Why Do I Keep Reacting Like This?
WHY DO I KEEP REACTING LIKE THIS?
The topic for our latest Speak Up Cambridge Men’s Group was a pretty simple question:
Why do I keep reacting like this?
Rather than beginning with how to stop reacting, we started somewhere much simpler — noticing that it was happening in the first place.
Think back over the last week. What got under your skin? When did you get defensive, angry, frustrated, shut down, overthink something or find yourself going back towards something you already knew probably wasn’t good for you?
And then, rather than immediately deciding somebody else caused it, what actually happened in you?
That might sound basic, but awareness changes quite a lot. If I don’t notice the reaction until after it has taken over, there isn’t much room for choice. I’m just reacting and then trying to make sense of it afterwards.
Once I can see it happening, I can start getting curious about what is underneath it.
ARE YOU REACTING TO WHAT HAPPENED, OR WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS?
At one point the conversation moved into politics, technology, phones and how much information is coming at us now. We can talk about something and suddenly see an advert for it. We notice connections between things and sometimes very quickly decide what those connections mean.
That reminded me of a perfectly logical argument:
Firemen cause house fires.
Think about it. Whenever there is a house fire, there are always bloody firemen standing outside.
Therefore, firemen must be causing the fires.
Obviously that’s ridiculous.
The fire and the firemen are connected, but that doesn’t mean one caused the other.
We can do something similar in everyday life. Two things happen together, we create a story connecting them, and then we start reacting to the story as though it is a proven fact.
Someone goes quiet and I decide they’re angry with me. Someone doesn’t answer my message and I decide they don’t care. My partner questions something I’ve done and suddenly I’m reacting as though they don’t trust me.
Maybe my interpretation is right.
Maybe it isn’t.
The useful question is: what do I actually know, and what meaning have I added?
MORE INFORMATION, BUT ARE WE MORE CONNECTED?
The technology conversation eventually went somewhere deeper.
Hundreds of years ago, information travelled incredibly slowly compared with today. Most people didn’t move very far from their own community. There was no phone constantly vibrating in your pocket, no television running in the corner, no social feeds and certainly no AI generating another mountain of information every second.
Life back then wasn’t necessarily better. In plenty of ways it was much bloody harder.
But people were heavily dependent on the tribe around them. You lived together, worked together and communicated because there wasn’t much option not to.
Now we can technically be connected to hundreds or thousands of people while barely talking to the person sitting beside us.
And somewhere in there we started talking about the difference between connection and attachment.
You can be attached to your phone without feeling connected to anyone.
You can be attached to an old relationship that is no longer good for you.
You can be attached to checking what an ex-partner has posted, even when you already know that looking at it will probably hurt.
You can even be attached to a familiar emotional pattern simply because it is what you have known for most of your life.
The interesting question then becomes less about what that person posted and more about what keeps pulling you back to look.
THE GOOD MORNING TEST
A really ordinary example of attachment came up for me around saying good morning.
My father used to say good morning and expect a good morning back. I’ve also worked with people who would do the same thing. If they said “good morning” and didn’t clearly hear you return it, they would say it again until they got the response they wanted.
It sounds like basic manners, and there is nothing wrong with teaching manners.
But there is another little piece underneath it that I find interesting.
If I say good morning to you but I need you to respond in a particular way before I can feel okay, was I simply offering you something, or was there a transaction attached to it?
“I gave you good morning, so you owe me good morning back.”
Think about that with a teenager.
Can I cheerfully say, “Morning,” receive a grunt in return and still be okay?
Can I get absolutely nothing back and accept that perhaps this particular human is currently doing their best impression of a grumpy cave dweller?
I can still teach respect and communication, but I don’t necessarily have to make my emotional state dependent on getting the response I wanted.
That starts looking a little more like connection without quite as much attachment to the outcome.
ARE YOU INVESTING IN YOURSELF OR DISTRACTING YOURSELF?
Once you begin noticing these reactions, another question appears.
What do you actually do with them?
Most of us have something that helps us switch off. Work. Scrolling. Drinking. Exercise. Gaming. Television. Keeping busy. Helping everybody else.
None of those things are automatically good or bad.
It depends partly on what job they are doing.
Are you doing something because you genuinely enjoy it, or because stopping for five minutes might mean feeling something you’d rather not feel?
I think of it like a car making a strange noise.
There is a very cheap first repair.
Turn the radio up.
Problem solved.
Except, of course, it isn’t. You’ve just made the noise harder to hear.
If your car genuinely needs new tyres or something underneath is making an expensive-sounding clunk, eventually you take it to someone who understands cars. You might not be particularly happy about paying for it, but you know that turning the music up louder probably isn’t going to fix the wheel bearing.
Yet we can spend years doing the equivalent with ourselves.
The same argument keeps happening. The same trigger keeps appearing. We keep shutting down, getting angry, worrying, checking, drinking, working or scrolling, and instead of becoming curious about the noise we just find another way to drown it out.
Investing in yourself doesn’t have to mean one particular type of coaching, therapy, retreat or personal development. It can be anything that genuinely helps you understand yourself better and work with what is actually happening rather than continually trying not to hear it.
SOMETIMES IT ISN’T ONLY ABOUT YOU
There was another part of this conversation that matters too.
We can do all sorts of internal work, but our environment still has an influence.
If I continually put myself back into a situation that activates exactly the same reaction, it can be incredibly difficult to create something different.
The rather blunt metaphor that came up was patting a snake or a lion.
If I keep putting my hand near something that repeatedly bites me, at some point the only useful question probably isn’t, “Why does this bloody thing keep biting me?”
There might also be a question about why I keep putting my hand there.
That doesn’t mean every difficult person needs to be cut out of your life. Sometimes the work really is learning how to stay around something without automatically getting pulled into the same reaction.
But sometimes the work is also a boundary.
Sometimes it is distance.
Sometimes it is acknowledging that an environment genuinely isn’t helping you anymore.
Working on yourself doesn’t necessarily mean learning how to tolerate absolutely everything.
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH THE EMOTION?
One of my favourite examples of this came from the group itself.
We’ve noticed that when the conversation gets particularly deep or heavy, quite often somebody cracks a joke.
Sometimes it’s a normal joke.
Sometimes it is absolutely not something I’m going to reproduce on The Healing Barn website.
And occasionally one of the guys arrives a little late carrying popcorn, right as somebody is halfway through sharing something deeply meaningful about their life.
So you end up with one man talking about something incredibly personal while five other blokes sit around the fire eating handfuls of popcorn.
There is something wonderfully human about that.
It got us talking about what we actually do with emotion.
I tend to think of emotions as having a physical charge or energy to them. Anger can make you want to move. Fear can activate the whole body. Sometimes sadness needs tears. Sometimes the release comes through walking, running, exercising, breathing, talking or simply shaking some of that activation out.
And sometimes it comes through laughter.
That doesn’t mean making a joke is always healthy. Humour can absolutely become another way of avoiding something we don’t want to feel.
But sometimes laughter genuinely shifts something.
The useful thing is noticing which one is happening.
Am I laughing because I cannot tolerate what I’m feeling?
Or am I able to feel what is happening and also allow some lightness into it?
The emotion doesn’t have to dictate the behaviour that follows it.
TAKING YOUR POWER BACK
This brought us into forgiveness as well.
Forgiveness is one of those words that can sound like we’re saying, “It’s fine. Forget about it. What that person did doesn’t matter.”
That isn’t how I see it.
You can forgive somebody and still have a boundary.
You can forgive someone and never speak to them again.
You can forgive without deciding what happened was okay.
For me, forgiveness can be much more about deciding that I no longer want what somebody did years ago to continue having the same emotional hold over me today.
If thinking about an ex-partner, a parent, an old boss or something that happened years ago can still instantly pull me into anger or hurt, there is still something inside me responding to that experience.
I can’t go back and change what they did.
I can work with what I’m still carrying.
That is what I mean when I talk about taking your power back. It isn’t pretending that other people can’t affect you. Of course they can.
It is recognising that somebody else may trigger the reaction, but there is still something I can become curious about in myself before automatically handing them control over what happens next.
WHY DO I KEEP REACTING LIKE THIS?
Looking back across the whole night, I think we kept returning to the same place.
The outside world is always going to give us things to react to.
Partners. Kids. Parents. Exes. Workmates. News. Politics. Phones. AI. Traffic. Someone who doesn’t say good morning properly.
The goal probably isn’t to become a person who never reacts.
It is to notice what happens a little earlier.
To understand what meaning you have attached to it.
To notice whether you are connecting or clinging to something familiar.
To recognise when you are genuinely helping yourself and when you are simply turning the radio up.
To decide whether your environment needs a different response.
And then to have a little more choice over what happens next.
UNDERSTAND → RELEASE → LIVE
That is also the basis of how I work with people one-to-one.
Understand is about seeing what is actually happening underneath the reaction. Not just what happened five minutes ago, but what may be making this particular thing have such a strong pull.
Release is about working with what appears to be holding that old response in place. Understanding why you do something is useful, but sometimes your body and emotions still react before your intellectual understanding gets a vote.
Live is where the question changes from “How do I stop doing this?” to “What do I actually want instead?”
That is ultimately where I want the work to go.
I help men who feel like they should have everything together understand why life keeps feeling harder than it should, so they can move towards what they really want.
You might recognise that through anger, overthinking, shutting down, a relationship that keeps falling into the same argument, a work situation that feels strangely familiar, or simply the feeling that you shouldn’t be struggling with something as much as you are.
Whatever brings you through the door gives us somewhere to begin.
Then we get curious about what might actually be happening underneath it.
COME AND SEE WHAT SPEAK UP IS LIKE
This night is also a pretty good example of what Speak Up Cambridge actually is.
I bring a topic, but the topic gives us somewhere to start rather than a script we have to follow. One minute we might be talking about technology and conspiracy theories, the next about our fathers, ex-partners, forgiveness or why half the room is eating popcorn while somebody tells us something incredibly personal.
Sometimes it is serious. Sometimes it is funny. Usually it is both.
You don’t need to arrive with something prepared, and you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. You can come along, listen, contribute when something resonates and see what you notice about yourself along the way.
If you’re a man around Cambridge and you’ve wondered what actually happens at one of these nights, come along and see for yourself.
And if something in this reflection has made you recognise a reaction or situation that keeps repeating and you would rather explore it privately, that is exactly the sort of work I do one-to-one at The Healing Barn.
A 60-minute session with me is $150.
