A conversational YouTube video (host Josh Trent with guest Aaron Doughty) exploring why people remain stuck—examining negativity bias, childhood imprinting, and learned patterns that feel "safe." Aaron emphasizes metacognition and self-inquiry (including inner-child work and recognizing repeating relationship patterns) as methods to become aware and unravel limiting beliefs; anecdotes illustrate how familiarity can feel safer than the unknown.
Chapters
What is it that that is in our psyche? I don't know if it's a negativity bias, if it's just the imprinting of our past from childhood that keeps us stuck where we are. But almost after a while, like that Radio Flyer wagon with the concrete in it, it becomes normal.
It's like, right.
It's like, oh, it's. This is just how it's supposed to be.
Yeah.
You know, what is that about the human psyche with like 2000 plus videos and leading people and also being interviewed and interviewing, being on, on probably podcasts with other people, being in roundtables with people like Jack Canfield and whatnot. There has got to be, Aaron, a common thread that allows us to finally cut the cord of that wagon with the stuff that, by the way, we filled it up in the first place.
Right. Yeah.
How do we do that?
Yeah. For. For me, what it's been a process of is really going inwards to look at these patterns, to look at the patterns and to become aware of them. So like metacognition, like becoming aware of what I'm thinking of, becoming aware of what I'm feeling, and also becoming aware of, of the reflection I'm getting in my life and what that reflects back to me. It's like a process of self inquiry. A lot of it too. Like, I remember, even with the whole 9 to 5 job situation, I remember realizing I. That I had this like big resentment towards my childhood because of 7 to 15 thing and the ex stepmom thing, but then realizing that there was always a level of control in my life that was there until I became aware of it. Once I became aware of it, it's like the spell started to break. So it was after my ex stepmom left my life at 15, I had a girlfriend in my life, an ex girlfriend for five years. And she was jealous. She wasn't physically abusive or manipulative like the ex stepmom, but she was very jealous and controlling. And for five years she was in my life. At the end of that, I broke up with her and. And within one week of breaking up with her, I was working in brass plum shoes at Nordstrom's. I got. Which is like the cheaper shoe department. I got transferred to a better shoe department, designer shoes for women's shoes, which is more commission, more money. And I go over, I get transferred within one week of breaking up with that ex girlfriend. And then I go to a department where that manager was the one I was talking about, where she was controlling, manipulative, and protected by upper management. So I remember looking at my past and noticing a core thread of these different patterns and, and then asking myself why? What about this is familiar for me, this is, must be a familiar energy. And the thing that got brought back to my mind is there was this moment back in, when I was 15 years old when my dad was divorced from my ex stepmom where we had just moved out of this house and we went with my brother and my dad and we lived in this like small two, three bedroom house. It was a three bedroom, 1100 square foot house with my grandparents, with my sisters and my dad and my brother. And we were just living there until we found another place where we figured out the divorce stuff. We go back to the house that I like grew up at to get our clothes. And I remember in this weird moment my ex stepmom and her mom were like throwing their clothes at my brother and I in the dirt and stuff like that. And it was like this dramatic thing. But in that moment, what was really weird about it is as dramatic as that was the memory of like me being in that house with my brother and us having to sneak food or us having to like sneak watching television where one of us would have like our finger on the remote control where it said previous channel. So if someone came home from work, we would push the button back to the channel it was on. So they didn't know what we were watching television. We throw the remote and run outside. What came to my mind in that moment was that even though we, that was like the way we lived, there was something about it that felt safe. And that's what they call Stockholm syndrome. So in an interesting way, when I was 15 years old, I was allowed to have friends all of a sudden. I went from being allowed to have no friends to all of a sudden being allowed to have friends, being allowed to watch television, being allowed to eat enough food and have second or third helpings, being allowed to go to school activities, not having to earn it. It was like a whole new world. But with that whole new world came anxiety. And I remember that anxious feeling. It was like there was a part of me that preferred to be with my hand on the remote with previous channel. Like, like in that, in that. Because it felt safe. It was the known. And in a weird way, once I had my spiritual awakening in 2012, I looked back and I could see that I always had someone in my life to give me the parameters of control. Even though it was no longer my ex stepmom, I could see that it just different people. I would attract this into my life because it felt safe, it felt familiar. So the process for me has been a lot of looking at the patterns in my life, like somebody, let's say. And does it always come from childhood? I don't think we need to be like Sherlock Holmes, like, going into our childhood and looking for problems that may not even really be active anymore. But in general, it is interesting to me that a lot of the patterns I notice in people's lives, whether it's people that watch my YouTube channel or my own lives, there's a reflection from childhood that. That it comes from. Like when you were talking about, you know, the. The money beliefs from your parents, even though your dad really liked money and that made him emotionally unavailable or disassociative because of it, there were still meanings that you derived from that experience that came from childhood. Sure, right. Of course. Even. And even though it evolves as you go on, you know, as you get older, you evolve your sense of identity, your sense of what money is through reference experiences. But I find that a lot of times, unless we do the inner child work or we. There's like a. In my. For my case, there was like an inner child part of myself that felt very scared to, like, be in the unknown, that felt very scared to express themselves because I was told children are meant to be seen and not heard growing up, you know, so, like, there was these aspects of myself that I could tell were kind of frozen back in time. So for me, it's been a process of just becoming aware of the patterns, whether it is in my childhood or it's in my immediate life. Like, if someone's a people pleaser, for example, probably maybe did stem from childhood sometimes. Because people pleasers sometimes come from parent pleasers.
Yeah.
You know, but nonetheless, it's like, why am I. Why am I changing myself to make someone else happy? Why am I being fake to, like, get someone else's validation or approval? And we don't ask ourselves the questions like, why do I even want their validation or approval? Yeah, what does their validation approval mean to me? Can they even really give it to me? And these are things that as we start to ask ourselves, we start to kind of unravel the belief systems. Because at the fundamental core, I believe that our beliefs create our reality. So getting to the core of those beliefs are where the power is. And those beliefs, a lot of times are stemmed from childhood in the sense that we adopt the belief of our parents. Many of the patterns we have, we adopted for them subconsciously. And we either reject it, sometimes we reject it, sometimes we embrace it, and sometimes we're not even aware that even rejecting. Even if we reject what they. The patterns they have, we end up still kind of carrying that energy.
Well, because literally, I think it was Confucius, if you hold resentment, you're the one getting burned.
Exactly.
So you're actually attached to your dad, to your mom, to someone else. Because you're the one holding. Holding it. It's burning my flesh. If I'm choosing to hold the hot stone.
Yeah.
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