What happens when acute responses become chronic? When the nervous system, designed for short-term survival, gets stuck in threat mode for months, years, decades? This is where we recognize the patterns that psychiatric frameworks call disorders: dissociation, depression, anxiety, anger. These are better understood as extended and adapted versions of underlying trauma responses—they make sense when traced to their origins.
Dissociation
Dissociation is extended flight—departure not from a physical location but from present experience. Consciousness separates from the body, from the moment, from direct engagement with reality. The person is here but not fully here, watching their life from a distance. This adaptation follows naturally when flight was the primary trauma response and actual departure wasn’t possible. The mind leaves when the body can’t.
Depression
Depression is extended freeze. Energy withdraws inward. Initiating action feels impossible. Pleasure becomes inaccessible. The world appears gray, futile, not worth engaging with. This adaptation follows naturally when freeze was the primary trauma response—when the person learned early that reaching out doesn’t work, that needs won’t be met, that the safest strategy is to wait passively rather than seek actively.
Anxiety
Anxiety is extended orient. The nervous system stays in scanning mode, perpetually vigilant, unable to settle. Minor threats trigger major alarm responses. The person can’t relax because relaxation feels dangerous—it means dropping vigilance, which means missing threats. This adaptation follows naturally when the environment was unpredictable, when safety was never assured, when the person had to remain constantly alert to survive.
Anger
Anger becomes the adaptation when fight was the primary response. The world is organized around opposition, resistance, the defense of power. Quick rage, chronic irritability, conflict in relationships. This follows naturally when fighting was what worked, when surrender or compliance meant annihilation of self.
The Statistics of Adaptation
The Canadian mental health statistics reflect these adaptations: one in five Canadians experience mental illness by age 25. Twenty-nine percent report anxiety or depression diagnosis—up from 20% in 2016. Youth mental health has deteriorated dramatically: 26% rate their mental health as fair or poor, double the rate from 2019.
The most common number of therapy sessions attended is one—a fact rarely discussed. People begin the work of addressing their adaptations, encounter the difficulty of changing patterns established over decades, and stop. This isn’t necessarily failure—sometimes one session is enough to shift something important. But often it reflects the profound stability of adaptive patterns. The system is organized to maintain itself. Change requires sustained effort across time.
The adaptations are attempts to manage the unmanageable, to survive the unsurvivable, to cope with legacies that precede conscious memory. Seeing an adaptation as making sense—as the best a system could do given what it learned about the world during the periods when it was most plastic and vulnerable—is the beginning of working with the pattern rather than against it.
Addiction: The Fuel That Maintains the System
Addictions facilitate the continuance of mental health adaptations, which maintain locked trauma responses, which protect against the legacies of developmental adversity. Each layer is functional within the system—and each can be addressed.
This reframes addiction entirely. The person struggling with opioid dependence isn’t just chemically addicted to a substance. They’ve found something that makes the freeze response tolerable, that provides artificial soothing where human warmth was never reliable, that allows the depressive adaptation to continue without the unbearable urgency of unmet needs. The person struggling with stimulants has found something that matches their chronic hypervigilance, that provides the energy and activation their anxious system craves, that allows perpetual motion without ever having to settle. The person whose alcohol use escalates in conflict has found something that releases the anger their system has been holding, that allows the fight response to discharge, that provides temporary relief from the controlled rage they maintain the rest of the time.
The addiction is functional within the system, an integral part of how the whole pattern maintains itself. This is why addressing addiction without addressing the underlying layers so often fails. Remove the substance without addressing the adaptation, and the person is left worse off—frozen without solace, hypervigilant without relief, enraged without discharge. No wonder relapse rates are so high. The system reorganizes back to its stable configuration because nothing has changed at the deeper levels.
In Canada, 21% of people meet criteria for substance use disorder—roughly eight million people. Sixty-seven thousand deaths per year are attributable to substance use. Twenty-two opioid-related deaths occur every day. Fifteen thousand alcohol-related deaths occur yearly. And the statistic that should haunt everyone who works in this field: only 2% of people with substance use disorders have ever sought professional help.
Two percent. The vast majority never reach out. The reasons are complex—stigma, access, cost, hopelessness—but how much of it is the freeze response itself? People whose systems learned that reaching out doesn’t work, whose developmental experience taught that needs are futile, don’t seek help. They wait, frozen, until the addiction or its consequences kill them.
The Layers in Motion
All models are provisional, all maps are incomplete—including this one. What the four-layer framework offers is a way of revealing patterns that were previously invisible.
Consider how the layers might configure in someone whose developmental wound occurred during the Need Fulfillment stage (one to eighteen months). Perhaps the primary caregiver struggled with depression and was physically present but emotionally unavailable. The infant learned that needs were a burden, that reaching out brought no response, that the safest strategy was to stop asking. This is resonance. The nervous system organized around freeze—the infant became quiet, compliant, “easy.” This is response. Over time, depression developed: difficulty initiating, pervasive futility, withdrawal from engagement. This is adaptation. And when opioids were discovered—perhaps through a legitimate prescription—they provided something that had never been reliable: warmth, holding, the sense of needs being met. This is addiction maintaining the system.
Different developmental wounds create different configurations. Someone wounded during the Autonomy stage might develop primarily the orient response, chronic anxiety, and stimulant addiction. Someone wounded during the Will and Power stage might develop the fight response, chronic anger, and alcohol dependence.
Understanding the layers doesn’t tell you what to do in any specific situation. It won’t give you a treatment protocol or a diagnostic checklist. It won’t simplify the irreducible complexity of individual human lives. What it offers is a lens that reveals connections previously hidden, a reminder that behavior which appears irrational often makes perfect sense when traced back through the layers of experience that created it.
The Hopeful Paradox
The developmental perspective feels more painful than simpler explanations, but it offers more hope.
Consider the alternatives. If addiction is simply a moral failure, then shame and punishment should fix it—but they don’t. If addiction is simply a brain disease, then medication should be sufficient—but often it isn’t. If trauma is just something bad that happened that you need to “get over,” then willpower should be enough—but it never is.
The four-layer framework explains why these simpler approaches fail. We’re dealing with patterns established during periods of maximum neural plasticity, maintained by adaptive systems that have their own logic and stability. Change at this level takes time, requires attention to multiple scales simultaneously, and must address the underlying organization that produces symptoms rather than the symptoms alone.
But the nervous system remains plastic across the lifespan. The patterns laid down in childhood can be modified through new experiences, through therapy, through relationships that provide what was missing early on. Recovery is possible precisely because we’re not trapped by our developmental history—we’re influenced by it, shaped by it, sometimes constrained by it, but not imprisoned by it.
The stone on the beach continues to be shaped by today’s waves. The patterns written into its mineral structure by ancient geological forces remain, but new patterns are always forming on the surface, gradually transforming what the stone will become. We are the same: carrying our histories while remaining open to the possibilities of transformation in the present.
Change the initial conditions of the present, and new patterns become possible. Effective intervention creates conditions where the system can reorganize, where different responses become available, where adaptations can soften, where the chemical or behavioral fuel that maintained the pattern becomes less necessary.
Each layer makes sense in context—and each offers a pathway for change. The patterns are deep but not permanent. The shaping was powerful but not final. Healing is possible when we understand what we’re actually working with.
Continue to Essential Experiences for Healing to discover what actually heals—the experiences that form the foundation of all healing work.