Change Triangle
Transform your Thoughts Strategies
Adapted from It's Not Always Depression Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self, Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW
The Change Triangle, developed by Dr. Hilary Jacobs Hendel, is a tool to help you navigate emotions in real-time by identifying where you are on the triangle: defense, inhibitory emotions, or core emotions. When something causes distress, this framework can guide you through your emotions to a place of greater peace and understanding.
Here’s how it works:
Locate where you are on the Change Triangle. Are you feeling defensive, blocked by emotions like shame or guilt, or are you fully in a core emotion like anger?
Move through the triangle intentionally, allowing core emotions like anger to guide you towards a solution or greater perspective.
The Change Triangle offers an immediate way to reconnect with yourself when emotions feel overwhelming by:
Providing distance from the initial intensity of the emotion,
Giving a sense of direction to help manage it constructively.
Steps for Using the Change Triangle
Identify where you are. Do you feel defensive, ashamed, anxious, or deeply in an emotion like anger?
Pause and breathe. Taking a few seconds to calm yourself creates space for reflection.
Name any core emotions that are arising. It could be anger, sadness, or another intense feeling.
Listen to what the emotion is communicating. Rather than judge the feeling, try to understand what it’s telling you.
Decide how to proceed. By acknowledging the emotion, you’re often better able to choose a constructive response.
Recognizing the Corners of the Change Triangle
With practice, you can quickly locate your emotional state on one of three corners of the Triangle:
Top Left – Defense. Avoiding or numbing emotions, often through habits like blaming or distracting, yelling, storming out of the rooom
Top Right – Inhibitory Emotions. Shame, guilt, or anxiety blocking access to core feelings.
Bottom Corner – Core Emotions. Emotions like anger, sadness, joy, or excitement.
And just below the Triangle lies a state of calm and openness—the goal of this exercise. By staying with a core emotion and letting it move through your body, you can reach a place of peace. According to Hendel, emotions like anger are wavelike—they rise, peak, and eventually dissipate when allowed to flow.
Example: Working Through Anger Using the Change Triangle
Recently, I used the Change Triangle to navigate a surge of anger. Here’s how it went:
I was feeling irritated over a conversation where I felt dismissed. This anger showed up physically as tension in my shoulders and a clenching in my jaw. Instinctively, I noticed defensive thoughts popping up, like blaming the other person entirely. I recognized I was in the Defense corner of the Change Triangle—reactive, stuck in blaming.
Instead of staying in this loop, I paused and asked, “What core emotions are beneath this defense?”
I focused on my body and could feel the anger simmering just beneath the surface. Naming it as anger helped me take ownership of the feeling. Then, I asked myself, “What’s this anger trying to tell me?” The answer was clear: I felt overlooked, and it was important to me that my perspective was acknowledged.
Acknowledging my anger and its message calmed me down significantly. Now I could choose how to act—not out of anger but from a more grounded place. Instead of lashing out, I prepared to revisit the conversation calmly, ready to express what I needed constructively.
This process made me feel clearer, less reactive, and ultimately, much better. The Change Triangle helped me reconnect with myself and make a choice in line with my values.