By: Paolo Peralta | Published: February 2026 | Reading Time: 8 min
You’ve tried to fix your reactions. You’ve worked on your triggers, your habits, your mindset. You’ve read the books and taken the courses. And yet the same patterns keep surfacing — the overreaction to criticism, the anxiety when plans change, the desperate need to be liked. What if none of that is broken? What if it’s all just grieving?
“You Don’t Look at What People Believe — You Look at Their Bruises.”
We’ve been taught to understand people — and ourselves — through the lens of beliefs, values, and personality. But there’s a more accurate map. The real drivers of human behavior aren’t found in someone’s worldview. They’re found in their wounds.
This isn’t just philosophy. Developmental psychologist John Bowlby’s foundational work on attachment theory demonstrated that the emotional injuries of early childhood don’t simply fade — they become embedded in the nervous system as persistent behavioral templates. (source: Bowlby, J., 1988. A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.)
When you understand that behavior is a language — and that it’s almost always speaking about loss — you stop judging people (and yourself) for being “irrational.” You start reading what’s actually being said.
“Behavior Is an Encrypted Grief File. Your Job Is to Become the Decoder.”
This single reframe changes everything. The person who overworks to the point of burnout. The people-pleaser who can’t say no. The one who eats to numb, or rages when plans change, or spirals for days after being left out of a group chat.
None of these behaviors are about what they appear to be on the surface. They are grief — encrypted, disguised, and wrapped in the clothing of personality.
Dr. Gabor Maté, physician and trauma researcher, has argued extensively that most compulsive behaviors and emotional dysregulation are not character flaws but responses to unprocessed emotional pain. In The Myth of Normal, he writes that the roots of these patterns are almost always traceable to unmet childhood needs. (source: Maté, G., 2022. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery.)
When you stop asking “what’s wrong with this person?” and start asking “what happened to this person?” — you’ve picked up the decoder ring.
“You Didn’t Just Grow Up — You Downloaded a Program.”
Between the ages of roughly zero and ten, your brain wasn’t developing beliefs. It was installing operating software. And that software was organized around three primal questions that your nervous system needed answered to feel safe:
Will I be liked? (the need for friendship and belonging) Will I be okay? (the need for safety and predictability) Will I be chosen? (the need for reward, recognition, and worth)
Developmental psychologists call this the architecture of early attachment. These aren’t abstract ideas — they are neurobiological imperatives. The brain of a young child is wired to scan constantly for social acceptance, physical safety, and relational reward because, evolutionarily, exclusion from the group was a death sentence. (source: Siegel, D.J., 2012. The Developing Mind. Guilford Press.)
The problem? That same software is still running at 34. At 47. At 60.
“You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Running Old Software.”
Your boss doesn’t reply to your idea in a meeting. Your whole body tightens. Your mind races. Something disproportionate rises in your chest that doesn’t match the situation.
That’s not professional anxiety. That’s a second-grader who didn’t get picked for kickball.
Your partner criticizes how you handled something. You don’t get angry — you brace. You go quiet. You wait for the fallout.
That’s not your adult self responding. That’s a seven-year-old waiting to be punished.
You walk into a party, scan the room instantly, and feel inexplicably unworthy — overanalyzing your posture, your laugh, your tone.
That’s the “will I be liked” program running, just like it did when you were eight years old on a school playground.
Polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, explains the biological mechanism here: the nervous system constantly scans the environment for cues of safety or threat — a process called neuroception. Crucially, this scanning operates below conscious awareness, which is why you can be triggered before you even know why. (source: Porges, S.W., 2011. The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton & Company.)
You are not broken. You are not immature. You are a sophisticated human being running a very old program in a very new world.
“‘Grown-Up’ Is a Mirage — Age Does Not Equal Healing.”
We treat adulthood like a destination. Like one day you cross some invisible threshold — you get a job, a mortgage, maybe kids — and you have arrived. You are done. You are a grown-up now. Act like it.
But age does not equal maturity. Responsibilities do not equal healing. A mortgage does not mean you’ve made peace with the eight-year-old living inside you who still flinches when someone raises their voice.
The evidence is everywhere. A 47-year-old man has a full-blown meltdown because someone cut him off in traffic. A 33-year-old woman spirals for three days because a friend didn’t invite her out. We call these things immature. They’re not. They’re grief that was never given language.
Psychologist Dr. Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing therapy, has documented how unprocessed trauma — including the everyday, relational kind from childhood — remains stored in the body as physical tension and reactive patterns that don’t resolve simply with time. Healing requires witnessing, not aging. (source: Levine, P.A., 2010. In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.)
There are only two kinds of people: those who are still growing, and those who are pretending they don’t need to. The tragedy is that the second group built an entire performance — the suits, the Zoom meetings, the social media posts about boundaries and self-care — to avoid looking in the mirror.
“Overworking Isn’t Ambition. People-Pleasing Isn’t Kindness. It’s a Younger Version of You Trying Not to Be Left Behind.”
This is the gut punch.
The person who overworks — grinding beyond all reason, unable to rest — isn’t ambitious. They are a child trying to earn their worth so they won’t be abandoned.
The people-pleaser — who says yes when they mean no, who shrinks to avoid conflict — isn’t kind. They are a child who learned that making others happy was the price of being kept around.
The emotional eater, the overexplainer, the one who fishes for praise after every helpful act — all of them are younger selves running triangle code: I need to be liked, I need to feel safe, I need to be chosen.
Dr. Pete Walker, a psychotherapist specializing in complex trauma, describes this as the “fawn” response — a survival strategy in which children learn to manage threat by becoming hyperattuned to others’ needs. (source: Walker, P., 2013. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.) It is deeply adaptive. It kept you safe. And it is still running the show decades later.
“Listen for Disproportion — When the Reaction Is Bigger Than the Situation, That Is Grief.”
Here is a practical decoder for spotting the childhood triangle at work — in yourself and others.
Step one: Listen for disproportion. When a reaction is wildly out of proportion to the situation, that gap is filled with old grief. Someone snaps over being left out of a group chat? That’s the friends need. Someone panics when plans change at the last minute? That’s safety. Someone fishes desperately for validation after doing something helpful? That’s reward.
Step two: Ask what they’re afraid to lose. Every problematic behavior is a defense mechanism keeping a potential loss at bay. Underneath the anger is fear of abandonment. Underneath the control is fear of chaos. Underneath the people-pleasing is fear of rejection. Ask the question: what loss is this behavior protecting against?
Step three: Speak to the loss, not the logic. This is where most well-meaning people — and many therapists — go wrong. You cannot logic someone out of a grief response. You cannot argue them into feeling safe. You have to address what’s actually happening: a loss, real or anticipated. These people don’t need to be fixed. They need to be witnessed.
Research in interpersonal neurobiology supports this. Dr. Daniel Siegel’s concept of “feeling felt” — the experience of being truly seen and understood by another person — has been shown to directly regulate the nervous system and reduce reactivity in ways that intellectual reasoning alone cannot. (source: Siegel, D.J., 2010. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Bantam Books.)
“They Don’t Need a Fix. They Need a Translator.”
This distinction is everything.
When someone in your life is acting out — being irrational, emotionally unavailable, dramatic, explosive — the instinct is to correct them. To reason with them. To tell them they’re overreacting. And that never works, because you’re speaking to the logical adult while the terrified child is the one who answered the door.
What they need is translation. Someone who can hear the code underneath the behavior and respond to that.
The same is true for yourself. When you notice a disproportionate reaction rising in you, try this: ask out loud — who inside me is trying to be liked, or safe, or chosen right now? Then wait. Don’t try to fix anything. Just listen. A younger version of you will answer — scared, uncertain, wanting to be seen.
And all you have to say is: I see you. I’ve got you now.
That simple act of internal witnessing — what therapist and author Richard Schwartz calls “Self-leadership” in Internal Family Systems therapy — has been shown to dramatically reduce emotional reactivity and increase psychological flexibility. (source: Schwartz, R.C., 2021. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Sounds True.)
“None of What You’re Trying to Fix Is Broken — It’s Just Grieving.”
The self-help industry has made billions telling you that you need to optimize yourself, fix your mindset, reprogram your habits. Most of it misses the point entirely. It speaks to the software without acknowledging why the software exists.
You are not broken. The people in your life who frustrate you are not broken. You are all, each of you, carrying ungrieved losses — losses that were never named, never witnessed, never allowed to be what they were.
The “difficult” people in your life aren’t irrational. They simply were never given the words to explain what’s missing. There is a hole — the shape of something that should have been there and wasn’t — and they’ve been filling it with behavior ever since.
Understanding this doesn’t mean excusing harmful actions. It means responding from a place of comprehension rather than judgment. It means meeting the grief that’s encrypted in the behavior rather than fighting the behavior itself.
“Everyone Has Ghosts That Are Waiting and Begging to Go to Sleep.”
The goal isn’t to become someone who no longer has a childhood triangle. The goal isn’t to eliminate your reactions, sanitize your triggers, or finally become so healed that nothing touches you anymore.
The goal is to become someone who can recognize when the triangle is running — and respond to it with compassion rather than judgment. To become, in the words of poet David Whyte, someone who is present to their own history rather than unconsciously acted upon by it.
Your ghosts don’t need to be exorcised. They need to be acknowledged. They need to hear the words they never got when they were small: I see you. You’re not alone. We’re going to be okay.
That’s not weakness. That’s the most sophisticated form of emotional intelligence available to a human being.
A Practical Framework for Decoding Your Own Triangle
When you notice a strong emotional reaction, run through these three questions:
- Is this disproportionate? Is my reaction bigger than the situation actually warrants? If yes — that gap is a grief signal.
- Which side of the triangle is active? Am I afraid of being rejected or excluded? (friends) Am I afraid something bad will happen or spin out of control? (safety) Am I afraid I won’t be valued, chosen, or recognized? (reward)
- What loss am I protecting against? What is the behavior actually defending? Name the fear underneath it. Then speak to that — not to the behavior, not to the logic, but to the loss.
And when you find the younger part of you that’s running the code, don’t try to fix it. Just say: I see you. I’ve got you now.
The Bottom Line
Every trigger is a timestamp. Every outsized reaction is a message from someone younger inside you, still trying to answer three ancient questions: Will I be liked? Will I be safe? Will I be chosen?
You were never broken. You were never irrational. You were always, underneath it all, a person carrying grief that was never given a name.
The most transformative thing you can do — for yourself and for everyone around you — isn’t to fix anything. It’s to finally understand what it’s been trying to say.
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Tags: childhood trauma, emotional triggers, grief, behavior patterns, self-awareness, psychology, attachment theory, inner child, nervous system, polyvagal theory, Gabor Maté, self-help, emotional intelligence, healing, people-pleasing, people pleaser, overworking, emotional regulation
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