Most people know their triggers.
You know the things that set you off. The situations you avoid. The name appearing on your phone that makes your stomach drop. You’ve probably done some work on them. You’ve named them. Maybe you’ve even cleared some of them.
But there’s another category entirely that I want to talk about.
The hidden charge. The one you don’t know is there.
(Not bank charges. Though honestly, same energy. 🙄)
A hidden charge doesn’t dress up in bright clothes and introduce itself on your doorstep.
It doesn’t make you react. It doesn’t fire your nervous system or make you say something you later regret. It just runs in the background, sneakily shaping your decisions, feeding your reasoning, blurring your preferences, steering the trajectory of your life – while you carry on thinking you’re just making choices.
That’s what makes it so insidious. It’s not loud. It’s invisible. And because it’s invisible, everything it produces looks completely rational. You have reasons. Good ones. That make total sense to you. They’re just not the real ones.
That’s what makes it so completely and utterly maddening once you find one.
Because you will look back. And you will think: what the hell was I actually doing?
Here’s what I mean.
For most of my adult life, I had arranged everything – and I mean everything – around not becoming a mother.
Career. Partners. The shape of the life I told myself I wanted. I had it all figured out. I had reasons. Good ones. Ones I could have talked you through coherently over a glass or two of vino. I was making intentional choices, living deliberately, thanks very much.
Except I wasn’t. Not really.
There was a hidden charge sitting underneath all of it – around pregnancy and birth – that had been there since long before I could have articulated it. I couldn’t see it. It had its cloak on. And so every time life moved me close to it, I turned. And I always had a perfectly good reason for turning.
It took me accidentally falling pregnant for me to know it was there.
I was thirty-five. THIRTY FIVE!
I try not to think too much about this, if I’m honest. Because the maths is simple and brutal: if I’d found that hidden charge in my twenties, I’d have become a mother in my twenties. I’d have had my children young. I’d have had more of them, probably. The whole trajectory of my life – the shape of my family, the years of motherhood I got, the exhaustion of being an older parent – all of it would have been different.
Instead, I spent fifteen years making perfectly rational decisions that were being secretly steered by something I couldn’t see.
That’s the bill. That’s what hidden charges do when they go unspotted long enough. They rack up in the background… quietly, invisibly, for years. And then one day the reality of them lands on your doorstep. Not with a dramatic theme tune. Just with the heavy weight of all the time that went the way it went instead of another way. And the cost of it.
So what’s is a hidden charge?
It’s like someone has dropped an invisibility cloak over a wall inside you. The wall is real. Completely solid. But you can’t see it. And because you can’t see it, you can’t name it. And here’s the thing about these particular walls: the only spell that reveals what’s under the cloak is naming what’s under it.
But how to do you that when you can’t see what’s under the bloody cloak??
Well, thankfully big, hidden, things under invisibility cloaks leave traces.
Think about Harry Potter walking through snow under his invisibility cloak. You can’t see him. But you can see his footprints appearing in the snow. You can see the cold winter air shifting and parting around something that isn’t there. If you know what you’re looking for, you can observe what’s happening and make a stab at what’s under the cloak.
Hidden charges work exactly like this. The charge itself is invisible – but it leaves footprints everywhere. In the decisions you consistently don’t make. The opportunities you always find a reason to step back from. The directions your life keeps not going in, for reasons that always seem perfectly reasonable at the time. The gap between what you say you want and where you keep ending up.
Someone who knows what they’re looking for will spot it. They’ll see the footprints, feel the air move, and know something’s there even before they can name it.
But if you don’t know what to look for? You’d miss it. For years. For decades, if you’re not careful.
I missed mine for fifteen years.
The charge is usually formed around something that at some point felt threatening or overwhelming – a fear, a wound, an experience that got filed away unprocessed. But because it never made it to the surface, because you never actually looked at it directly, it didn’t stay in one place. It spread. It became policy. It started informing decisions that had nothing obviously to do with it, because your nervous system had made a decision and underlined it in red: we don’t go near that. ANYWHERE near it. You got it?
And so you don’t. And you never know you don’t.
The people who come to me – women with the same pregnancy and birth charge I had, business owner and leaders, people who’ve done years of work on themselves, anyone quite frankly – are almost never completely unaware that something’s going on.
They know they’re stuck. They know there’s something. They’ve talked about it in therapy or with their coach, they’ve journalled about it, they’ve sat with with well-meaning friends who’ve nodded along thoughtfully.
But the hidden charges – the specific ones that are actually running the show – those are, by definition, the ones nobody’s spotted yet. Including them. Sometimes including their therapist – the one person you’d hope who could.
Not because the therapist is bad at their job. But because a hidden charge is hidden. It requires a very particular kind of attention to locate it. Often it needs someone sitting opposite you who can see the shape of the gap and who recognises the shape. It’s someone who notices not what you’re saying but what you’re consistently not saying, not pursuing, not touching. That negative space is where the charge lives.
And even then, even with the best practitioner in the room, it can be missed. There are so many of them. We all have far more hidden charges than we know. They don’t announce themselves for inspection. They just keep shaping things from behind the scenes like the sneaky little buggers that they are.
That’s the problem I’ve been trying to solve.
Because you can’t rely on always having exactly the right person in the room who happens to notice exactly the right thing. And you can’t keep living inside a life whose architecture is being decided by things you can’t see.
What you need is a way to surface them – to make the invisible visible. To give you a map of where your walls and blocks actually are, so that you can decide what to do about them rather than just keep turning left without knowing you’re turning left.
That’s what we’re building with Ladder of Growth. Different profiles for different areas of life – the anxiety pattern profile, which locates where your hidden charges are sitting in relation to the six anxiety drivers. A business owner profile, for the charges that are shaping how you run your business. A therapist profile, for practitioners who want to understand their own internal architecture before they try to map someone else’s.
Different contexts. Same question underneath all of them: where are the things you can’t see that are deciding things for you?
Because they exist. For all of us. The only variable is whether you find them before, or after the bill arrives.
I found mine after.
I’m trying to build something that means more people find theirs before.
If this resonates, share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you want to know more about what we’re building at Ladder of Growth, you’ll find it at ladderofgrowth.io.