When I was seven, I learned that silence was a shield.
My parents weren’t cruel. Just distracted, often tired, and sometimes impatient in ways I didn’t yet know how to name. If I cried too long, I was told I was being dramatic. If I asked for help too often, I was told to figure it out. So I did. I learned to solve things quietly, neatly. I praised myself for being “low maintenance,” for not needing much. I wore independence like armor and called it maturity.
It would take me nearly two decades to realize that what I’d called “self-sufficiency” was, in fact, hypervigilance dressed as adulthood. And that this pattern — this instinct to overfunction, to disappear my needs before anyone else could — wasn’t my personality.
It was a coping mechanism. One that had calcified into habit.
We tend to think of childhood coping strategies as reactive tools for the moment: a kid hides under a table during a fight, starts people-pleasing to avoid punishment, learns to become funny when things get tense. But coping doesn’t always stay in childhood.
If it works — if it keeps us safe, earns us affection, helps us predict chaos — it often becomes a script we keep performing long after the threat is gone.
“Children don’t get to choose how they cope,” says Dr. Nicole LePera, author of How to Do the Work. “They adapt based on what they believe is required for survival. But those adaptations can become maladaptive when carried into adulthood.”
What helped us get through can later get in the way.
None of it is conscious. That’s what makes it powerful. And hard to undo.
The link between early life experiences and adult behavior isn’t new. Developmental psychologists have studied attachment theory — the idea that our bonds with caregivers shape our internal model of relationships — since the 1950s. But newer research digs deeper into behavioral adaptation: how we learn to read environments and adjust our emotional responses to survive them.
A 2019 study published in Development and Psychopathology found that children raised in unpredictable or emotionally inconsistent environments tend to develop anticipatory regulation — overmonitoring themselves and others to prevent perceived threats. These behaviors often become default settings, particularly under stress.
“The brain’s wiring is shaped by what it repeatedly experiences,” says Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert on trauma and co-author of What Happened to You? with Oprah Winfrey. “What begins as survival can later look like personality.”
And because these patterns are encoded early, they’re hard to notice — especially if they’ve been rewarded. Society loves the overachiever. The caretaker. The peacemaker. The person who always seems “fine.”
But beneath those traits can be a nervous system that never stopped bracing.
I’ve seen it in friends, in therapy clients, and in myself:
These aren’t just quirks. They’re strategies. Micro-adjustments we learned to make in order to stay connected, relevant, loved.
The irony is: the very thing that protected us can later isolate us.
There’s a reason you can’t outgrow these patterns by logic alone. They weren’t formed by logic. They were formed by need — real or perceived — and reinforced by repetition. That’s why self-awareness, while powerful, isn’t enough.
“The body remembers what the mind forgets,” says trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. And the body doesn’t let go just because you read about inner child work on Instagram.
To begin shifting the pattern, we need something safer than self-critique.
We need compassion.
For me, the work hasn’t been about demolishing my independence. It’s been about expanding it — so that I’m free to ask for help, to rest, to say “I don’t know” without fearing collapse.
I still sometimes catch myself filtering every sentence in a group text to make sure I sound “easygoing.” But now I pause. I ask: What am I trying to protect here? Sometimes the answer is fear. Sometimes it’s habit. But sometimes it’s just… me trying to do better.
We like to think we become adults by outgrowing childhood. But in reality, we become adults by recognizing which parts of us never stopped being children — and deciding what we want to do with that.
Some coping strategies deserve to be honored. They kept us afloat. They were smart, even when we were small. But others deserve to be questioned — not with shame, but with curiosity.
Who might you be if you didn’t need to anticipate everyone’s feelings?
Who might you become if you trusted that love didn’t require performance?
Maybe healing isn’t about becoming a brand-new person.
Maybe it’s about remembering you were never broken to begin with.
