Three Emotional Systems That Drive Me – and You

Fuelled by threat, running on drive – and the soothing I found when I identified the pattern

The first Christmas I spent back in England after my marriage ended, I sat in front of the mirror and didn’t recognise my own face. Not in a dramatic way – no breakdown, no tears. Just a strange blankness. The make-up I’d applied automatically for nearly two decades suddenly made no sense. I didn’t know where to start.

I wasn’t seeking comfort. I was seeking function. What moved me to finally ask for help wasn’t the mirror moment, or the marriage ending, or even the continent I’d crossed with a small child and a determination to make everything fine. It was my daughter picking up my pint of vodka orange one day – assuming it was juice – and taking a sip.

That was the moment. Not because I was falling apart visibly. Because I was falling apart invisibly, and I’d got so good at it I hadn’t noticed how threadbare I had become.

What followed was a long and twisty 18 years: Functional Neurological Disorder, a false bipolar diagnosis, years of being offered frameworks that didn’t fit. What I didn’t have – what I couldn’t have imagined needing – was any understanding of the emotional systems running me. They felt unknowable and deeply threatening. My sole interest in my emotional states was keeping them in check.

The old me would have felt humiliated and shamed at the very idea of treating myself with compassion. I equated self-love with narcissism and self-delusion – at least for myself – and was driven by proving to myself and others that I was the antithesis of that.

The Three Systems

Paul Gilbert’s Compassion Focused Therapy identifies three emotional regulation systems. I’m sharing them here because understanding them helped change how I relate to myself. They form one of the foundations of my Compassion Journalling course.

All three systems are necessary. None is the enemy. But they can fall badly out of balance – and when they do, we tend not to notice, because the imbalance becomes the air that we breathe.

🔴 Threat System – Protection & Safety
Emotions: anxiety, anger, fear, disgust
Body: tense, racing heart, shallow breathing, tight chest
Thoughts: scanning for danger, worst-case scenarios
Purpose: fight, flight, freeze, fawn

🔵 Drive System – Achievement & Progress
Emotions: excitement, determination, striving
Body: energised, focused, activated, forward-leaning
Thoughts: planning, comparing, pursuing goals
Purpose: achieving, acquiring, never enough

🟢 Soothing System – Rest & Connection
Emotions: contentment, calm, safety, care
Body: relaxed, warm, settled, gentle breathing
Thoughts: present-moment awareness, kindness
Purpose: self-nurture, psychological resilience

Looking back, I can see exactly how my systems were running. Threat was the engine underneath everything – not the dramatic, visible kind, but the low-level hum of don’t expose yourself, don’t drop the ball, don’t do anything that might impair your ability to mother, to be enough, to keep the people you love close. It was a full-time surveillance operation, and I was both perpetually watched and on guard.

Drive sat on top of it, performing. Perfect mother. Perfect daughter. Perfect employee. Enough – but not too much. Capable, unflappable, the person others could lean on. Drive felt like the solution to Threat. If I just kept achieving, kept overdelivering, kept being useful, I’d be okay.

Soothing barely existed. Or rather: it felt dangerous. What I thought was self-soothing was more stonewalling – shutting myself up with food and alcohol, driving myself to exhaustion where I could conk out for a few hours rather than glide into restful sleep.

Being truly known wasn’t even a desire. Not even by myself. Hidden trauma and neurodivergence lurked, misunderstood as monsters to be guarded against. What was soothing system suppression, I called coping, adulting, being good.

With no robust soothing system, the threat system was in overdrive, the drive pushed to physical and psychological breaking point. Without any regulation, there was no real rest, no coming home to yourself. Just an ever-circling loop of diminishing size.

A Practice: Visual Mapping

This exercise comes from my Compassion Journalling course. It takes ten minutes and asks nothing other than a little honest noticing.

Draw three circles or shapes – one for each system. Use size, colour, or imagery to show which feels most active in you right now. Some people draw Threat as jagged red lines, Drive as forward-pointing arrows, Soothing as soft green curves. There’s no right way. Let your hand decide.

Then sit with what you’ve drawn.

Which system is doing most of the work right now? Which is barely present? What would it take – even slightly – to bring a little more soothing to the fore?

If you feel activated while doing this: try grounding. Notice five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste.

Please note: this isn’t about eliminating Threat or Drive. Both have their place. The practice is learning to restore Soothing when we need it – not judging ourselves for having the other two.

What Changed

ADHD diagnosis gave me a framework that finally started to fit. And somewhere in the process of understanding my neurology, I found I could extend that same curiosity – gently, slowly – to my emotional systems too.

Self-compassion wasn’t the first thing I reached for. It was the last thing left after other things hadn’t worked. And even then, I came to it sideways – through writing, through the two-pen dialogue I developed to help me hear my own voice without flinching.

The misconception I held longest was ‘I don’t deserve it.’ ‘I don’t need it’ came a close second. I had Drive. I had performance. I had function. What would softness add, except risk?

What it added, it turns out, was the ability to thrive, not just survive.

I’ll write more about what it actually took to move from Threat to Soothe – the full journey, the mess of it, what broke and what didn’t – a longer story for another time.

For now: which system is most alive in you today?

My Compassion Journalling course – a four-week facilitated programme and six-week self-study version – is grounded in CFT, Kristin Neff’s self-compassion research, and therapeutic writing practice. If this resonates, you can find out more at katepoll.co.uk. For more about CFT, here’s a video and book worth exploring:

Gilbert, P. (2013) The Compassionate Mind: A New Approach to Life Challenges. 3^rd edn. London: Robinson.

The Three Circles of CFT (YouTube)