Why do people behave in ways that seem inexplicable? The person who can’t stop using despite losing everything that matters to them. The colleague who flies into rage at minor provocations. The client who disappears at the moment connection becomes possible. The employee who can’t initiate action even when the path forward is clear.
These apparent failures of character or willpower are the visible surface of deeper patterns—patterns that make sense when traced back through the layers of experience that created them.
The four layers of experience offer a way of seeing—not a diagnostic system or treatment protocol, but a lens. When the connections between layers become clear, previously inexplicable behavior reveals its logic. The framework illuminates structure within human complexity without pretending to simplify it.
The Framework
The four layers form an ecological system. Each layer influences and constrains the others. Addiction or mental health challenges are surface manifestations of a pattern that extends back through adaptations that developed in response to trauma, which emerged from nervous system patterns that formed in the context of developmental experiences. Pull on any thread, and the whole fabric moves.
Resonance
Resonance is the foundation. It includes what shaped a person before they had any say in the matter: their genetic inheritance, the family system they were born into, the cultural and historical context of their upbringing, the specific experiences of their childhood. Developmental adversity during critical periods creates vulnerabilities that persist across the lifespan—not as deterministic causes, but as patterns of nervous system organization that shape how the person will respond to later challenges.
Response
Response refers to the body’s immediate reactions to threat or overwhelming experience. These are survival mechanisms refined by evolution: flight, freeze, orient, fight. When someone encounters something that exceeds their capacity to cope, their nervous system activates one of these protective responses automatically, without conscious deliberation. The response that dominates depends partly on what’s available (you can’t flee if you’re cornered) and partly on what the person learned works based on earlier experiences.
Adaptation
Adaptation describes what happens when acute responses become chronic. The nervous system, designed for short-term survival, gets stuck. What was meant to be a momentary protective state becomes an ongoing way of being. We recognize these extended states by clinical names: dissociation, depression, anxiety, anger. But these are extensions of trauma responses that never fully resolved, rather than disorders that arrive from nowhere.
Addiction
Addiction emerges when substances or behaviors are discovered that allow the adaptive pattern to continue. Addictions are functional parts of a self-maintaining system, not separate from mental health challenges or trauma responses. The addiction facilitates the continuation of the adaptation, which maintains the locked trauma response, which is organized around vulnerabilities established during early development.
Each layer makes sense in context—and each offers a point of entry for change.
Continue to Resonance and Response to explore how early experiences shape the nervous system and how the body’s survival wisdom emerges.