16/04/2026
Exactly 💜
You have a way of being. You know it well, the way you go quiet when you feel threatened, or the way you talk too much when you're nervous. The way you need to be liked, or the way you refuse to need anything at all. You call it your personality. You wear it like it was given to you at birth, like it belongs to you the way your face does. But what if it was built, not born? What if the person you are today is simply the child you once were, still trying to survive?
Think about the thing you pride yourself on most, your strength, your independence, your humor, your drive. Now ask yourself, when did you first need that quality? Who, back then, made it necessary?
Gabor Maté's insight is not a comfortable one. It does not say you are broken. It says that you adapted. That a child who was not held enough learns to stop reaching. That a child who was shamed for crying learns to perform toughness so convincingly, they eventually forget it's a performance. That a child who walked on eggshells around an unpredictable parent learns to read every room before entering it, and calls that skill intuition, or charm, or emotional intelligence. And it is those things. But it is also a scar that learned to look like a gift.
What do you call "just who I am" that might actually be "what I learned to do to feel safe"?
The hardest part of Maté's words is the word often. Not always. Not never. Often. Which means you have to sit with the discomfort of not knowing which parts of you are free, and which parts of you are still flinching from something that happened decades ago in a room you rarely think about anymore. The controller. The people pleaser. The overachiever. The one who sabotages closeness right before it gets real. These are not character flaws. They are old solutions to old problems, brilliant, even. They kept you safe once. The question is whether they are keeping you free now.
You are not your coping mechanisms. But you cannot outgrow what you refuse to see. The child who built you deserves more than to be mistaken for the whole of you.