Choose Your Response: Six Practices to Uncover and Break the Hidden Patterns That Hold You Back (The Response Series)

Stop repeating reactions you regret. Learn to choose what happens next.

A tense conversation. A critical comment. A worry that won’t let go. Before you know it, you’ve snapped, shut down, or started replaying the same painful story.

You know how you want to respond. So why do you keep reacting the same way?

Choose Your Response helps you recognize the pattern—and practice a different response.

Drawing on decades of counseling experience, Michael J. Rogers, Ph.D., introduces the Pain Wheel: a cycle in which pain leads us to seek relief, the relief brings consequences, and those consequences lead us back to pain. First encountered in addiction recovery work, this pattern also shows up in relationships, workplaces, families, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Seeing the cycle gives you a place to begin changing it.

You can’t control everything that happens to you. You can learn to choose what you do next.

Through real stories, clear explanations, and practical exercises, this book will help you:

• Recognize your triggers and recurring patterns so you can notice when the same argument, withdrawal, or spiral is starting again.

• Create a pause before you react and give yourself room to choose words and actions you’re less likely to regret.

• Keep painful moments from becoming punishing mental replays by separating what happened from the story you build around it.

• Question your first interpretation when criticism, conflict, or uncertainty sends your thinking down a familiar path.

• Focus your energy on what you can control: your actions and your attitudes.

• Loosen the hold of old grievances so they have less influence over how you respond today.

• Act more like the person you want to become, one deliberate choice at a time.

You don’t have to pretend things don’t hurt. And recognizing a pattern doesn’t mean you should already know how to change it. Choose Your Response offers a clear map and six learnable practices you can begin using the same day.

If you’re tired of snapping at people you love, shutting down when conversations get hard, or carrying yesterday’s conflict into today, this book gives you a practical place to start.

Pick up Choose Your Response today and begin practicing a different next step.

Dr. Michael J. Rogers has spent his career answering one question: why do smart, well-intentioned people keep reacting in ways they regret, and what does it take to stop?As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and a Qualified Supervisor, board-certified master's-level addictions professional, Nationally Certified Counselor, board-certified sex-offender treatment provider, and educator, licensed in multiple states, he has worked with people at every stage of being stuck. His clinical and forensic work spans the counseling room and the courtroom, with a focus on the everyday struggles that follow people home: conflict, resentment, anxiety, the stories we build on top of our pain as well as addiction and recovery. Again and again, he watched clients discover the same truth. The event was never the whole problem. The suffering they carried was built in the space between what happened and how they responded, and that space belonged to them.His doctoral research put that conviction to the test, developing a cognitive reframing curriculum for incarcerated individuals to see whether people in the hardest circumstances could change their trajectory by changing their interpretations. They could. If change is possible there, it is possible in a tense kitchen, a resentful commute, or a 2 a.m. spiral. Whether working with individuals or couples, young and old, that finding runs through his whole practice.He also teaches graduate students preparing to become counselors, which keeps him honest: nothing exposes a fuzzy idea faster than a room full of sharp students.