🌱 5-Step Reset After a Setback

🌀 When Your Healing Routine Falls Off Track

14-week Rewired Healing Series- Week 12

Navigating Setbacks Without Losing Yourself

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⚠️ Trauma-Informed Reminder

Some of what’s shared here might bring up strong emotions or old memories. Please go at your own pace.

✔️ Pause or step away if you feel overwhelmed — that awareness is part of healing.

✔️ Use grounding tools if your body feels tense (a few deep breaths, stretching, or orienting can help).

✔️ Skip this entirely if it doesn’t feel safe for you today. Your emotional safety comes first — always.

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✨ Summary

In this week’s free post, “Why Falling Off Track Is Still Progress,” I shared why setbacks happen, what they can look like, and why they don’t erase your progress.

Today, I want to take you deeper.

Setbacks are something all of us face — whether it’s parenting stress, partner tension, work deadlines, or old family dynamics.

In this post, you’ll find:

• The 5 steps I personally use to reset

• A full list of why setbacks happen and what they look like in real life

• Four everyday setback scenarios (mine included)

• A printable Setback Reset Guide

• Reflection prompts to help you meet setbacks with compassion instead of shame

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💭 Why Setbacks Happen

When we’ve lived in survival mode for years (or decades), our nervous system has built strong, well-worn pathways designed to keep us safe. These are the automatic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses that helped us survive.

Some everyday examples include:

• Fight: snapping at your kids after a long day

• Flight: burying yourself in busyness or scrolling to escape

• Freeze: going blank in the middle of a conversation

• Fawn: over-explaining or apologizing just to keep the peace

Even as we build new, healthier pathways through healing work, those old ones don’t just disappear. Under stress, the nervous system takes the fastest route it knows. It’s like your brain saying, “I know this shortcut — let’s take it.”

Add in stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, and suddenly you’re reacting before you even realize it.

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🌀 Real Life Examples of Why Setbacks Can Happen:

• Stress or change pushes your nervous system back into protection mode

• Skipping the grounding practices that usually keep you steady

• Old triggers get activated before you even realize it

• Your body is tired, overwhelmed, or out of rhythm

• Life throws in something unexpected — like travel, surgery, or family stress

• Carrying too much for others and forgetting to check in with yourself

• A small daily stressor piles on top of bigger ones until your system tips

• Hormonal shifts, illness, or lack of sleep add extra weight to your nervous system and throw off your daily practices.

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💔 What Setbacks Can Look Like

Setbacks wear many faces. Sometimes they’re loud, sometimes they’re quiet, and sometimes they’re sneaky.

Examples include:

• Snapping at someone you love 😡

• Shutting down in the middle of a conversation 🙊

• Skipping daily healing practices that usually ground you ⏭️

• Losing patience more quickly than you’d like 😓

• Over-explaining or apologizing to keep the peace 🙇

• Feeling numb or disconnected from yourself or others 🧊

• Avoiding something important because it feels too overwhelming 🛑

• Suddenly thinking, “All my progress is gone.” 💭

✨ Please know: none of these moments erase your healing. They’re your nervous system protecting you the best way it knows how.

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❤️ Real-Life Scenarios

Sometimes it helps to see what a setback actually looks like in everyday life. They rarely happen in a neat, predictable order — they tend to show up in messy, overlapping ways.

Here are a few examples — including one from my own life — that you might find familiar.