When I spend time on social media and bump into the healing niche, one hook wins every single time: "You know that [insert a quirk here] you do? It's just another coping mechanism." It gets the clicks, the shares, the comments, and I get why: it's a reveal, a moment of recognition. People feel they got caught red-handed.
And I'm genuinely bothered by how much it affects people.
Suddenly, carelessly, a stranger on the internet has dropped a grenade into our already anxious core, making us question whether our personality is even real. We start pondering if everything we are is merely a response to trauma, to the point that we feel like frauds. Then, a few videos later, we hear that healed people "travel light," so we decide to let go of all of it.
And that's where our brain starts eating its own tail.
Even small changes take months of effort, like skipping the dessert after a stressful day or the glass of wine we used to unwind with. Now we're carrying something much bigger than a habit, because we're trying to become a completely different person overnight.
So let's spend some time on this. Please.
First, let's draw a line. Some coping mechanisms are destructive: substance abuse, self-harm, eating disorders, explosive violence, chronic dissociation. They shrink your life, they hurt you or the people around you, and they need professional support. This essay isn't for those.
It's for the other kind, "the bothersome quirks": humor born from pain, people-pleasing, functional perfectionism, workaholism, intellectualizing everything, being the social chameleon. They kept you going, they're often useful, and they just happen to be running on autopilot.
So here's the big fat misconception the title refers to: the idea that we must eliminate every coping mechanism and scrub ourselves back to a clean factory version.
Most of what kept us alive was asking to be understood, and removal was never the point. With a coping mechanism, what matters is what it does for us today. Where it came from matters much less. The correct question to ask is not "was this born from pain?" (because the answer is almost certainly a boring yes). It's "does this still serve who I am now?" And the answer can be a loud YES, the end.
Healing culture, in my view, has a subtle form of violence sometimes: it encourages us to cut away parts of ourselves that work perfectly well, simply because they started in pain. Healing, to me, is closer to integration. We keep those parts but change the way we hold them.
So when is it time to let one go? When it starts standing between us and something we want, or between us and our peace.
And before we touch anything, the whole job is to look, with curiosity and no verdict:
What was this built to protect me from?
Does that threat still exist?
Is it helping me now, hurting me, or both?
If I keep it, can I run it on purpose instead of on reflex?
Can I stand to look at it today, or is that a tomorrow job?
We aren't deciding what to delete yet. We're getting to know what we're carrying, and why.
I'll gladly be the guinea pig: most of who I am today was built as a coping mechanism, and one of those skills has taken me very, very, very far in life: charming communication and social adaptability.
I can talk to anyone, anytime, any culture, any generation, about anything. At work, I can be the nice millennial boss who puts people's well-being first, and I can also work under the authoritarian boomer boss who makes everybody's butts clench when he walks in, and be liked by both. I can walk from one to the other in the same corridor and change my whole frequency in the time it takes to cross it, and neither of them will ever feel the switch. A reflex this well-developed doesn't feel like effort. It feels like the laws of physics.
This is a big fat, gigantic coping mechanism. I'm actually a very deep, opinionated person whose inner world lives fifteen layers down, in emotional and philosophical territory, all the time. My mind is in complete chaos, yet I'm known for clear, pristine communication. Isn't that amusing?
I built all of it so people wouldn't look underneath, because I was called too much. That was the verdict early on: too much. After I got called too much enough times, I walked into every room already smaller than I was, already funny, already easy, so nobody had to do the work of shrinking me. That's what I sometimes call social charm.
So should I tear my chameleon side out?
Hell, no. I truly like this about me. We're not dismantling a survival mechanism that's still pulling its weight because the healing industry has decided we should be above that sort of thing.
The thing stayed. My relationship to it changed.
I examined it until I knew exactly where it came from, and then, with clear awareness, I chose to keep it. The charm is the same, but now it's a choice instead of a reflex. The real shift happens the day we can say "I choose to be charming" instead of "I have to be charming." That's less dramatic than the internet suggests, and that's where the magic happens.
And please don't try to excavate your entire personality at once. That's the shortest path to the madhouse. As for me, I stopped hiding the "too much" part, and you're reading it right now.
Here's a metaphor I'd like you to keep with you forever: our coping mechanisms are an army we built to protect ourselves as an act of self-compassion.
That doesn't mean the army is necessarily good or that we should keep it exactly as it is. It means the child who created it was simply trying to survive with what they had. Perhaps that child had no safety, no resources, or no adults who could hold them... so they got creative. They forged soldiers out of whatever they could get their hands on: humor, charm, invisibility, perfectionism. Calling that compassionate doesn't mean giving every soldier lifetime tenure, but refusing to add shame on top of survival.
We shouldn't kill our own army: we retrain some soldiers and send them on a different mission. Some are still on active duty, serving us well, while others are veterans. They served their time and got us through, and now they're just... there, doing no harm but no longer helping either. They don't need to be "healed" or discharged with shame. They need to be thanked and given a quiet place to retire.
So don't panic when you feel the weight of everything you're carrying; that's an army in there. Get to know your soldiers: what each one was recruited to protect, and whether the war is even still going on. Turns out, you don't have to declare war on yourself to heal. The internet left that part out.
