AFGOs as your litmus test…

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • October 2, 2022

How AFGOs become our proverbial litmus test

AFGOs – though most of us don’t consciously seek them out – can catalyze our growth.

It’s basically that old adage of “struggle leading to strength.” 

But not only can they carve out new capacities inside of us to deal with hard things, they can also show us how far we’ve come and provide clues to what work still needs to be done if we pay attention.

I paid attention when those super hard things occurred these past few weeks and I observed myself and noticed:

“Huh, I didn’t feel that familiar, all-consuming heat in my stomach.”

“Hmm, I reached out to safe people immediately to process this time.”

“Huh, I had more adaptive thoughts sooner.”

“Huh, I chose to go for a fast run to dispel the cortisol versus bury it with popcorn.”

I observed that the key indicators of my historical distress response were reduced. 

Greatly reduced.

For me, my historical distress responses usually looked like this:

• A lot of somatic disturbance in my body – especially around my stomach area – when cortisol would flood through me.
• I would isolate and withdraw, turning inwards for self-comfort instead of reaching out. Doubting I could get support from the relationships around me.
• I would ruminate for days or weeks. Stuck in unhelpful thought loops about things being unfair and/or having catastrophic thoughts about safety.
• I would slide back into some of my less helpful emotional coping mechanisms like emotional eating and workaholism. 

But this time, in this chapter of my life, I felt less somatic disturbance and reduced cortisol flooding.

I was able to quickly reach out to safe, functional relationships to process and grieve.

And I was able to generate far more adaptive thoughts sooner and more consistently about the situations.

Did I love those opportunities?

No. I still wish they hadn’t happened.

But if they’re going to happen, I’m glad to see how far I’ve come in terms of making progress in my relational trauma recovery work.

This series of experiences reminded me of what my favorite Peloton instructor – Robin Arzón – says in so many of her classes:

“It doesn’t get easier. But you get stronger.”

I used to bristle when I heard her say this. Lungs burning as I raced on the bike or willed my legs to move faster on the Tread.

I wanted it to be easier.

I wanted there to be a finish line of more ease after I did all the hard work of the initial phase of my fitness journey.

But that’s not how it works in fitness or in life and certainly not in our relational trauma recovery journeys.

We can’t stop hard things from happening.

And if you’re a lifelong athlete (like I’m aspiring to be), you willingly put yourself into hard things 5 or 6 days a week.

So if we can’t stop hard things from happening, we can increase our capacity to deal with hard things.

In the last few years, I’ve increased my capacity to cope with and tolerate critical triggers of mine: perceived and actual abandonments and threats to my safety.

Through my own work receiving EMDR therapy, I’ve been able to metabolize maladaptively stored trauma memories, generate new, more supportive cognitions and coping behaviors, and generally feel less (sometimes no) triggering when challenges occur.

My work in EMDR therapy was tested, so to speak, by these recent AFGOs and I got to experience the results of my healing work, my personal growth investment.

I’m proud of this and pleased about it.

Of course, I still have work to do, but like hitting a new PR (personal record) on a morning workout, it’s good to see how far I’ve come since starting.

Using AFGOs as Healing Catalysts in Therapy

When you bring your latest AFGO into therapy—that rejection that surprisingly didn’t destroy you or the abandonment that devastated you more than expected—you’re offering invaluable data about your healing trajectory that can guide precisely targeted interventions. Your therapist helps you recognize that efforting towards feeling enlivened is a critical part of recovery, and sometimes that aliveness comes through surviving challenges with new capacities rather than avoiding them altogether.

Together, you examine your response patterns like scientists studying progress: celebrating the reduced somatic activation that shows your nervous system is rewiring, noting where isolation reflexes still kick in despite knowing you have support, identifying which thoughts shifted from catastrophic to adaptive and which still spiral into familiar darkness.

The therapeutic space becomes a laboratory for understanding these involuntary progress reports—using approaches like EMDR to target the specific memories that still carry charge when similar triggers barely register, somatic work to build capacity for the flooding that still occurs, or parts work to strengthen the internal resources that helped you cope differently this time. Your therapist helps you distinguish between grief that this hard thing happened (appropriate) and trauma activation from past wounds (workable), teaching you to use each one as diagnostic information about which neural pathways have integrated healing and which remain frozen in time.

Most powerfully, trauma therapy reframes it from cruel universal jokes into sacred opportunities—not spiritually bypassing the genuine pain they cause but recognizing that each challenge offers real-time feedback about your expanding capacity to meet life’s inevitable difficulties.

Through processing how you handled this latest AFGO compared to previous versions, you build evidence that contradicts old beliefs about your fragility, discovering that becoming stronger rather than life becoming easier is perhaps the most honest promise therapy can offer—and witnessing yourself surviving with increasing grace what once would have shattered you entirely.

What AFGOs Reveal About Your Nervous System

The acronym AFGO — Another F***ing Growth Opportunity — is deliberately irreverent, and that irreverence is part of its function. It gives us a way to acknowledge that something hard is happening without catastrophizing, without bypassing, and without the pressure of performing gratitude for an experience we haven’t fully processed yet. But underneath the dark humor, there’s a serious clinical observation: the things we most resist are frequently the things that contain the most important information about where our edges are.

In my clinical work, I’ve found that a person’s characteristic response to AFGOs — the way they habitually meet difficulty — reveals a great deal about their developmental history and nervous system patterning. The woman who becomes hyperproductive in crisis often learned early that activity was the only safe response to uncertainty. The woman who freezes and withdraws often learned early that invisibility was the safest strategy.

Peter Levine, PhD, psychologist and developer of Somatic Experiencing, writes that our characteristic responses to stress are not flaws but adaptations. They made sense in the original context. The problem isn’t that you developed these responses; the problem is that they get activated in contexts where they no longer serve you. The AFGO that would benefit from steady engagement gets met with avoidance. The difficult conversation that needs your full presence gets met with hyperactivity and deflection.

Maya is a 37-year-old tech founder who came to me during a particularly difficult period of her company’s growth. “Everything feels like a crisis,” she told me. “Even small things. I can’t tell anymore what actually requires my full alarm system and what’s just… Tuesday.” What we discovered was that her alarm system had been calibrated to a childhood in which genuine crises were common and unpredictable. Learning to sort them — to distinguish the AFGO that needed attention from the one that needed perspective — was the beginning of real change.

Both/And: AFGOs Are Frustrating AND They’re Evidence of Growth

The both/and of AFGOs is inherent to the concept itself: they’re genuinely difficult AND they’re precisely where the real work lives. There’s no more honest reframe than that. The frustration you feel when the same pattern shows up again — when you react to your partner’s withdrawal the exact way you did five years ago, when the familiar tightening happens in your chest before a performance review, when you notice you’re people-pleasing in a meeting and hating yourself for it — that frustration is legitimate. You’re not imagining it. It’s hard.

AND. Your ability to notice it — to see the pattern, to name the AFGO, to bring even a moment of awareness to what’s happening — is evidence of exactly the growth you’ve done. You can’t see what you haven’t learned to look for. The fact that you can identify the pattern now is the work paying dividends. The goal isn’t to stop having AFGOs. The goal is to get incrementally better at moving through them with more awareness, more self-compassion, and a faster return to your regulated baseline.

Leila, a pediatric surgeon I worked with, came in after a particularly brutal AFGO — she’d fallen back into fawn mode with a dismissive colleague despite years of therapy specifically around that pattern. She was devastated and ashamed. “I thought I was past this,” she said. But as we explored the AFGO, we found something important: her reaction had been shorter. She’d caught it faster. She’d named it in the moment instead of days later. “That’s the growth,” I told her. “It’s not that the AFGO disappeared. It’s that your window for noticing it is getting shorter.”

The Systemic Lens: When AFGOs Aren’t Just Personal

One final reframe that I think is essential for driven women navigating AFGOs: not all of your repeated challenges are primarily products of your individual psychology. Some of them are the predictable result of being a certain kind of woman in a certain kind of world.

When a woman of color finds herself repeatedly navigating microaggressions in her workplace with the same sick feeling in her gut, that’s not just an AFGO pointing to her unresolved trauma. It’s also a legitimate response to a real, ongoing structural problem. When a woman finds herself repeatedly shrinking in rooms full of men despite doing deep work on her voice and boundaries, that shrinking isn’t purely the product of her early relational wounding. It’s also a response to real environmental cues that her voice is less welcome than those of her male peers.

The AFGO lens is most powerful when it’s used as one tool among many — a way to inquire into your own reactions and growth edges, not a tool for self-blame that locates the source of every difficulty inside yourself. As Audre Lorde, poet and activist, wrote: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Some AFGOs are invitations to personal growth. Others are invitations to structural advocacy, community building, and the recognition that the difficulty isn’t all yours to fix. Discerning which is which is itself a sophisticated clinical and personal skill — and one worth developing alongside a good therapeutic relationship.

Ready to use your AFGOs as a genuine litmus test for your growth? Whether you’re building your self-regulation capacity, exploring the origins of your patterns, or navigating the intersection of personal and systemic challenges, connect with Annie to explore working together.

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. For driven, ambitious women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal — it’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.

Wrapping up.

Use these prompts to consciously treat any and all growth opportunities that occur in your life as your own proverbial relational trauma recovery litmus test to see how far you’ve come since beginning your healing work.

And, if and when AFGOs occur and you observe that you still feel a lot of disturbance and distress, please use this as an opportunity to consider seeking out support, specifically EMDR therapy.

I swear: few other tools in my life have accelerated my healing work as much as this modality. It’s really a power tool for relational trauma recovery.

And now I’d love to hear from you in the comments:

When hard things happen in your own life – when AFGOs are unavoidable – what other signs and markers do you look for as evidence of your personal growth?

If you feel inclined, please leave a message in the blog comments below so our community of 23,000 monthly blog readers can benefit from your wisdom and experience.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

P.S.: The photo of the little girl accompanying my post today is a WHOLE MOOD. And I put her up on my vision board for inspiration. May we all be so fierce and determined in the face of hard things.

One of the most practical things I can offer you as you work with the AFGO framework is this: the most valuable thing you can do when an AFGO arrives is not to immediately try to process it away or fix your reaction. The most valuable thing is to get curious about it.

Ask these questions: What, specifically, is being activated right now? Is this a familiar feeling — have I been here before? What does my body feel like in this moment — where is the charge, the tightening, the collapse? What story is my mind telling me? And then: is that story true? How old does this feeling feel — is it me at 38, or me at 8?

These questions, asked with genuine curiosity rather than self-criticism, turn the AFGO from just another frustrating incident into a window into your own nervous system. They give you information that your therapist can use, that you can use in your healing work, and that you can use in the moment to interrupt the automatic pilot.

Maya, a physician I worked with, developed a practice she called “AFGO journaling” — a brief five-minute write every time she recognized an AFGO in her life. She tracked the pattern over six months. What she found was striking: almost every AFGO involved a perceived threat of abandonment or disapproval. “I can see the wound now,” she said. “I couldn’t see it before because I was just reacting. Now I can work with it.” That’s what the litmus test reveals, when you use it honestly. And what it reveals, you can heal.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer