The Mindset Mentor - Why Your Childhood Wounds Keep Showing Up in Your Life

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

What if the things triggering you today aren’t really about what’s happening right now, but about something from your past that still needs to be healed? In this episode, I coach Cindy through an emotional trigger with her boss and uncover how childhood experiences can create behavioral patterns that follow us into adulthood and hold us back from our full potential. I’ll show you how to identify what your triggers are really trying to tell you, heal your inner child, and finally let go of the emotional weight that’s been keeping you stuck. Freedom Live is a 3-day live experience in Austin designed to help you break through what’s keeping you from your next level. Get $50 off your ticket: https://robdial.short.gy/freedomlive The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life. Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I've got something a little bit different for you today. This is a real coaching session recorded from one of my private groups called Mindset Academy. And it starts with a lady named Cindy telling me her situation with her boss that keeps triggering her. But as we dig deeper, we realize something that's really important here. Her boss isn't actually the problem at all. He's triggering a wound that was created decades ago in her relationship with her mom. when she was a child. And this is important for you to see because sometimes it's great to listen to a podcast episode, but sometimes when you hear somebody else be coached and actually hear the context of their life and see yourself on them, you can actually start to learn more about yourself and heal

quicker. And I think you're going to see yourself somewhere in this conversation because so many of us spend years trying to fix what's happening on the surface without actually ever realizing there's something much, much deeper happening below the surface. And so if you keep treating the symptom, and not finding the actual route, the pattern will keep coming up. And so I'm going to coach Cindy through this in how to actually find the root so that she can actually start changing it and start healing herself. So I think you're going to love this episode. And if you want to learn more about Mindset Academy and coaching with me, there's currently a seven-day free trial happening right now inside of Mindset Academy. You can go to coach withrob.com right now to learn more.

Once again, it is coach with rob.com. Okay, let's dive into today's episode. My question is about emotional attachment. My mentor for my business is very frequently tell me that I'm too emotionally attached to everything. He says that I need to work on deattaching emotionally. I have a big heart. I have always been one to take care of others before I take care of me. My concern is if I emotionally detach, will this be a positive thing or a negative thing for me?

Is there a fine line of being too emotionally attached? Do I need to work on becoming more emotionally detached? I want to live the best me that I possibly can, so I love your input on it. Well, I would kind of need some more context of what exactly that means of being too emotionally attached to something. Cindy, do you want to describe it for me? Lots of times when something comes up,

his big thing is if you could just emotionally detach, you were to whatever. Something happens with a coworker. If you weren't emotionally attached, you wouldn't react that way. I am an emotional being. we all are to an extent. So I guess my question is, is there a way to level that attachment down without changing

who I am on the inside or does that even make sense? Let's try to work through it. Can you give me an example of like one situation where this actually happened? Okay, just a few days ago, I'm in sales and I've not been in sales about a year, almost two years. And I have always been not real confident. So if I don't understand or if I have a question, I ask. I always ask. And his thing is, Cindy, we have gone over this a million times. Well, when he says that, I feel very, I feel like a child. So I brought that up the other day. This is just one small example. And he's like, that's just because you're emotionally attached. It's like, it's almost like, he's like, I'm an asshole all the time. You should try it. That's just one of his little things. That's not who I am. So here's the easiest way to work through. it, right? Whenever we're triggered by something, you guys all are triggered by something different.

Cindy might be triggered by something that I'm not triggered by. I might be triggered by something that Cindy's not triggered by. Because the way that I like to think about things, guys, this is just my mental processing is I like to look at things from like 50,000 foot overview. So if we look at the situation and we're getting triggered by something, we can go, why am I triggered at us? But if we go a level above and we look at it from 50,000 foot looking down, why are we triggered in some sort of way? What's happening is your boss is reminding you of your parents, most likely. And it's something that's unhealed.

So if we can try to think about it for a second, Cindy, when your boss does that to you, does it remind you of any situation from one of your two parents? Of course it does, but the thing that also throws me off is your parents are not even here anymore. They have both passed away. Why do you let them control the way you think? They're not controlling the way you think. They raised you to be the way that you are. You think that you automatically hear.

heal from your childhood trauma when your children when your parents die? Oh, do God, no. So you just answered your own question. It's like, oh, my, guess what? It's not when my dad died when I was from when I was 15 years old from being an alcoholic, I wasn't like, oh my God, my trauma from an alcoholic father disappeared. No, it's because not on purpose. Nobody purposely instills trauma into their children and give you big tea trauma or small tea trauma. So let's go back to the original question that I asked you, what, when you look at your boss and what happened, what parent? does that kind of remind you of if there's some similarities? Always my mom.

How so? I had one sister. She was always very thin. She was born three months early. They thought she was going to die. So I guess in my mom's eyes, she was it. I was not. I was always a bigger child, not like I am now, but not tiny like her.

She used to literally make me way on a scale every single day. And she would do the same with my sister. and sorry, this is so hard to talk about. But she would tell my sister, oh, you know, you're beautiful, small, blah, blah, blah. And then she would lick at me and just say things a mother should never say to a child. And I still, that still hurts.

It still hurts. Of course you're done. And then I lost my dad when I was 56. So like, he died in a car wreck. Anytime I hear of anybody dying in a car wreck, it hurts. Because number one, I know what they're going through. First off, number one, don't ever apologize for being emotional because that's the problem is that we've all been taught

that that's incorrect to be emotional to stick you know throw it away all that stuff to not feel emotions it is not the situation that we're currently in that is causing the emotions it is these emotions have been here for a long time and now you're giving yourself a chance to feel them that's the crazy part is we think we're like we're the only one that's fucked up with the stuff everybody has these things right so i want you understand that sometimes right to answer your question or around this, and this is why I had to ask you a question directly and not answer the emotionally detached thing, is because the problem is not emotional attachment or detachment. The problem is you're not healed and the triggering is trying to show you where you're not healed. I will take you

through, for those you guys that are, I know a lot of you guys are coming to Freedom Live in December in Austin. This is why we have three days. Like, we're going to work through all of this shit so that we can literally get rid of all of the weights that are holding you back and holding you down. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. It's like the way I like to look is if you're trying to, if you're a swimer and you're trying to swim faster, right? You're going to swim a lot. You don't need to work harder. What you need to do is you need to take the weights that are on your ankles off and you'll naturally just swim faster with the same amount of effort. That's what life is. And the problem is all of us, all of us are walking around with weights.

all over our body, all over us. And we're like, well, I can't, I've been working so fucking hard to try to do this. Yeah, you've got to realize there's things that have to be let go of to them become someone who is a high performer or else you're not going to get to your true potential ever. Because if you've hit like 60% of your potential and trying and trying and trying, it's not your potential that's the problem. It's not your effort a lot of times. It's a problem is that there's weights that you need to let go of so that therefore you can become better with the same amount of effort. That's the craziest part. So the thing that we all have to look at is when we are triggered by something. It is my opinion that I think this is God's way, the universe's way, of saying

this is your work. Because this thing that is being triggered within you is showing you where you're not free. And so I've got to work at where I'm not free because I need to become free of the things that are holding me back. Right. And so once, when I am triggered in some sort of way, it is showing, like if I get into an argument with my wife and I'm triggered, it's usually not the situation. between me and her. It's usually a situation between me and something in my past that is not healed. And what happens is over time, being a child, and mind you, like, I've known this, I've taught this, I've read so many therapy and psychology and neurology books, but having a two-year-old downstairs is literally the, I'm in it from the very beginning, right? Like, I'm in it in the most

important stage of building a human psychology. And I'm noticing ways that I could go down old paths that I know my parents would have gone down with me. And that is then going to build the same things within him that they built within me. And mind you, my parents built very, very good things within me. It's not all that. I'm not trying to say that. I notice the things and I'm like, but I'm going to choose this way because I know

what the long-term effect of building an adult is going to be like because I'm essentially trying to fix adults problems that come from the childhood that come from the parents. So now I'm in it with a parent-childhood relationship. And so the thing that happens is nobody can raise a perfect person because there's no such thing as perfect. I think it's part of our mission and part of us being humans is to lose ourselves to find ourselves. And the way that we lose ourselves is we come in, we're excited, things are amazing, beautiful little children, and maybe they're too loud. And they're screaming in a restaurant.

and that's not okay. So your parents have to say, be quiet. You're too loud, all of the stuff. So the child learns to silence themselves and not let out their true emotions or true feelings or true happiness. And that's what's called a behavioral adaptation. So we adapt our behaviors to fit in with the environment that we're in.

And we all were raised in different environments. Those behavioral adaptations as we get older, morph and change into different things. Like maybe what it turns into in a romantic relationship is that you don't speak your truth because you're afraid of losing that person. Do you guys see how the behavioral adaptation then morphs into something a little bit different but still very similar. And what happens is then we go, you know what?

I need to learn to speak my truth. I need to learn to speak my truth. I've got to speak up in this relationship with my husband. And we try to fix the current situation. you, your emotions, when in reality, the way that you fix it is by healing the child that didn't get what they needed to in the first time, like whatever happened was healing our inner child. I was like, that sounds fucking woo-wooey and stupid. And then as I dove into, I was like, oh, fuck, this is the whole game of life.

This is it. The situation in this made up example that I have with someone with their husband, they're trying to become more vulnerable with their husband and speaking. got more, they definitely can work on that. But what's going to make this behavioral adaptation dissolve is by healing the inner child that we had. How do you heal the inner child? You ask yourself, what did I not get that I needed in childhood? And you start giving it to yourself. Because you might see like on this, guys, this, let me, let me tell you that the full truth. And this is why I have so much compassion for people. I have heard the worst things you could

possibly imagine. Like, take it to the worst degree. Heard it. anything. Everything. I've heard it all. So I can't have massive amounts of compassion for people, right? So when you're looking at Rob, you're not looking at a 40-year-old guy. You're looking at a seven-year-old boy that really just wants his dad to be around. And guess what? Never going to get it. Who can give it to me, though? I can learn how to give it to myself. That healing is what gets rid of all of the behavioral adaptations that are holding me back from being the person that I can live to my true full potential. So when I see you, I'm not seeing an adult. I'm seeing a child who didn't get specifically what they needed to in childhood,

created behavioral adaptations to fit in and to be what they needed to be in order to get their parents' love because all we care about is getting our parents love. That's it. That is literally the only thing that we care about is in childhood. Seeing our parents love. And so we adapt ourselves to get the love that we feel like that. That behavioral adaptations morph and shift over time in order to be something. and those behavioral adaptations are usually our barriers to our greatest potential. And so we tried it.

And the crazy part about it, I fucked this up for 16 years of self-development, everybody. And I was like, I need to jump the barriers. I need to jump the barriers. When in reality, what I needed to do was heal the parts of me that were still unhealed and the barriers just dissolve. So your emotional or too emotional or not emotional enough has nothing to do with emotions. it has to do with this moment is reminding you of something in your childhood that is not healed. All of us have this.

And so when I bring it up to you and you say, oh, well, this thing that happened with my boss, I'm not hearing about something that happened with your boss. I'm going, well, where does this remind you of your childhood? It reminds me of my mom. Boom. And when you feel the emotions come up, we found it. That's it. That's 100%.

I know. It's like it's been waiting to come out. It's literally like you've been holding onto a hose, you know, where you bend the hose and you hold it. And it's like, we have this moment. You've been holding. You're fucking. holding it back and now like your boss has something to get triggered and stuff. And you get this moment where you can think about it. It's like release. It's out. And that's how you know that this

is the thing that you need to work through. Is ask yourself, what does this remind me of my childhood? It almost always is about one of your two parents. And then ask yourself, what did I need back then that I did not get in my childhood? And you learn how to start giving it to yourself now. A lot of times, it's like closing your eyes, the cave that you're afraid to enter holds a treasure that you seek. The main thing that it's about is two things, love and safety. Something made you feel unsafe. Something made you feel that you weren't loved. And so what you've got to do is get yourself into a state where you do some breathwork for five minutes. You've got yourself calm and you might have to develop some sort of strategy. You put your hands on your your chest. You feel your

heartbeat. And you think about like that little six-year-old girl that was going through what she was going through. She didn't feel loved. She didn't feel fully safe. And you might just say to yourself, I see you, I love you, and you're safe. The first few times you do it, you feel fucking weird. You're like, I'm talking to my six-year-old self. Like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done. Over time, you'll start to notice your body just like settles into it. You'll feel it, truly.

And that's how you actually start to heal these things. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, once again, like I said, this is exactly what I'm going to be diving into in a much, much, much deeper way over the course of three days at Freedom Live in Austin, Texas. It is going to be live in-person, Austin, Texas, December 3, 4th, and 5th. If you want to learn more about it,

you can go to Freedom Live226.com. Once again, Freedom Live, 226.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way. I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.