One Big Fat Misconception About Coping Mechanisms

When I spend time on social media and bump into the healing niche addressing coping mechanisms, the hook "You know that thing that has kept you alive? It's just yet another coping mechanism" is a winner. Every single time. It gets the clicks, the shares, the comments. I get why: it is a reveal, a moment of recognition.

But I'm genuinely bothered by how much this affects people.

Suddenly, carelessly, a stranger on the internet added a significant issue to our already anxious core self. Because this isn't just information, it's a grenade. Now we're questioning the authenticity of our personality. We're thinking everything we are is merely a response to trauma, and we feel like a fraud. We start doubting ourselves right after hearing that healed people "travel light," which suggests we should let go of our coping strategies.

So we decide to change.

And then we hit a wall.

Because even minor changes in our lives are often challenging; reducing the dessert we indulge in after a stressful day, avoiding the glass of wine we used to relax with, or giving up comforts we depend on can require months of effort.

And then we get overwhelmed because now we carry a problem bigger than it is. We're not just trying to change a habit. We're conceiving of becoming a completely different person overnight.

So let's spend some time on this. Please.

Before we go any further, let's draw a line.

There are two categories of coping mechanisms:

Category 1: Destructive

These harm you, others, or both
They shrink your life, not expand it
They require professional support and, in many cases, elimination
This essay is NOT for these

Category 2: Quirks

These kept you alive
They're functional, even useful
They happen to be running on autopilot
These can be integrated into consciousness
This essay is for these.

So the big fat misconception the title refers to is that we must eliminate all coping mechanisms, and scrub ourselves to a clean factory version.

But most of what kept us alive was never asking to be removed. It was asking to be understood.

And understanding it means one thing: a tool is judged by its utility, not its origin. A knife doesn't become less sharp because it was forged in a fire. The question is never "was this born from pain?" It's "does this still serve my present self?" And the answer could be a loud YES — the end.

Healing culture, in my view, has a subtle form of violence: it encourages us to cut away parts of ourselves that functioned well, simply because they originated from pain. However, healing is not about subtracting; it’s about integrating, keeping those parts while changing how we grip them.

Think of our identity as a Swiss Army knife. We didn't buy it all at once; each tool was added over time. Some were chosen calmly for their usefulness, while others were attached quickly out of survival. None of them stopped being real tools just because of the year we attached them.

So how do we tell when it's time to unscrew one?

The Answer: not when some book says it's unhealthy, but when it starts standing between us and something we want, or our inner peace.

And before we touch anything, the whole job is to look. Put it under the glass like we'd study an insect: no verdict, just observation.

— 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're not deciding what to delete. We're getting to know what we're carrying, and why.

Some things are obvious: we're funny, jokes are a core part of our personality, and they originate from a not-so-funny childhood. We employ humor to lighten heavy situations, and it has served us well. But suppose we land a job that regularly involves facing serious issues, and we realize we'll need to maintain a 'clean' sense of heaviness without humor.

In this situation, we must confront our discomfort and learn a new skill: how to stay in the heaviness without lightening it. It's important to note that I'm not suggesting we should eliminate our funny side, but rather add a complementary aspect to it.

And I'm not saying building that muscle will be easy. But the decision is simple: keep both, and learn to switch between them depending on the occasion.

I will gladly use myself as a guinea pig. My Swiss Army knife was 80% made out of skills I acquired as coping mechanisms. There's one that has taken me very, very, very, very, very far in life: charming communication and social adaptability.

I can talk to anyone, anytime, about anything, which makes people interested. People value me for being adaptable, changing my tone, and acting like a social chameleon.

At the workplace, I can be a nice millennial boss who puts people's well-being first, but also work with a boomer boss who is authoritarian and makes everybody's butts clench when he's around. And I can 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 well-developed reflex no longer feels like effort; it almost doesn't seem like I'm doing it.

This is a big fat, gigantic coping mechanism. I am, in fact, a very deep, opinionated person whose inner world never lives on the surface but 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. If anything, it's a keepsake from the good old days of misery. We don't throw out the thing that kept us alive because the healing industry says so.

Instead, we examine it carefully, like a wound whose exact origin we've found, and then, with clear awareness, we choose to keep it. Nothing sudden changes: just a new way of holding it, with intention.

Before, the knife was in control of us; now, we possess the knife.

The same charm, humor, and chameleon spirit remain, but now as a conscious choice rather than instinct.

That's the entire shift, and it's less dramatic than the internet suggests. The real change happens when we say 'I choose to be charming' instead of 'I have to be charming'; That's the moment when it stops controlling us.

This is a twisted game we play with ourselves, in solitude. It starts with self-knowledge, then the sovereign decision about what stays, what goes, and what we can handle looking at right now. Please don't try to excavate the whole personality all at once; it is the shortest path to the madhouse.

As for me, I stopped covering the deep "too much" part of me, and you are reading right now. Facing public exposure was challenging, but it proved to be truly rewarding.

And that's where I'll leave you: not with a plan to change, but with permission to look, and the comforting knowledge that coping mechanisms are not flaws to be fixed overnight.

In fact, it is an army we built to protect ourselves. It's, before anything, an act of self-compassion. And in case you're tilting your head right now, I'm not claiming that the army is necessarily good or that we should keep it exactly as it is. I am saying the child who created it was simply trying to survive with what they had. That child didn't have safety, resources, or adults who could hold them; what they had was ingenuity, and they used it to forge soldiers out of thin air: humor, charm, invisibility, perfectionism, whatever worked. Calling that compassionate isn't about endorsing the coping mechanism forever; it's about refusing to add shame on top of survival.

We don't kill our own army; at most, we retrain them or deploy them in a different mission. Some soldiers are still on active duty, serving us well. Others are veterans: they served their time, they got us through, but now they're just... there. They don't cause harm, but they also don't help anymore. You don't need to "heal" them or discharge them with shame. You just need to honor their service and let them rest. A veteran doesn't need to be eliminated; 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 weight is an army. First, get to know our soldiers: what each one was recruited to protect and whether that war is still ongoing.

That alone quiets the panic the internet sold us.