The Behavior Didn't Change, I Did: How Trauma Changes the Way We Understand Behavior
Author of the Month
September 28, 2026
Tammy Adler Foeller, Author, Founder & Executive Director, OpenDoor Women's Recovery Alliance
Tom O'Connor, Publisher
60-SECOND TAKEAWAY
Learning about her mother's childhood during the Holocaust helped Tammy see controlling behavior as connected to a past shaped by powerlessness and danger. |
Understanding why someone returns to a harmful relationship can create patience without erasing the need for safety, boundaries, or accountability. |
When Tammy learned about the childhood abuse her daughter had carried in silence, she understood that addiction was not the whole story but a later chapter shaped by earlier pain. |
A trauma-informed response replaces 'What's wrong with you?' with 'What happened to you?' and makes room for curiosity before judgment. |
My mother was controlling. For years, that was simply the word I used for her—the tight schedules, the need to know where everyone was, the way she couldn't relax until she believed she had every situation under her control. It has taken me most of my life to understand that something lies beneath the behavior.
My mom was born to Polish parents during the Holocaust. As a Holocaust survivor, my mom lived through a world where almost nothing was hers to control—not her home, not her safety, not even what would happen next. She was not born controlling. She learned to seek control after living through a time when she had none, and neither did her parents or anyone else in her world.
Once I understood that, I couldn't look at her the same way again. The behavior didn't change. My understanding of it did.
I stopped asking, Why does she have to control everything? and started wondering, What was it like to be a child with no control over whether you were safe?
The second question doesn't erase the first. It simply makes room for both truths at once—that her need for control could be exhausting, and that there was a story behind it I hadn't fully understood.
I think about a woman I know named Annie.
Annie kept going back to a relationship that hurt her. From the outside, it looked simple: Leave. Don't go back. Choose yourself. I've heard people say it as though it really were that easy. Why does she keep doing this to herself?
But relationships shaped by trauma are rarely that simple. Fear, attachment, hope, and moments of affection can become intertwined in ways that make leaving incredibly difficult. What looks like an obvious choice to someone standing on the outside can feel entirely different to the person living inside it.
Understanding that changed the way I sat with Annie. I focused less on why she kept going back and more on what kept pulling her back. She always deserved better. But knowing that and believing it for herself were two very different things.
Healing took time. I learned it can take a woman seven attempts—or more—before she can leave for good. Understanding that helped me offer less judgment and more patience as she found her way.
And then there is my daughter. For years, we watched her struggle with addiction and asked all the questions parents ask. What did we do wrong? Why can't she just stop? Doesn't she see what this is costing her? What we didn't know, what she was too afraid to tell us, was that she had been carrying the weight of abuse she endured as a child. She carried it alone, in silence, for years. And somewhere in that silence, substances became a way of escaping pain she didn't yet know how to put into words.
When we finally understood, so much of what I thought I knew about her "choices" changed. She wasn't simply a person who lacked willpower. She was a person who had been in pain long before we ever saw the symptoms of it. The addiction wasn't the whole story.
It was a chapter that came after a much earlier one, one she had been too frightened to let us read. Three people I love. Three behaviors that once confused or frustrated me. Three stories that, once I understood them better, rearranged the way I saw the person. My mother's need for control. Annie's return to a relationship that hurt her—my daughter's addiction.
Three very different struggles on the surface. Three human beings whose behavior made more sense once I understood the trauma that came before it.
That doesn't mean everything becomes acceptable once we understand where it came from. I still believe in boundaries. I still believe in accountability. I still believe the choices we make today matter.
But I've learned that understanding someone's history can change the way we respond to the choices they're making today. Understanding trauma doesn't require us to become therapists or to have the right words. Sometimes it simply asks us to slow down before we judge, listen before we assume, and remember that the behavior we see may be only the smallest part of someone's story.
It can make us a little slower to judge. A little more curious. A little more compassionate. Behind behavior that confuses, frustrates, or even angers us, there may be a story we know nothing about.
Maybe instead of immediately asking, "What's wrong with you?" we can become curious enough to ask a different question: What happened to you?
We may not always get to hear the answer. But perhaps simply remembering that there is a story can change the way we see the person standing in front of us.
Read Tammy's bio by clicking her icon at the start of this article.
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