Shooting outside Chris BrownLos Angeles Palace on Friday. The police storm the gates. And in the background, Rihanna The assault case from 2009 still haunts him like a shadow that won’t give up.
The Internet did what the Internet always does. Diagnosis of the monster. Choose the villain. Crack jokes. I continue.
But sitting at the table next to you at dinner I’ll be the annoying one with a different question. Why does this keep happening? Not to him specifically. To everyone whose life keeps exploding in the same place, with different people, in different homes, year after year.
Because loud patterns are not random. They are a nervous system screaming for something it never got.
Architecture under the title
When a culture sees a volatile man with a violent history, it focuses on the behavior. aphasia. Cancel him. finished.
In my office, I look at the architecture that drives behavior. Different function.
You are biologically wired from the moment you are born. Not food first. No shelter first. Someone good enough on the other side of your birth. We are committed to the need for a basic attachment figure from cradle to grave, which means a threat to that bond registered in the body as a real threat to survival.
When someone grows up with deep wounds or absorbs serious trauma early on, the nervous system never learns that the world is safe. To get through the day, this person builds heavily armored protective parts. Protectors take over the moment a person feels small, rejected, exposed, or about to be abandoned.
This is the line I repeat to clients until they get tired of it: There are no angry people in the world. Only people who play angry people on TV because they’re hurting inside.
The worst behavior you can imagine in another human being is the product of this hurt. The behavior is destructive and unacceptable. The underlying biological drive is a desperate and ill-aimed attempt to secure connection or escape from excruciating pain. Both things are true at the same time. This is the part that the gossip machine can’t handle.
Read Chris Brown’s timeline through that lens and the headlines will stop looking like a mess. They start to look like a system stuck in a loop.
Why mercy is not the same as passage
I want to be careful here because the Internet flattens nuances in about four seconds.
Saying that someone’s nervous system has been hijacked does not mean that their behavior is fine. It means that this behavior makes biological sense, and that punishment alone has never succeeded in rewiring a hijacked nervous system. Prison did not. Public shaming did not do that. The 2009 picture was not like that.
What I see in my room with high-engagement couples is what I call the two-component shame mixture. The abusive partner drowns in it. 100 percent shame. I feel bad about myself. There is hardly any room left to register the pain they inflict on the other person, because they are underwater themselves.
This is the trap. Shame does not produce accountability. Shame produces more of the behavior that caused the shame. If you want to know your own version of this episode, you can get a free assessment of your relationship and find out what turns on when you feel small.
Now the border. I believe in uncompromising compassion and I tell couples clearly: There are contraindications to couples working, the most important of which is ongoing domestic violence or any risk of it. You have the right to expect that you will not be beaten or threatened, that your passport will not be burned, or that your car tires will not be slashed.
When the relationship reaches shootings, police responses, and assault, the container is shattered. You can’t do pairs work in a crushed container. You do the individual work first. There are basic safety requirements before two people can sit across from each other and look at anything delicate. This is not gatekeeping. This is the word.
No one will give you the option online
The prevailing message on the internet for relationship help now is to ask if your partner is a narcissist, if they are borderline, how to fix yourself, and how to fix them. It’s a bag of M&M’s for dinner. Great taste. Leaves you feeling like garbage.
Diagnosing celebrities from your couch seems obvious. It’s actually the opposite of clarity.
My view is harder and calmer. There are no villains at all. Behind every terrible behavior is a person in pain. This does not excuse the behavior. He explains where he came from, which is the only place where change ever began.
I work from this position. There was a hurt and vulnerable person in front of me who didn’t have the tools to deal with feeling helpless, not loved, or not enough. Violence is what they came up with because it was the only thing in the cabinet. So when I talk about bad behavior, I’m talking to the terrified child inside the man, not to the title. The baby is the only one who can actually hear me.
You can say “Your behavior is unacceptable and dangerous” and “I see the little child inside you who is convinced that he will never have enough” at the same time. Culture insists on choosing one. The nervous system needs both.
What actually sounds better
If there’s a couple in my office experiencing this kind of volatility, the first step is not communication skills. It’s perimeter insurance. Stop the bleeding. No need to litigate the last fight, no rehash of what happened Friday night.
The abusive partner is doing an individual job. Shock action. Function of the nervous system. Often the medicine, often the shepherd, always the one who can sit with their shame without feeding it. Only after a long period of physical safety would you consider starting couples therapy together.
The partner on the receiving end of volatility needs their own support, separately, with someone who is not invested in saving the relationship. Their nervous system has been registering every closed door and every loud sound for years. This is not relaxing on the weekends.
This pattern, where higher behavior masks the deepest unmet needs, appears in smaller forms as well. It’s the same architecture that underpins the science behind micro-cheating. The behavior looks like the problem. The unmet need for attachment is the actual problem.
Final thought
The title says shooting at a palace. The story below is that of a man whose nervous system has been stuck in survival mode for as long as anyone is watching, and a culture that would rather feed on the spectacle than wonder why it keeps repeating itself.
You don’t have to like it to see it. You just have to be willing to look longer than the headline allows.
This is where any of this starts to change. For him. to the people around him. for you.
Couples Therapist Figs O’Sullivan is a couples therapist and relationship expert on the Stars and Silicon Valley, founder of Empathi, and built Figlet, our AI relationship coach, an AI relationship coach trained in his clinical work.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please call National Domestic Violence Hotline At 1-800-799-7233 for confidential support.
