Why Your Reactions Aren’t a Personal Failure

Dear Johnny

I feel embarrassed by how quickly I react sometimes. I snap or shut down, or I agree to things I don’t really want just to keep the peace. Afterward, I replay everything in my head and feel ashamed that I couldn’t handle it better. I keep telling myself I should know better by now, but in the moment it feels automatic, like my body takes over.

Dear One Who Is Being Hard on Herself,

It makes sense that you feel unsettled by this. When reactions happen quickly and feel out of your control, it’s easy to turn on yourself afterward and decide something must be wrong with you. Anyone who has experienced repeated moments of stress or emotional unpredictability would feel discouraged by that pattern.

What you’re describing isn’t a lack of self-awareness or maturity. It’s your nervous system responding before your thinking mind has time to catch up. Fight, flight, freeze, and people-pleasing responses don’t come from weakness. They come from protection. These patterns develop when the body learns that certain situations require quick action to stay safe, connected, or out of trouble.

The problem usually isn’t the reaction itself. It’s what happens after, when the inner critic steps in and treats that reaction as a personal failure. That self-judgment keeps the nervous system on high alert, making it more likely the same response will happen again.

The work here is not forcing yourself to react differently or promising that you’ll do better next time. The work is learning to recognize what just happened without shaming yourself for it. When you name a reaction as protection instead of pathology, you create a little more space between the trigger and the story you tell yourself afterward.

Over time, that space matters. It’s what allows choice to return. Not all at once, and not perfectly, but gradually and reliably.

A gentle question to sit with this week might be: when you notice yourself reacting, what would it sound like to speak to yourself the way you would to someone you care about?

You’re not broken for reacting. You’re learning how to understand yourself instead of judging yourself.

With care,

Johnny Lascha

Dear Johnny is a weekly advice column for deeply caring women who feel emotionally exhausted, unheard, dismissed, or stuck in painful relationship patterns. Johnny Lascha is a certified relationship coach, trauma-informed mentor, and trained facilitator of The Gottman Institute’s 7 Principles for Making Marriage Work. He moderates a 40,000-member Marriage Support Group and has privately helped hundreds of women reclaim their voice, regulate their nervous system, and build healthier relational boundaries, without losing their heart. Learn more at RelationshipVoice.com or subscribe to receive Dear Johnny directly in your inbox.