#110: Checking the back door

Author

Alex Joshi
September 14, 2025

Happy Sunday all, and welcome back to Plane Thoughts. We’re a few minutes past 7pm, which might signify the reluctance with which I have come back to ‘the hustle’ after a really enjoyable summer break. I hope you’ve had a great one too.

A special thank you to Amit, a subscriber that came up to me in public to introduce himself last Sunday, coincidentally as I was deep in thought about the Plane Thoughts project.

Every time I open the front door to my house, I do something instinctively. I glance at the back door.

It happens in a split second. I don’t think about it. But I do it each and every time I enter.

To understand why, let me take you back about 25 years. My sister and I were coming home from school. As I turned the key in the door, I saw that the glass in the back door had been smashed in. The house was a mess.

We’d been burgled.

A few years later, at a different house, it happened again. Guess where they came in from..

Now, for a multitude of rational reasons - of which I am very well aware - the probability that I'm going to find my house burgled is very low. I had to dig deep into my memory to recall this story for the writing of this post.

Yet, somewhere in me - in both my mind and body - the fear lingers. It must do. Why else would I glance at that door? At every door?

My summer reading

While on my summer break, I read a number of books, and the one which really stayed with me is ‘What happened to you?  Conversations on trauma, resilience and healing’ by Dr Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey.

Perry is brain development and trauma expert, and the book is structured as a conversation between him and Oprah, exploring how what happens to us in early childhood influences the people we become.

If I was to summarise it in one line, it would be this:

We should ask ‘what happened to you?’, instead of ‘what's wrong with you?’, when looking to understand ourselves and others.

A central idea is that everything is connected. We are not, who we are, but instead, we are who we are because of what happened to us.

I quote a passage to illustrate the point:

Let's say a young boy is yelled at by his mother's new boyfriend. This experience is processed and stored in the cortex as a narrative-who, what, when, where— memory: "On Monday, the boyfriend came to the house and yelled at me." But it's also stored deeper in the brain. When the boyfriend was yelling, the boy's stress response was activated. The key regulatory systems governed by the lower parts of his brain sped up his heart, increased his muscle tone, and sent signals to his body to prepare for fight or flight. Fear shuts down thinking and amps up feeling, and the boy was afraid. And as his brain is trying to make sense of the whole experience, it's also making a trauma memory.

Later on, when this boy is exposed to a trigger or evocative cue that reminds his brain of that traumatic experience, his heart rate will go up. His body posture will change. The cocktail of hormones in his body will shift. The point is that our body's core regulatory systems can be altered by traumatic experiences. A child exposed to unpredictable or extreme stress will become what we call dysregulated.

Everything is connected

That line, everything is connected, has stayed with me.

I think it's such a powerful idea and will change so much about how we come to understand others.

At the heart of much conflict, big and small, is misunderstanding and an impulse to judge:

Why are they like this? Why don't they see things like I do? What is wrong with them?

But imagine instead if we paused to ask:

What might have happened in that person’s life for them to have those views, to be the person that they are today?

It would change everything. Not in just how we see others,  but how we see ourselves.

Understanding the self

Most of us, at some point, wrestle with self-doubt, shame, or frustration. I believe there are very few of us who don’t have some moments where we are hard on ourselves for certain aspects of who we are, or are not.

We try to fix ourselves. Improve ourselves. Understand ourselves. I think its a commendable exercise and its part of growth.

But fixing implies something is broken.

What if we paused the self-criticism and instead asked:

What happened that made me feel this way?
What did I experience that might still be shaping me?

So many people haven’t had the opportunity to explore that question. They don’t realise that what happened to them is still within them, and that it wasn’t their fault.

Take my back door glance. I didn’t become fully conscious of it until last year. Yet that small reflex, buried in routine, is a daily imprint from something that happened a quarter of a century ago.

If something I barely remember can live on in me like that, what does that suggest about far more significant events?

Implementation idea

Next time you find yourself struggling to understand someone, pause and reframe the question.

Instead of thinking: What’s wrong with them?
Try: What might have happened to them?

The same goes for yourself.

I believe we’d live with much more compassion — both for others and within ourselves — if we learned to close the front door,  and understand why we still glance at the back.

— AJ

On my bedside table:

📖 Non-fiction: What happened to you?  Conversations on trauma, resilience and healing’ by Dr Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey.

🎬 Film: Good Will Hunting (1997)

💬 Quote: “What we see in people is determined, in large part, by what we expect to find.” - Author Paul Smith

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