The Three-Step Mood Change Trick for Relational Trauma
When you’ve experienced complex or relational trauma, emotional regulation isn’t simply about “calming down,” it’s about survival.
A missed text reply, a subtle tone shift, or a misunderstanding can feel like the ground falling out beneath you. What might register to someone else as mild frustration can flood your nervous system with terror, shame, or rage.
If you grew up without consistent emotional attunement where your feelings were dismissed, minimized, or punished, then emotional safety became conditional. As an adult, that same wiring can make ordinary relational tension feel like abandonment.
This post introduces a three-step emotional regulation practice (adapted from Dr. John Sommers-Flanagan’s “Three-Step Emotional Change Technique”) specifically for people with histories of relational trauma. It’s a way to move from emotional collapse or self-protection back toward grounded, authentic connection.
Step 1: Feel It, Name It, Locate It
When you feel that familiar wave of panic or anger after a misunderstanding, the first task is not to think your way out, but to turn toward your experience with awareness.
In psychodynamic terms, this is where you practice affect tolerance: the ability to stay present with your feeling rather than acting it out or dissociating from it.
You might say to yourself:
“Something in me feels panicked right now,” or “Something in me feels rejected and angry.”
Using “something in me” helps maintain internal differentiation. You’re acknowledging a part of yourself without collapsing into it. This honors what Internal Family Systems would call self-leadership: recognizing that there’s a steady, observing core of you who can hold what’s happening inside.
Next, bring your attention into your body. Where is this feeling living right now?
Maybe it’s a tight chest, a heat in the face, or a sinking in the stomach.
Notice if your breathing becomes shallow or your vision narrows.
From an interpersonal neurobiology and polyvagal perspective, this is your autonomic nervous system mobilizing to protect you. The sympathetic branch (fight/flight) might be firing, or you might be sliding toward dorsal shutdown (freeze, dissociation).
By simply noticing and naming these shifts, you’re engaging your ventral vagal system, which is the part of your nervous system that brings safety, curiosity, and social connection back online.
So before you rush to fix the problem, pause here. Feel. Name. Locate. Breathe.
You’re letting your body know that you are here now, and that this feeling doesn’t have to carry you away.
Step 2: Recall the Felt Sense of Safety
For those with relational trauma, the hardest part of emotional regulation often isn’t the emotion itself, it’s the loss of what is called relational “object permanence.” It’s like amnesia, where all memories of the goodness in the person or the relationship are forgotten entirely.
When someone feels distant or unresponsive, your body may interpret it as total abandonment. This stems from early attachment experiences where caregivers were inconsistent, frightening, or emotionally unavailable. Your system learned: When they’re gone, love is gone. Safety is gone. I’m alone again. I’m nothing.
In psychodynamic language, this reflects a difficulty with object constancy, which is the capacity to hold onto the inner sense that someone who loves you remains loving even when they’re not immediately accessible, and that the relationship perdures even when our nervous system is going haywire. Without that capacity, relationships can swing between extremes of idealization and devaluation, black-and-white thinking, what clinicians call splitting.
So rather than “thinking about something else,” as some cognitive techniques suggest, this step is about reconnecting to the felt memory of safety and reliability.
Ask yourself:
“When have I felt connected and safe with this person?”
Picture that moment vividly.
Maybe it was the sound of their laughter, the warmth of their voice, or the steadiness in their eyes.
Notice what that memory feels like in your body, perhaps it’s a softening in your chest or an exhale that arrives without effort.
From a neurobiological standpoint, this practice activates neural networks of safety and attachment that can inhibit the stress response. You’re literally strengthening the pathways in your brain that support emotional regulation and relational trust.
The more you practice accessing this “internalized safe relationship” when things are calm, the more accessible it becomes when you’re triggered. Over time, this builds the bridge between emotional memory and conscious regulation, a process sometimes described as the integration of implicit and explicit memory.
Step 3: Act From Freedom, Not Fear
Once you’ve felt the feeling (Step 1) and recalled relational safety (Step 2), you can ask:
“If what I remembered in Step 2 is true, how am I free to respond right now?”
When we’re triggered, our behavior is often driven by unconscious fear: withdrawal, attack, control, or appeasement. Acting from freedom means acting from the truth that connection is possible, even amid conflict.
Let’s take a common example.
The Anatomy of a Relational Rupture: A Text Message Scenario
You text a friend in the morning: “Hey, want to hang out later?”
Hours pass. No reply.
Your chest tightens. You start replaying recent conversations, searching for what you did wrong. You feel invisible, unimportant.
By late afternoon, anger mixes with shame. You think: Fine. If they don’t care, I won’t either.
Then, at 8:00 p.m., they text:
“Hey, sorry! Today’s been nonstop. I’m just now catching up. Want to grab coffee tomorrow?”
You feel torn. Part of you wants to ignore them to prove a point—to make them feel the hurt you felt.
Here’s how the three steps play out:
Feel it, name it, locate it.
You notice: “Something in me feels rejected.”
You feel the tension in your chest and a heat in your face. You breathe and stay present with it, recognizing this as an echo of older experiences where you were dismissed or unseen.Recall safety.
You remember the last time you hung out with this friend, how seen and relaxed you felt. You recall their reliability over time. You let that memory settle into your body like a warm current.
You remind yourself: This person has been consistent. My feelings are real, but they might not reflect reality right now.Act from freedom.
You text back: “No worries at all! Sounds like a crazy day. Tomorrow works great.”
As you send it, you feel your body relax. The tension begins to dissolve.
That’s what regulation feels like: not pretending you weren’t hurt, but choosing to act from trust instead of fear.
Why This Works
From a polyvagal and psychodynamic perspective, these three steps re-establish the link between emotion, memory, and action, the triad often fractured by trauma.
Step 1 engages the observing ego and brings implicit emotion into conscious awareness.
Step 2 activates neural patterns of safety and attachment, quieting the amygdala and supporting vagal tone.
Step 3 integrates top-down and bottom-up processing, allowing behavior to align with reality rather than trauma narrative.
Over time, this rewires the brain toward resilience. You learn not only that relationships can survive tension, but that you can survive it, too.
The Heart of the Practice
Healing relational trauma isn’t about never getting triggered. It’s about learning to stay connected to yourself and others when you are.
Each time you walk through these steps, you’re repairing an ancient rupture between feeling, remembering, and choosing. You’re teaching your nervous system a new truth: that love can persist through distance, that safety can exist alongside discomfort, and that you are no longer powerless to your past.
If this resonates with you, or you want to experience deeper stability and freedom in your relationships, I’d love to help.
You can contact me here to begin the process of rebuilding safety and connection from the inside out.
