The internal working model: the child’s solutions still running

John Bowlby’s internal working model predicts the foundational mechanism. The infant and child develop psychological solutions to the specific environment they find themselves in: ways of relating that maximise connection and safety given the specific caregiving they receive; emotional regulation strategies calibrated to the specific emotional climate of the family; self-concept protections that defend against the specific threats to worth that the developmental environment produces. These solutions are not conscious decisions — they are adaptations, as automatic and well-intentioned as the immune system’s responses to pathogens.

The problem is not that these solutions existed but that they continue to operate in the adult environment as though the original conditions still apply. The internal working model — the child’s encoded expectations of how relationships work, how the self is valued, and what the world requires — runs as the background operating system of adult relational and professional behaviour. It is not the only thing running; the adult also has deliberate, consciously directed behaviour. But it is running continuously, below deliberate awareness, and it shapes a wider range of commercial decisions than most entrepreneurs recognise.

The driven founder who cannot stop working is frequently running the solution the child developed to earn conditional approval: the work is still, at a level below conscious access, the price of being enough. The founder who avoids the difficult conversation with an underperforming team member is frequently running the child’s solution to an environment where conflict produced withdrawal of love. The founder who self-sabotages at the point of greatest commercial success is frequently running the child’s solution to the danger of becoming visible — visible in an environment where visibility produced something that felt more threatening than invisibility.

Identifying which patterns are active: the narrative test

Mary Main and Ruth Goldwyn’s Adult Attachment Interview research established the most precise available diagnostic for which childhood patterns are still active as automatic responses: the coherence, consistency, and completeness of the narrative a person can construct about their early relational history predicts the degree to which the early patterns have been processed into understood history versus maintained as active operating assumptions.

The practical version of this diagnostic does not require formal assessment. The questions that reveal active patterns are: Can you describe your early relationships with your parents in specific, emotionally detailed terms without either dismissing their significance or becoming overwhelmed by them? When you recall specific episodes of difficulty — being let down, shamed, frightened, or ignored — can you maintain a coherent perspective on what was happening and why? Or do the memories either feel distant and not particularly significant, or do they produce the same emotional response now that they produced then?

The dismissing narrative — “it was fine, I don’t really remember much, it didn’t affect me” — indicates the pattern is active in the avoidant direction: the emotional material has not been processed but has been defensively minimised. The preoccupied narrative — the recall that pulls the speaker back into the emotional state of the original experience, that is long, entangled, and struggles to reach perspective — indicates the pattern is active in the anxious direction: the emotional material has not been processed but continues to generate the response it generated when it was first experienced. The coherent, freely recalling narrative — specific, emotionally present but not overwhelmed, able to understand the parent’s behaviour in context — indicates processing has occurred. The pattern is understood rather than simply running.

The immunity to change: why identified patterns persist

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s immunity to change research answers the most practically important question about working with childhood patterns: why do they persist after identification? The entrepreneur who has understood that their overworking is driven by a need for conditional approval — who can name the pattern, trace it to its source, and observe it arising in real time — and who nevertheless continues to overwork is not failing to apply their insight. They are demonstrating what Kegan and Lahey’s research established as the primary mechanism of pattern persistence: the hidden competing commitment.

The hidden competing commitment is the psychological function that the pattern currently serves. The overworking that is driven by conditional approval also provides protection: protection against the question of whether the self is enough when not working, protection against the relational demands that non-working time creates, protection against the anxiety of stillness that the developmental environment installed as threatening. The insight that the overworking pattern is driven by approval-seeking does not automatically remove the protection the pattern provides. Until the hidden competing commitment is identified — until the entrepreneur can say clearly what the pattern is protecting them from — the pattern will maintain itself even in the presence of clear understanding of its origin.

The diagnostic that Kegan and Lahey’s research supports is specific: for every pattern you have identified and not changed, ask what you would have to face if the pattern were not there. What becomes possible that currently feels dangerous? What is the pattern currently preventing you from having to confront? The answer to that question is the hidden competing commitment — and it is the more important target for change work than the pattern itself.

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The ACT defusion approach: observing the pattern rather than being it

Steven Hayes and colleagues’ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy research predicts the most directly available moment-to-moment approach to working with active childhood patterns. The core mechanism is cognitive defusion: the development of the capacity to observe a thought or pattern arising, as a mental event, rather than being automatically governed by it as though it were reality.

Applied to childhood patterns in entrepreneurial contexts, the defusion practice is specific: when the pattern activates — when the shame-driven proving motivation surges in response to a competitor’s success, when the approval-seeking anxiety arrives before a difficult conversation, when the imposter experience activates at the point of a commercial breakthrough — the ACT approach is to notice the pattern arising as a pattern rather than immediately responding to it as a commercial reality. “There is the child who needed to prove they were enough, showing up again.” Not suppressed, not acted on immediately, but observed — named, recognised as the historical response it is, and then held alongside whatever the actual commercial situation requires.

Defusion does not eliminate the pattern. It creates space between the pattern’s activation and the behavioural response — space in which a chosen response becomes possible rather than the automatic response inevitable. For most entrepreneurial contexts, the space is what is commercially significant: the decision made from the chosen response rather than the automatic one is, on average, better calibrated to the current commercial reality.

The Pennebaker approach: the narrative processing that converts active patterns to understood history

James Pennebaker’s expressive writing research established the most accessible evidence-based approach to the processing that converts active automatic patterns into consciously understood developmental history. The mechanism is narrative integration: structured written engagement with the emotional significance, causes, and meaning of formative experiences produces the coherent narrative that the Main and Goldwyn research identifies as the indicator of processing — and with it, a reduction in the automatic emotional reactivity the unprocessed pattern produces.

The structure that Pennebaker’s research supports is the what-question sequence: what was that experience like? What did it mean to me at the time? What did I do to manage it? What has that solution produced in how I behave as an adult? The written form matters: writing requires the construction of a sequential, explicit account that speaking about the same material does not, and it is this sequential explicit construction — the narrative architecture — that produces the integration the research documents.

The commercially relevant implication is specific: this is not journal writing as catharsis. It is a deliberate processing approach with a defined structure and measurable outcomes. Thirty minutes, three times in a week, on a specific formative experience is the protocol that Pennebaker’s research most consistently supports. The outcomes are measurable in reduced physiological stress response, improved immune function, and — most directly relevant — reduced automatic reactivity when the associated pattern is triggered.

The neuroplasticity evidence: why genuine change is actually possible

Allan Schore’s research on right hemisphere neuroplasticity provides the biological evidence that the most sceptical entrepreneurial reader needs: the formative psychological patterns are genuinely modifiable through corrective experience. They are not fixed traits; they are embedded neural patterns that were installed by experience and are therefore susceptible to revision through experience. The revision is not rapid, and it is not produced by insight alone — the neural change requires accumulated corrective relational experience, not merely the intellectual understanding that the pattern exists.

What this means practically is that the identification and defusion approaches described above are necessary but not sufficient for the deepest pattern change. The pattern that was installed through relational experience requires relational correction: the accumulated experience of being in relationships — therapeutic, genuinely close friendship, or developmental partnerships — where the feared outcomes of the childhood pattern do not occur. The entrepreneur who has identified their approval-seeking pattern and practises defusion when it activates will move the pattern more substantially if they also have relationships in which they are accepted without performing — where the relational data that contradicts the internal working model’s predictions is repeatedly provided.

The most commercially applicable summary of the neuroplasticity evidence is this: intellectual understanding of a childhood pattern moves it a little. Defusion practice moves it somewhat more. New relational experience that contradicts the pattern’s predictions moves it most. The most commercially consequential change work combines all three, and the most neglected of the three in entrepreneurial contexts is the relational experience — the one that actually does most of the neural work.

If the patterns described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation. Basic Books. Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization. Harvard Business Review Press. Schore, A.N. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self. Norton. Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36-43. Main, M. & Goldwyn, R. (1984). Predicting Rejection of Her Infant from Mother’s Representation of Her Own Experience: Implications for the Abused-Abusing Intergenerational Cycle. Child Abuse and Neglect, 8(2), 203-217. Pennebaker, J.W. (1997). Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162-166. Hayes, S.C. et al. (1996). Experiential Avoidance and Behavioral Disorders: A Functional Dimensional Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168. Young, J.E. & Klosko, J.S. (1993). Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behaviour and Feel Great Again. Plume. Levine, A. & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find — and Keep — Love. Tarcher/Penguin.