Threat, drive
and soothing.

The three systems

CFT often draws these as three circles and asks how big each is in a person’s life at the moment.

These are a simplified teaching model, not three separate switches in the brain.

When the threat is real

A threat system that stays on may be responding to a threat that stays on. For Muireann, the reassessment is a genuine danger to her income. The useful questions are:

• What is the threat, actually?
• What can be done about it: advice, an advocate, preparation?
• What is the cost of the threat system being on all the time, and what helps it rest even while the threat continues?

The aim isn’t to persuade the person the threat is imagined. It is to support them while it is real, and to find moments of soothing that don’t depend on it ending.

Real threat opens the formulation; it doesn’t end it

Several things can be true at once:

• there is a genuine external threat;
• earlier experiences make it especially frightening;
• the person is anticipating outcomes that are still uncertain;
• some protective responses help;
• others add exhaustion without adding protection.

For Muireann, gathering evidence and booking an advocate for the reassessment is protective. Checking the post six times a day may not be: it keeps the threat in view without making her any safer. Therapy can explore that difference without ever disputing that the reassessment is real. Muireann put it as: “Preparing is mine. The checking is the fear doing my job badly.”

Drive and energy

In energy-limiting conditions, reduced activity isn’t low drive. Someone may want a great deal and be able to do little. A disability-informed reading separates wanting from capacity, and recognises that the drive system can also be over-active in a harmful way: pushing through, then crashing. See Fatigue or Avoidance?

Drive isn’t only striving. It also includes pleasure, creativity, ambition and meaningful participation. A person may work hard because they love the work, or because stopping feels like proof that others were right to underestimate them. Often both are true. A useful question is: what is this effort helping you move towards, and what is it helping you avoid feeling? See the worked case What Happens in the Therapy Room?

And a person doesn’t have to become calm to show progress. Someone facing an ongoing threat may make real progress while still feeling afraid.

Metaphor or mechanism?

CFT links its three systems to evolutionary theory and to research on the brain and body. The three circles simplify many interacting processes. They shouldn’t be presented as three separate brain modules, or as simple switches driven by one hormone or neurotransmitter each. Used as a teaching model, they can help people make sense of experience; readers are entitled to ask what evidence supports any more specific biological claim.

Polyvagal theory is sometimes mentioned alongside CFT because both talk about safeness and physiology. They are different models, making different claims, and the scientific debate about one doesn’t settle anything about the other. See Polyvagal Theory.

How you’d know it helped

• The person understands their responses without blaming themselves.
• External threats are named and, where possible, addressed.
• They find some soothing that doesn’t wait for the threat to end.

Words you can use

Questions worth carrying, as a therapist

• Have I called a real threat an overactive system?
• Am I measuring drive by activity?
• Am I presenting the model as metaphor or as fact?

Evidence & sources

Sources checked in October 2026, using targeted searches rather than a systematic review. “We have not located” means our searches did not find it.