Healing from trauma often involves learning to understand and connect with emotions we've spent years trying to avoid, manage, or push aside. And while we may recognize these patterns intellectually, understanding why we feel a certain way doesn't always change how we experience those feelings in our bodies or relationships.
One tool I use in AEDP therapy to help clients make sense of their emotional experiences is the Change Triangle. It offers a way to understand the protective strategies we've developed, the emotions that can keep us feeling stuck, and the deeper feelings and needs waiting beneath them.
In this blog, we'll explore the three components of The Change Triangle, what they can look like in everyday life, and how we might work with them together in trauma therapy.
What Is the Change Triangle in AEDP Therapy?
The Change Triangle is a framework that helps us recognize three common aspects of our emotional experience: defenses or protections, inhibitory emotions, and core emotions.
When difficult feelings arise, we may automatically turn toward protective strategies like avoidance, defensiveness, or intellectualizing. At other times, emotions like anxiety, shame, or guilt can make it difficult to connect with what we're feeling underneath.
The Change Triangle helps us get curious about these experiences and gently move toward our core emotions, rather than continuing to avoid or push them away.
In AEDP therapy, we use this awareness alongside the safety and connection of the therapeutic relationship to help clients explore, experience, and process emotions that may have felt overwhelming or unsafe to access alone.
Let's explore each part of The Change Triangle and what working with these experiences might look like in AEDP therapy. Along the way, we'll use fictional, composite client examples to illustrate how protective responses, inhibitory emotions, and core emotions can show up in our lives and relationships, and how we might begin exploring them together in therapy.
The Change Triangle® was developed by Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, based on the work of David Malan and Diana Fosha. Graphic adapted for Chadley Zobolas Therapy. Learn more at The Change Triangle.
1. Protections/Defenses:
Protective mechanisms are psychological strategies we unconsciously employ to protect ourselves from emotional pain or discomfort. These protections serve as temporary and highly adaptive solutions, but they can also serve as barriers to growth and connection, especially if they stick around past the time that they are needed. Recognizing and understanding our protective mechanisms, how they’ve kept us safe, and how they may continue to keep us away from what’s at the bottom of the triangle (the core emotions, often linked to trauma, that have been too heavy to feel) is the first step in this process.
Example: Sherry often responds to constructive feedback from their partner with defensiveness. Through therapy, they begin to recognize that their defensive responses (top left of the triangle) acts as a shield to protect their more vulnerable experiences of shame and deep insecurity (top right of the triangle). Beneath Sherry's defensiveness is a deeply familiar fear of not being good enough. Over time, they've learned that responding defensively feels safer than allowing others to see how much these interactions hurt. Through AEDP therapy, Sherry begins recognizing that what looks like anger or resistance on the outside may actually be protecting a much more vulnerable emotional experience underneath.
2. Inhibitory Emotions - Anxiety, Shame, and Guilt
Our inhibitory emotions – anxiety, shame, and guilt – are emotions that we can more readily experience and that often become a common experience throughout our daily lives. They also tend to cloud our connection with the core emotions – or those at the bottom of the triangle – due to their frequency and a certain comfortability that comes along with them that core emotions don't often have. Exploring inhibitory emotions in trauma therapy serves as the gateway to core emotions, which once processed, serve as the gateway to our core, authentic selves.
Example: Sarah, a therapy client, experiences anxiety before social gatherings. She often avoids attending events due to a fear of judgment and rejection – her protection (top left of the triangle). By acknowledging her anxiety and exploring its underlying roots, she realizes that anxiety and shame (two inhibitory emotions at the top right of the triangle) are actually working hand in hand, ultimately stemming from feelings of unworthiness and a deep-seated fear of abandonment. This realization enables Sarah to delve deeper, accessing the core emotion of fear that we identified above.
For a closer look at how this works, our article on understanding anxiety through the Change Triangle explores how anxiety can sometimes protect us from more vulnerable emotional experiences.
3. Core Emotions - Fear, Anger, Sadness, Disgust, Joy, Excitement, Sexual Excitement
Core emotions are the feelings that lie beneath the protections and inhibitory emotions. They are the raw and genuine emotions that we experience that, for many reasons, can be hard to access and fully feel through in the moment. Core emotions include fear, anger, sadness, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement. Once we’re able to move past our protections and inhibitory emotions, we can then access our core emotional experience, process those emotions and their associated traumas fully, which ultimately allows us to access our authentic selves, needs, and desires.
Example: Sarah, the client from the above vignette, has been in AEDP trauma therapy for a few months now. With the support of her therapist, she has harnessed much more compassion and understanding for her anxiety, protections, and how they show up in social settings. She is now ready to feel through her fear of abandonment (core emotion at the bottom of the triangle). This process includes somatic processing of the emotion – ie connecting with the sensations of fear in the body and supporting the nervous system to release them – and trauma processing of childhood experiences that told her she is unworthy of love. This process takes place slowly, entirely on Sarah’s timeline, and with lots of attunement and care from her trauma therapist. At the end of this process together, Sarah’s younger self is released from the feelings of unworthiness, and Sarah is able to move through social situations with more ease, fun, and a stronger sense of connection with herself and others.
How to Use the Change Triangle in Everyday Life
While connecting with our bodies, emotions, and core selves can be especially meaningful within a supportive therapeutic relationship, the Change Triangle can also be a helpful framework for exploring our emotional experiences outside of, or alongside, therapy.
For those of us healing from trauma, this practice can be especially valuable in beginning to recognize protective patterns that once helped us stay safe, but may now be keeping us disconnected from our emotions and needs.
The next time you notice yourself feeling anxious, overwhelmed, defensive, or disconnected, consider the following:
1. Notice Where You Are on the Triangle
Begin by getting curious about what's happening inside. Are you noticing a protective response, like withdrawing, distracting yourself, overthinking, striving for perfection, or becoming defensive?
Alongside these protective responses, notice whether you're experiencing anxiety, shame, or guilt. Perhaps you feel like you're ping-ponging between the two upper corners of the triangle. You might feel anxious or not good enough while simultaneously finding yourself unable to stop overthinking, doing more, or trying to get everything just right.
Here's the important part: I encourage you to notice your experience without judgment or pressure to change where you are on the triangle.
For now, the invitation is simply to become more familiar with your internal experience. Over time, you may begin recognizing patterns, identifying triggers, and understanding what different parts of your experience might be communicating about your needs.
2. Get Curious About What's Underneath
Once you've begun noticing your protective responses or inhibitory emotions, you might then invite yourself to get curious about what other feelings may be present underneath (at the bottom of the triangle).
Maybe defensiveness is protecting feelings of grief or sadness. Or maybe anxiety is making it difficult to recognize anger about a boundary that's been crossed.
If you feel comfortable, consider asking yourself:
If this protective response didn't need to work quite so hard right now, what might I be feeling underneath?
There's no need to find an answer immediately. Sometimes our emotions become clearer when we give ourselves the space to listen, rather than pushing to figure them out. Other times, we may need the safety, connection, and support of a therapist or another trusted person to help us explore what's coming up.
3. Offer Yourself Compassion and Support
Remember, our protections developed for a reason. Rather than criticizing yourself for avoiding an emotion or struggling to connect with it, consider what support you might need to feel a little safer exploring your experience.
You might try journaling, gentle movement, or reaching out to someone you trust. Our journal prompts for trauma survivors offer additional opportunities to practice emotional awareness and self-compassion.
You don't have to force yourself to access difficult emotions or push beyond what feels manageable. Sometimes, recognizing that a protective response is present and allowing yourself to slow down is enough for the moment.
And if that kind of spaciousness, compassion, and permission feels unfamiliar, as it does for so many of us, the experience of offering it to yourself can be meaningful and healing in its own right.
Explore AEDP Therapy in Denver
Understanding what's happening beneath our protective responses can be an important first step, but sometimes we need more than awareness to experience something different.
We’re wired for connection, and we’re not meant to heal in isolation. In AEDP therapy, we make room for all of you, together. With deep care, curiosity, and attunement to your nervous system, we can begin exploring feelings that may have been too overwhelming or protected to navigate on your own.
If you're interested in experiencing this approach to therapy, I'd love to connect and explore whether working together feels like the right fit.
