Understand the hidden reason behind your most perplexing patterns — and how your emotions are actually the way through.
You know the pattern. You shut down in a conversation that mattered. You snapped at someone you love and didn’t quite know why. You said yes when every part of you wanted to say no — again. You’ve been procrastinating on the same thing for weeks, and the harder you push yourself, the more stuck you get. You go too far when you’re triggered. You go too quiet when you needed to speak. You forget you have needs until you’re running on empty.
These aren’t character flaws. They aren’t proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you. They are patterns — intelligent, adaptive patterns that developed for real reasons. And underneath every single one of them is an emotion that never got to land.
That’s what this piece is about.
Most of us were never taught how our emotions actually work. We were taught to manage them, override them, perform the acceptable ones and suppress the inconvenient ones. And in the process, we lost access to some of the most essential information our inner life has to offer — and to the natural clarity, courage, and connection that comes from actually being in contact with what we feel.
The Change Triangle, developed by psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs-Hendel and described in her book It’s Not Always Depression, is one of the most useful frameworks I’ve encountered for understanding what’s actually happening beneath our automatic reactions — and how to work with our emotions rather than endlessly around them. I use it with coaching clients, I’ve integrated it into the HeartRich Matrix, and I use it in my own life. This piece is my attempt to share it in a way that makes it real and usable, not just conceptually interesting.
2025 note: For a practical, executive-oriented adaptation of these ideas, read The APPs MAP — Upgrading Our Adaptive Protective Patterns, which extends this framework into a coaching context for leaders and professionals.
The Architecture of the Triangle
The Change Triangle maps the relationship between three layers of our emotional experience: our Core Emotions at the bottom, our Inhibitory Emotions in the middle, and our Defenses at the top. Most of us live almost entirely in the top layer — the defenses — without realizing what’s driving them from below.
At the bottom of the triangle, pointing toward your Authentic Self, are the Core Emotions — the ones we’re all born with the capacity to experience. These aren’t problems to be solved. They’re biological signals, each with a specific purpose, designed to help us respond to our environment in ways that protect and enhance life.
THE CORE EMOTIONS
Fear
Alerts us to potential threats and motivates protective action
Anger
Asserts boundaries, protects values, motivates action when needs are violated
Sadness
Processes loss and disappointment, signals the need for comfort and support
Joy
Signals safety and pleasure, encourages us toward positive experience
Excitement
Motivates exploration, builds anticipation and energy around possibility
Disgust
Protects from harm by signaling what to avoid or reject
When we’re in genuine contact with our core emotions — when we can feel them, name them, and let them move through us — we are, in the language of Self Leadership, closest to our Authentic Self. Clearest. Most resourceful. Most capable of choosing how to respond rather than simply reacting.
But core emotions don’t always get to arrive cleanly. For many of us, they were conditioned out of us long before we had any say in the matter.
What you think you’re feeling is often not the real feeling. There’s an architecture underneath it.
When Emotions Get Blocked: The Inhibitory Layer
If you grew up in an environment where certain emotions were unsafe — where anger led to punishment, where sadness was dismissed, where needing comfort was a sign of weakness — your nervous system learned to intercept those emotions before they could fully surface. Not because you chose to suppress them, but because suppression was the only way to stay safe and connected to the people you depended on.
In place of the blocked core emotion, a different set of emotions arises — what the Change Triangle calls Inhibitory Emotions: guilt, anxiety, and shame. These aren’t the real feelings. They’re the brakes. The emotional system’s way of saying: don’t go there.
INHIBITORY EMOTIONS
Guilt
Signals a perceived violation of values — but excessive guilt becomes self-punishment that blocks authentic feeling
Anxiety
Alerts to potential threat — but chronic anxiety keeps us from the core emotions that actually need attention
Shame
Signals social violation — but toxic shame convinces us we are the problem, not just that we did something problematic
These inhibitory emotions are genuinely painful — painful enough that we’ll do almost anything to avoid them. Which brings us to the top of the triangle.
Defenses: The Strategies We Don’t Choose
Defenses are the behaviors, patterns, and strategies we develop to protect ourselves from the pain of inhibitory emotions. They are not inherently pathological — everyone uses them. The problem isn’t that they exist. It’s that when they become automatic and habitual, we lose the ability to choose them. They start choosing us.
And over time, we stop recognizing them as strategies at all. We just think: this is who I am.
The list of possible defenses is vast — essentially any behavior that reduces, replaces, or distracts from emotional pain. Here are some of the most common ones. You’ll likely recognize yourself in more than a few:
- Avoidance in any form
- Procrastinating
- Perfectionism
- People-pleasing
- Overworking
- Over-exercising
- Over- or under-eating
- Joking or sarcasm at the wrong moment
- Ill-timed smiling or laughter
- Changing the subject or going vague
- Going quiet, mumbling, dropping tone
- Avoiding eye contact
- Spacing out or not listening
- Going mute or freezing up
- Constant apologizing
- Inner Critic / self-judgment
- Judging or criticizing others
- Negative thinking
- Grandiosity or one-upping
- Victimhood or one-downing
- Numbness or helplessness
- Obsessions or addictions
- Being secretive
- Preoccupying or ruminating
- Misplaced aggression
- Chronic tiredness or exhaustion
- Anxiety and depression themselves
- Chronic pain and physical symptoms
That last points are worth sitting with. Anxiety, depression, and chronic physical symptoms can themselves function as defenses — the system’s way of staying offline so it doesn’t have to feel what’s underneath. This is one of the reasons that addressing these conditions only at the surface level so often falls short. And what explains the name for the book, “It’s Not Always Depression”.
Where IFS Meets the Change Triangle
The Change Triangle maps beautifully onto the Internal Family Systems framework that sits at the heart of my Self Leadership coaching work. In IFS terms, the defenses at the top of the triangle are the behaviors of our Protector Parts — the Managers and Relievers who have taken on the job of keeping our Exiles (the wounded parts carrying core emotions) safely hidden from view.
From this perspective, a defense isn’t just a habit to be broken — it’s a part serving a role trying to help, doing the best it knows how. The Inner Critic auditing your every move. The Perfectionist raising the bar endlessly. The People-Pleaser saying yes before anyone even finishes the question. Each one protecting an Exile that carries a core emotion it learned was too dangerous to feel.
The invitation — in both frameworks — is not to fight the protectors, but to meet them with curiosity and compassion. To understand what they’re protecting. And to gradually create the safety that allows the core emotion to surface and be felt, perhaps for the first time.
That’s the work. And it’s both more challenging and more liberating than it sounds.
If you’re curious which patterns are most active in you, the free Who’s On Your Crew? Assessment explores many of these through the lens of the Inner Crews framework.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
Case Example — Perfectionism
Amanda was a straight-A student whose parents praised her achievements — and, without intending harm, made her feel inadequate when she fell short. She carried that pattern into her career at a law firm, where her work was excellent and her anxiety was relentless. She worked late, obsessed over every detail, and when she stumbled during an important presentation, she was devastated. When her boss gently pointed out that her perfectionism was starting to interfere with her functioning, Amanda was defensive. She couldn’t imagine another way of being. She believed this was simply who she was.
The core emotion underneath: Fear — of not being good enough, of failure, of being seen as inadequate. The perfectionism wasn’t the problem. It was the protection. And beneath the protection was a scared part carrying a wound that had never been addressed.
Case Example — People-Pleasing
Daniel had built his career on saying yes. When a new boss — a bully — began criticizing everything he did, Daniel worked harder, said yes more, sacrificed weekends and family time. He couldn’t confront her. Couldn’t stand up for himself. The anxiety grew into panic attacks and eventually depression before he finally entered therapy and began to see what his people-pleasing had cost him.
The core emotions underneath: Anger at being mistreated — suppressed to avoid confrontation and maintain the relationship. And beneath the anger, fear — of rejection, of not being liked, of losing the approval that had always felt like the condition of his worth. Both emotions were real. Neither had ever been allowed to land.
How to Actually Use the Change Triangle
The goal isn’t to analyze your emotions from a distance. It’s to feel them — to let them move through you, complete their biological purpose, and release. When we do, something remarkable often happens: the rumination stops. The spinning slows. The preoccupation that had been consuming enormous amounts of energy simply — dissolves. Because it was never really about the situation. It was about the emotion that needed to be felt.
The entry point is almost always the defense — the behavior you notice in yourself that seems automatic, that you didn’t quite choose. From there, you work backwards toward what’s actually underneath.
Here’s a full walkthrough using procrastination as the example:
1
Notice the defense and press pause
You catch yourself avoiding something you normally wouldn’t. Rather than pushing through or judging yourself, you get curious.
“I’m usually driven and hard-working. Why do I keep stalling on this?”
2
Find the trigger
Work backwards. What were you thinking or feeling just before you slipped into avoidance?
“I can trace it back to agreeing to do a favour I didn’t want to do. Something tightened in me when I said yes.”
3
Feel the inhibitory emotions
As you stay with the trigger, the inhibitory emotions will begin to surface — anxiety, guilt, shame. Don’t try to skip past them. Let yourself feel them in your body.
“I feel anxiety. And some guilt. There’s tightness in my chest.”
4
Calm and accept the inhibitory emotion
You don’t need to resolve it or fix it. Just acknowledge it. Breathe into it. Let your body know it’s safe to feel this without it taking over.
“I can be with this anxiety. I don’t need to turn away from it. It’s uncomfortable but it won’t hurt me.”
5
Ask: what might I really be feeling?
With some ease in the inhibitory layer, you can ask what’s actually beneath it. Move through the core emotions: sadness, anger, fear, joy, excitement, disgust. Notice which one has a charge.
“Is it sadness? Fear? Anger? When I land on anger, something shifts. There’s energy there.”
6
Name it and validate it
Name the core emotion without judgment. Each emotion has a purpose. It doesn’t make you bad or wrong for feeling it.
“I’m angry. I didn’t want to do that favour. I felt manipulated into saying yes. And I had fear underneath that too — fear of being judged, fear of my wife being embarrassed, fear of being seen as rude.”
7
Feel it and let it move
Allow the emotion to be felt in your body. You can use imagination to complete the unexpressed action — to say what you couldn’t say, set the limit you didn’t set. Let the wave move through you until it completes.
“I let myself feel the anger. I imagine saying clearly: I don’t want to keep agreeing to things like this. The tightness begins to shift.”
8
Return to your Authentic Self
From this clearer, more settled place, you can see the situation more wisely. You’re no longer reacting from a defended place. You can choose your next action from your values rather than your fear.
Clarity
Courage
Confidence
Compassion
Curiosity
“I can still do the favour this time — I said yes and I’ll honour that. But I’m clear now: next time, I say no. I know that’ll bring up anxiety and guilt. But I’d rather be on my own side.”
This isn’t a quick fix. Working with emotions at this level takes practice, patience, and often support. But what it offers — the freedom from endless rumination, the return to genuine choice, the sense of being back in contact with yourself — is real. And it compounds over time.
Coming Back to What’s Real
The Change Triangle doesn’t ask you to become more emotional. It asks you to become more aware and honest — with yourself, about what you’re actually feeling beneath the strategies you’ve built to survive not feeling it.
Most of what passes for emotional management is really emotional avoidance, often in the form of suppression. And avoidance has a cost. Not a dramatic, obvious cost — a slow one. The energy spent defending. The relationships that stay at a carefully managed surface. The decisions made from fear rather than values. The sense of never quite being fully present in your own life.
Working through the triangle — gradually, compassionately, without forcing — is one of the most direct paths back to yourself that I know. Back to the part of you that is calm, clear, and capable of genuine connection. Back to the Authentic Self that was always there, underneath everything your system learned it needed to protect.
That’s what this work is for. And it’s available to you — one honest feeling at a time.
Keep exploring
These pieces go deeper into the frameworks and the path back to yourself.
- The APPs MAP: Upgrading Our Adaptive Protective Patterns
- What Is Self Leadership?
- The HeartRich Matrix
- Burnout Is Not a Badge of Honor
- It’s Time We Talk About Trauma
- How’s My Relating?
- Who’s On Your Crew? Assessment
- Self Leadership Coaching
Self Leadership Assessment
Wondering which patterns are keeping you stuck?
If something in this piece resonated — from perfectionism to people-pleasing, and procrastination to self-criticism — the Who’s On Your Crew? Assessment was built for exactly this. I personally review your responses and prepare a detailed, personalized report — usually within a day or two. It’s free. And it might be the most useful thing you read about yourself this year.
Guy Reichard is a Self Leadership, Resilience, and Executive Coach and the founder of HeartRich Coaching. He is the author of How to Talk Amongst Your Selves and The Heart of Values. If this resonated, you might start with the free Inner Crews Guide or the Who’s On Your Crew? Assessment.
0 Comments