Shooting near Chris Brown’s house: reasons for recurring conflicts

Shooting near Chris Brown’s mansion in Los Angeles on Friday. The police surrounded the gates. And in the background, the case of the assault on Rihanna in 2009 still lingers, like a shadow that won’t go away.

The internet, as always, did its thing. It labeled the villain. Made jokes. Moved on to the next topic.

But sitting at the table next to you at dinner, I would ask a different question. Why does this continue? Not specifically with him. With anyone whose life keeps exploding in the same place, with different people, in different homes, year after year.

Because such loud patterns are not random. It’s a nervous system screaming about what it never received.

When culture sees an explosive person with a violent past, it focuses on behavior. Lock him up. Cancel him. And that’s it.

In my office, I look at the architecture driving behavior. That’s a different job.

You were biologically programmed for connection from the moment of birth. Not food first. Not shelter first. A good enough other person on the other side of your birth. We are programmed to need a primary attachment figure from cradle to grave, which means that the threat of that connection is perceived by the body as a real threat to survival.

When someone grows up with deep attachment wounds or experiences serious trauma at an early age, the nervous system never learns that the world is safe. To survive the day, that person builds heavily armored defense mechanisms. Defenders take over the moment the person feels small, rejected, vulnerable, or on the verge of abandonment.

Here’s the phrase I repeat to clients until they’re tired of it: there are no bad people in the world. There are only people playing bad people on television because they are hurting inside.

The worst behavior you can imagine in another person is born from that pain. The behavior is destructive and unacceptable. The biological impulse behind it is a desperate, poorly aimed attempt to connect or avoid excruciating pain. Both of these aspects are true at the same time. This is what gossip cannot hold.

Look at Chris Brown’s timeline through this lens, and the headlines will stop looking like chaos. They will begin to look like a system stuck in a cycle.

I want to be careful because the internet simplifies nuances in seconds.

Saying that a person’s nervous system is hijacked does not mean that their behavior is acceptable. It means that the behavior makes biological sense, and that punishment alone has never recalibrated a hijacked nervous system. Prison didn’t help. Public condemnation didn’t help. The 2009 photo didn’t help.

What I see in my office with highly reactive pairs is what I call a cocktail of two ingredients of shame. The perpetrator is drowning in it. 100 percent shame. I feel bad about myself. There’s almost no room to recognize the pain they are causing another person because they themselves are underwater.

Here’s the trap. Shame does not lead to accountability. Shame breeds more of the behavior that caused the shame. If you want to know your version of this cycle, you can take a free relationship assessment and see what gets activated when you feel small.

Now about boundaries. I believe in tireless empathy and also tell couples directly: there are contraindications for working with couples, and the main one is ongoing domestic violence or any risk of it occurring. You have the right to expect not to be hit, threatened, to have your passport burned, or your tires slashed.

When relationships reach the point of shooting, police reactions, and assaults, the container breaks down. It’s impossible to work with couples in a broken container. Individual work must come first. There are prerequisites for safety before two people can sit across from each other and consider something tender. This is not a restriction of access. It’s a foundation.

The dominant message on the internet about relationship help right now…