Adult Choices, Clarity, and Courage | Choose Your Own AWEventure

When you’re a kid, sometimes the wins come easy. My mom entered me to win a football toy chest at the local grocery store, my name was drawn, and suddenly there I was — standing in front of a wall of snacks, smiling for the newspaper. What it demanded of me was simple: show up, hold the prize, take a picture.

Adulthood isn’t marked by wins like that.

The choices that matter most later in life don’t come from being picked. They come from choosing. They ask for something quieter and heavier — clarity about what matters, courage to act without applause, and a willingness to trade short-term relief for long-term alignment. There’s no camera, no crowd, and no guarantee. Just a moment where you decide whether you’ll react automatically or choose deliberately.

That difference — between effortless wins and earned ones — is where adult choice begins.

One of the simplest ways I’ve come to understand the difference between illness and wellness is this:

Illness feels like you only have one move. Wellness begins when you realize you have choices.

When people are overwhelmed, stressed, or emotionally activated, their world narrows. It often feels like fight, flight, or freeze are the only options available.

Sometimes that’s true. Often, it isn’t.

Most of the time, what’s actually happening is that the situation is moving too fast for reflection. One part of the nervous system takes over, and everything else goes offline.

In those moments, people don’t experience themselves as choosing. They experience themselves as reacting.

Knowing You Have Choices Isn’t the Same as Feeling Them

One reason decision-making is so hard is that we are wired to avoid pain—and that instinct is wise. Avoiding harm, conflict, and unnecessary suffering has kept humans alive for a very long time.

But many of the choices we believe are avoiding pain aren’t actually sparing us. They’re only delaying it.

When the nervous system is activated, it pushes us toward whatever reduces discomfort the fastest. That relief often gets labeled as “safe.” And sometimes it is.

But just as often, safe is simply familiar.

Safe can be good. But safe can also become stuck.

People usually know this intellectually. After the fact, they can list alternatives. They can explain what might have gone differently. They can say, “I guess I could’ve handled that better.”

But in the moment, it doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like:

• “I had to respond.”

• “I couldn’t let that go.”

• “That’s just how I reacted.”

  
  

That gap—between knowing choices exist and feeling them as real—is where most people get trapped.

When Relief Replaces Choice

There’s a pattern I see again and again.

People recognize the healthier option. They can name it clearly. They know what the adult choice would be. And for a moment, that awareness itself brings relief.

Then they don’t make the choice.

Somewhere inside, there’s a quiet hope that acknowledging the healthy option should count—that they can avoid the discomfort of acting while still receiving both the short-term relief and the long-term benefit.

That’s not how it works.

Insight without action may reduce anxiety temporarily, but it doesn’t change outcomes. You don’t get the benefit of the choice you didn’t make.

Clarity doesn’t compound unless it’s acted on.

A Parallel Process: Survival Responses and the Courage of Adult Choices

Fight, flight, and freeze are often treated as primitive reactions we’re supposed to outgrow. That’s not quite right.

They don’t disappear. They evolve.

Under stress, these responses show up in a low-resolution, automatic form:

• Fight becomes attacking, blaming, controlling, or escalating

• Flight becomes avoidance, distraction, numbing, or withdrawal

• Freeze becomes paralysis, rumination, waiting, or quiet resentment

  
  

These responses aren’t wrong. They’re protective. They reduce discomfort quickly.

But they also shrink options.

With clarity and courage, those same instincts can be expressed in a higher-resolution, adult form:

• Fight becomes fighting for something—a boundary, a value, a truth—rather than against someone

• Flight becomes abstaining—choosing not to engage, not to respond, not to escalate

• Freeze becomes acceptance—acknowledging what cannot be changed without collapsing or giving up agency

  
  

The difference isn’t the instinct. The difference is whether it’s chosen.

Low-resolution responses seek relief. High-resolution choices create movement.

What the Frameworks Help Explain

Frameworks like Internal Family Systems (IFS), Transactional Analysis (TA), and Games People Play helped me name what I was already witnessing.

IFS explains how different parts of us step in automatically under stress—parts focused on protection, avoidance, control, or relief.

Transactional Analysis shows how we shift into different ego states—Child, Parent, Adult—depending on pressure and power dynamics.

Games People Play describes how people repeat familiar interaction patterns because they offer predictable emotional payoffs, even when the outcome doesn’t serve them.

All of that insight is useful. But it often comes too late—after the argument, the text, the meeting, or the fallout.

What was missing was a way to see options before one part took the wheel—before fight, flight, or freeze collapsed the menu down to one move.

Why “Safe” Often Feels Smaller Than It Should

When people say they want to feel safe, what they usually mean is that they want the pressure to stop. They want the anxiety to drop. They want the situation to stop demanding something of them.

The problem is that safety achieved through avoidance tends to shrink options. Over time, life gets organized around what won’t rock the boat. That narrowing can quietly turn into resentment, stagnation, or dissatisfaction.

Empowerment works differently.

Empowerment doesn’t eliminate discomfort. It increases options.

And options don’t expand through blaming, complaining, criticizing, or manipulating—even though those strategies can feel active or justified. They preserve short-term relief, but they keep the same game going.

Responsibility is what opens the field back up.

Taking responsibility doesn’t mean taking blame. It means recognizing where you actually have choice—and choosing deliberately instead of reactively.

That’s the high road. It’s quieter. It’s harder. And it leads somewhere different.

Why I Created Choose Your Own AWEventure

I didn’t build Choose Your Own AWEventure to motivate people or tell them what to do.

I built it to slow the moment down just enough that choices become visible.

The structure is simple:

• You’re given a realistic situation

• You’re presented with multiple ways of responding

• Each option has consequences

  
  

The point isn’t the “right” answer. The point is noticing:

• which option feels urgent

• which option feels familiar

• which option feels steadier

• and which part of you is pushing hardest for a particular choice

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The AWEventure GPT helps people see what usually disappears under stress—that they have more than one move.

It makes clear that “safe” is sometimes just another word for stuck, and that empowerment comes from expanding options through responsibility, not avoidance or control.

Awareness alone doesn’t produce change. Choice does.

That moment—when you realize you could choose differently—is where wellness begins. That’s where clarity and courage enter the equation.

How to Use the App

You can use pre-written scenarios, or you can enter your own real-life situation—a conversation you’re debating, a decision you’re avoiding, or something that keeps replaying in your mind.

You describe what’s happening in your own words. The app then walks you through different response options so you can:

• see what each one costs

• feel which parts of you are driving which impulses

• think before acting

  
  

It’s not about fixing anything inside the app. It’s about walking back into your real life with more awareness, clarity, and courage.

The Part People Aren’t Prepared For

Seeing that you have choices doesn’t automatically feel empowering. Sometimes it feels disappointing.

Responsible, adult choices often mean:

• fighting for something instead of fighting someone

• abstaining instead of reacting

• accepting reality instead of waiting for it to change

  
  

Those choices are quieter. They don’t feel like winning. But they are usually clearer.

That disappointment isn’t a sign you did it wrong. It’s the cost of choosing consciously instead of automatically.

Why This Matters

When people are unwell, life feels like it’s happening to them.

When people move toward wellness, they begin to feel that they have agency—even when exercising that agency is uncomfortable.

Wellness isn’t about always knowing what to do. It’s about knowing that you have a say.

Clarity helps you see your options. Courage helps you take them.

That’s what Choose Your Own AWEventure is for—practicing the awareness and bravery needed to act in alignment before the moment spirals out of control.

Try It Yourself

You can explore Choose Your Own AWEventure at EmpowermentErie.org.

Click the button at the top of the page that says:

Choose Your Own AWEventure

If using it creates tension instead of relief, that’s not a problem. That tension is where clarity, courage, and real choice begin.