The Little Girl Who Cried "It's Not Fair" Doesn't Disappear — She Just Grows Up
Children don't become different nervous systems when they grow up. They become adults with older nervous systems.
That sentence sounds simple until you sit with it. The seven-year-old who slammed a door, argued about bedtime, or shouted "IT'S NOT FAIR!" from the top of the stairs didn't get replaced by a calmer, more reasonable adult somewhere along the way. She just got better at packaging the same response.
What a fight response actually is
In nervous-system language, anger, resistance, and arguing are one branch of a much older survival system: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These are the body's four main ways of answering one question — am I safe? — before the thinking brain has time to weigh in.
Fight is the branch that protects through intensity. It shows up as pushing back, taking control, or meeting a threat head-on instead of retreating from it. In a child, that can look like tantrums, defiance, or a flat refusal to cooperate. In an adult, it rarely announces itself so plainly — but it hasn't gone anywhere.
What it looked like then
Picture the child who couldn't let an injustice go. Not because she was dramatic, but because fairness mattered to her nervous system in a way that felt like safety itself. "It's not fair" wasn't a complaint — it was a signal that something important felt threatened: her sense of control, her sense of being seen, her sense that the rules applied to her too.
What it can look like now
That same signal doesn't disappear in adulthood. It shows up as snapping at a partner after a long day. As the sharp comment that surprises even you. As "why does it always fall on me" running on a loop by 6 p.m. As irritability that seems to come from nowhere, when really it's coming from somewhere very old.
Different situation. Same nervous system, still trying to protect something important.
It isn't a character flaw — it's information
Here's where it's tempting to reach for the wrong question. Not "what's wrong with me" but "what happened, and what is this protecting?" A fight response that shows up in a marriage isn't proof of a bad temper. It's often proof that fairness, autonomy, or being noticed still matter enough to fight for — the same way they did at seven.
This doesn't mean every sharp word gets a pass. Understanding a response and excusing a behavior aren't the same thing. But naming what's underneath it is what actually makes change possible — correction without understanding tends to just push the same response further underground, where it gets harder to notice and harder to work with.
Getting curious instead of correcting
The next time you notice that old, familiar heat rising — at a partner, a coworker, your own child — a few questions can create a little space before the reaction takes over:
What does this remind me of?
What feels unfair or out of my control right now?
What was I protecting the first time I felt this exact thing?
What would it look like to stay in this feeling without needing it to disappear immediately?
None of these questions are about talking yourself out of the anger. They're about getting curious enough to hear what it's actually saying.
Same girl, new eyes
The little girl who cried "it's not fair" grew into a woman who still notices when something is unjust — she just has more tools now than she did at seven. Understanding that connection doesn't erase the reaction. It changes your relationship to it, which is usually where lasting change actually starts.
If this is where you are right now, my door's open.
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Ryan Peterson, CMHC, is an EMDR-trained therapist and the author of the Brain and Heart children's book series, based in Sandy, Utah. If you're raising a Ruby of your own, the Brain and Heart books explore this same idea for kids — before they grow into the pattern you might be noticing in yourself.