Prevailing accounts of maladaptive behavior are commonly organized around reward maximization, hedonic regulation, or deficits in executive control. Although these frameworks explain important forms of behavioral reinforcement, they do not fully capture the recurrence of structurally similar maladaptive patterns across individual, interpersonal, institutional, and ecological domains. This paper advances a conceptual framework centered on pressure reduction rather than reward pursuit. Because the model is scale-independent, similar dynamics can be identified in addiction, compulsive consumption, affect regulation, interpersonal conflict, institutional control, and ecological exploitation. Across these contexts, local pressure reduction coexists with the distributed reproduction of suffering over time. The paper concludes by outlining the framework's theoretical implications, limits, and potential pathways for empirical operationalization.