When a Child's Survival Strategy Becomes a Culture's Dysfunction

One of the things I love about the nervous system is how plastic it is. We adapt for survival and our autonomic nervous system which drives our behaviour, adapts to keep us safe. It is clever, so masterful in how it drives us to adapt so that we stay safe, feel a sense of belonging and receive the love we need to grow and flourish as humans.

That same survival system is also what drives maladaptive behaviour. When we look at toxic cultures, we have to look systemically at what is driving the threat. Often it is a leader with maladaptive traits that were developed as a child to survive. But it can be other things too. It may also be remuneration and compensation structures that aim to foster never ending financial growth, which we know is completely unsustainable. Maybe it is further out than that. Maybe it is laws that are overly rigid and drive dysfunctional behaviour, it happens, and there is irony in that because in theory laws are put in place to promote safety, prosperity and harmony in society. The point is all of this ripples out. We all know that cultural and geopolitical hegemony exists and have to look broadly at what might be going on. Most often in culture it is all these happening together.

Back to the individual though. Our adaptive strategies start forming sometimes whilst in the womb. Babies cannot regulate their own nervous system, they need co-regulation of parents and caregivers to learn how to soothe themselves. We do that by attending to their cries for help, through touch, a soothing voice and meeting their needs to feed or change or soothed back to sleep. Babies can’t survive without a parent/caregiver, they need to be fed and cared for. When those needs aren’t met or parents are miss-attuning to them, they start to develop little strategies to receive the love, feel safe and feel like they belong to the family. You see for a small baby or small child to not receive this attuned care, it feels like death to them.

These are adaptive strategies and as Gabor Mate says, children will choose adaptive over being their authentic selves every time.

It is here our adaptive strategies begin. Now this is okay in childhood but as we grow and age they get in the way of our adult relationships and often lead to conflict in our intimate and platonic relationships.

I want to add that its not always about our parents. Some of us were bullied at school, some of us had lots of sports accidents when we were teenagers that really impacted our proprioception which is our bodies’ sense of where it is in space and time. This can cause some of these strategies to develop also.

Digital image - Kellie Stirling. An adult soothing their inner child who is metaphorically holding the ‘armour’ of their adaptive strategies.

Let's talk about some of the common strategies that I see. Some of these are mine too!

Hyper-vigilance — We flinch at footsteps, scan every room we walk into. There's nothing wrong with us; we were just watching for the next threat so we’'d never be caught off guard.

Control — We white-knuckled every plan, every outcome, every unknown. When our past was unpredictable and unsafe, we learned that controlling the details was the only way we could sleep at night.

Overthinking — We stay awake at night, ruminating, replaying conversations from years ago, when one wrong word used to cost us everything. We thought that if we studied every angle, next time we'd see it coming.

Overexplaining — We write an essay to prove that we aren't the problem. When words were twisted or used against us, we thought if we gave enough context, we'd finally be believed.

People pleasing — We agree to things we don't really want because saying no cost us our safety when we were younger. We learned to keep everyone happy; that was the only way we stayed alive.

Perfectionism — Making a mistake felt like a death threat to us. Perfectionism shields us from the pain of losing love, avoiding criticism, and preventing abandonment by being completely flawless.

Self-abandonment — We make ourselves the last person on our list of who we look out for. When choosing ourselves meant punishment, self-abandonment taught us that disappearing, or receiving the crumbs of what was left in the love and attention department was the safest thing we could do.

Shame — Shame made us feel like we were the problem for things that were done to us. We were made to feel like we weren’t deserving of receiving love and attention. We carried the blame because the person who hurt us didn't have the capacity to take responsibility and we have to hold it for a really long time.

Freeze — We go deathly quiet, mid-sentence, vacant behind the eyes. When fight and flight aren't options, we froze in place so danger would pass over us. This is such a natural biological response when we are experiencing extreme threat, animals do it too. It is just that animal’s bodies know how to shake it off and somewhere along the way our bodies stop remembering how to do that.

Dissociation — It makes us disappear when things get too loud, too close, too much. When our body couldn’t run or fight, dissociation came in and it took us somewhere we couldn't be reached.

Isolating — It made us cancel our plans, dodge the calls, and stay behind the locked door. After the people who were supposed to love us hurt us, being alone was the only place we knew to feel safe.

Growing into adulthood isn’t about eliminating these strategies, it is about becoming aware of them and not letting them run your life. When we work with them somatically, we become so aware of them and we learn to expand our capacity to feel them so we have the choice to pause and slow them down in the moment. To be actually present to what is happening right now and not disappear into our survival response.

I want to add that many of these strategies can give us superpowers. Here are a couple of examples. In clients that are hypervigilant, I notice they don’t miss anything going on in the meeting at the office. Super attentive people. The over-thinkers and over-explainers are great at managing risk in my experience. The people pleasers, natural carers and they are always very attentive to people’s moods. The perfectionists, whilst they can be hard to work with, their attention to detail is always exceptional in my experience, and they are generally pretty good at finishing and completion of tasks.

It’s just that when one of these strategies (or maybe a few together) is the dominant operating strategy, it gets in the way of honesty, deep intimacy and being able to listen to and be okay with different perspectives on life and how we live it. That is what causes friction at home and in the office. It is what causes greed and manipulation. It causes wars and conflict.

In my opinion, healthy adult relationships are the bedrock of a happy life. Loosening these strategies makes room for deeper intimacy, happier lives and healthier cultures.

The Nervous System Never Lies

Attunement, the Inner Critic, and What We're Really Missing

Humans are relational by nature. Our bodies are hardwired for connection, and we regulate through co-regulation. When we try to regulate from a place of urgency, to fix ourselves or change something, we might be missing a vital step.

Breathwork and vagus nerve exercises are genuinely useful tools, and they can absolutely support us in the moment. But they are not what a young, developing nervous system misses out on. What gets missed is something far more fundamental: attunement.

Attunement is being seen, heard and known. Being met exactly where we are when we needed help from a caregiver. When we had big emotions, or overwhelmed, when we might have fallen and hurt ourselves, our caregivers were there to soothe us and had capacity to hold our big feelings. From these experiences, from them attuning to us in the moment, lending their nervous systems to soothe ours, our nervous systems develops and grows. When our caregivers did not lend us their nervous system to hold us through experiences that were overwhelming, we didn't receive the attuned attention we needed to learn how to soothe ourselves.

Babies are not born with the capacity to self-regulate. Caregivers lend them their nervous system, through gentle touch, a gentle voice, and responsive presence, and over time, through that repeated experience, the child's nervous system learns that the world is safe. Gradually, they internalise that capacity and begin to self-soothe. If that attuned care was inconsistent or absent, the nervous system may never have had the chance to fully learn it.

*Digital Image - Kellie Stirling. Two women mirroring each other offering deep attunement*

This is also where the inner critic is born, though it has other contributors too, including cultural and family messaging. The inner critic is often misunderstood as something we need to eliminate. But it usually formed for a reason.

The inner critic doesn't arrive in a single moment, nor from a single voice. It is shaped over time, like rings in a tree. Early relationships often form the core, particularly where attunement was inconsistent and a child learned to adapt in order to belong. But other layers gather around it: temperament, family expectations, cultural messages, moments of shame, and the quiet lessons about who it was safe to be. What we call the inner critic is often a protective ecosystem, one that once helped us stay connected and feel safe, even if it now feels limiting or harsh. It is often an aspect of our inner critic, which emerged to protect us, that shows up in our relationships when we are arguing.

So back to the breathwork and the vagus nerve exercises. These tools matter. But they are not the core of what our deeply relational nervous systems need.

When we learn to practise self-attunement, when we learn what safety actually feels like in the body, something begins to happen that was interrupted early in our development. This work unfolds most powerfully in the presence of a therapist or coach who is trained to hold this kind of space, and who has done enough of their own work to bring a stable, regulated nervous system to the room. That stability matters, because it recreates the very thing that was missing: a regulated system, a compassionate witness to co-regulate with. The body is being met in its experience, not shifted out of it.

From this level of attunement, something remarkable starts to grow: self-trust. We begin to learn how to attune to ourselves, to notice and stay with our inner experience. Another word for this is interoception; our capacity to sense what is happening inside us. As our interoception develops, our own voice starts to emerge. As distinct from the inner critic, which is so often the voice of the caregiver who couldn't meet us.

This is developmental work in the truest sense. We get to grow what didn't get to grow the first time around, so we can move through our lives as empowered, self-aware adults who know how to be in relationship, with others and with themselves.

When our inner child is leading the fight

Our relationships can be the most fantastic containers for healing our inner child wounding. When we argue with our partners it is not our wise adult self having the argument it is almost always one of our adaptive childhood parts. These are the parts of us that learned very early how to survive emotionally in our families of origin.

When I work with couples through a systemic lens, I can see the recurring patterns that keep looping and generating conflict, alongside each partner’s adaptive child strategies. Once these patterns become visible, they’re impossible to unsee.

We think our fights are about the dishes, about a shutdown after a small comment, about tension around sex. Or maybe it is someone always needing to be right, or to be in control. Maybe it about someone who withdraws in the middle of tension, they clam up and say nothing. There is always something deeper there.

Once you see it, it makes a different kind of sense. The fight isn’t about the housework or the small irritations, those are just the signs. What’s really happening is that an adaptive child has taken the lead. The adaptive children are in the house.

It is our adaptive child that runs the fight. The problem with this is our adaptive child has no place running our adult relationships. It doesn’t have the discernment or capacity to make adult decisions.

The adaptive child is the part of us that learned how to stay connected, safe, or invisible in childhood. This is a very intelligent survival strategy that helped us survive when we were a child to stay safe. The only problem is that when this part is running the show in adult relationships, we don’t respond we react.

So when two adaptive children collide, the relationship quickly becomes a battleground rather than a place of safety.

In Terry Real’s framework, there are three common adaptive child imprints that often show up in adult intimacy. These are:

The Hero Child. This is the person who '“holds it all together.” They learned early that love came through competence, responsibility, or emotional caretaking. They took up a particular role in their family system and it was often either, the good one, the achiever, the surrogate spouse, the family therapist or they calmed things down.

They are often very competent, loyal and responsible people in their adult life. They show up, do their job and they do it well. They are often seen by others as competent, logical and good people.

When they are not good, what does that look like?

Well they can be passive sometimes and they are not particuarly good at being vulnerable because they have had to be good and responsible for a very long time. This means surrender, being open and receiving can be really challenging for them.

In adult relationships, this can look like:

Over-functioning
Carrying the emotional load for both partners
Resentment building beneath “being fine”
Struggling to ask for help or show vulnerability

When the Hero Child is activated, they often feel: “If I don’t manage this, everything will fall apart.” When they do eventually explode or withdraw, it often shocks their partner because their exhaustion has been invisible for a long time. The Hero child has had to hold a lot in the family system; in fact, they have probably been given more power than a child should have but it has not been based on them as an individual. It has been based on what the parents needed them to do to regulate the family system.

The Scapegoat Child. The scapegoat is the classic rebel or problem child. They learned that conflict, intensity, or acting out was the only way to stay seen. They often have very big feelings and express all that is not being expressed in the family system. They might be the person who fights with one of the parents all the time. Maybe the overbearing parent. They are often overtly or covertly shamed, being seen as the source of all the problems in the family.

In adult relationships, this can show up as:

Anger that feels bigger and disproportionate to the moment
Defensiveness or blaming
A sense of being misunderstood or unfairly criticised
Feeling chronically “wrong” or rejected

Underneath the reactivity is often a deep fear; fear that they are going to be shamed again. Often the whole family system can be organised around keeping this child in line. So they seem to carry a lot of power because everyone is walking around on egg shells around them. In some ways, they are the truth teller of what is not being expressed.

This child fights not to win but to protect against collapse. They are very emotional and often have big hearts. They are the rebels and the creatives of the world. Sometimes the bad boys. Why do we love the bad boys; because they have big hearts.

The Lost Child. The lost child runs their own race. Behind it is the belief, “If I disappear, I’ll be safe.”

The Lost Child adapted by minimising needs, emotions, and presence. The core wound here is often abandonment and that was learned early when this child went to their parent for co-regulation and they learned quickly that that was not available so they become independent and walled off as they have had to regulate themselves. They went and hid in their bedroom.

In adult relationships, this often looks like:

Withdrawal or emotional shutdown
Avoidance of conflict
Difficulty expressing wants or desires
A partner feeling shut out or alone

The Lost Child’s strategy isn’t disinterest, it’s self-protection. Their nervous system learned very early that connection is overwhelming or unsafe. There are lots of repressed emotions here because growing up there was no one they felt safe enough to be with to express how they were feeling.

When we eventually find a partner, the person we want to commit to, we often pick a partner that enables us to predictably repeat our role. Hence they saying ‘we marry our unfinished business’. We pair off with people who mirror the experience we received from our parents/caregivers so we can finally heal that pattern.

Why do fights often escalate so fast?

Here’s the key piece, when we are fighting from our adaptive child, we cannot access our Wise Adult self because our pre-frontal cortex, the part of our brain responsible for logical and rational thought, goes offline. We go into a survival response, our limbic system comes online and all our early adaptive patterns are alive and ready to go.

When we can stay in the Wise Adult part of ourselves we;

Can stay present
Can hold complexity
Can self-soothe
Can take responsibility without collapsing or attacking

But the adaptive child doesn’t have that capacity. Instead, the nervous system is organised around threat, survival and attachment loss. So the fight isn’t about the content. It is about our old unmet needs colliding in the present.

Two children are trying to feel safe, using strategies that once worked, but now damage intimacy. Our adaptive child strategies rarely serve us well in our adult relationships.

From Fighting to Repair

The work of adult relationship healing isn’t about erasing these parts. It’s about learning to:

Recognise when your adaptive child is running the interaction
Learning how to self soothe so that you can pause before responding
Build the capacity to come back online as your Wise Adult
Speak from the present rather than the past

This is deep nervous-system work. Because you can’t “think” your way out of an adaptive state.
You have to feel your way back into safety first. Only then can true repair happen.

The Quiet Shift That Changes Everything

When couples can see that this isn’t you versus me, but younger parts trying to keep us safe, the nervous system settles. Defensiveness eases, blame falls away, and curiosity makes space for compassion, for ourselves and for one another.

Very slowly, the relationship becomes less about winning or withdrawing and more about learning how to stay connected, even when it’s hard.

Here are some reflection questions for you to sit with.

When conflict arises in my relationship, what do I notice happening in my body first?
Do I tend to move toward fixing, fighting, or disappearing when things feel tense?
Which adaptive child strategy do you recognise most easily in yourself; the Hero, the Scapegoat, or the Lost Child? Do you see see a combination of two or maybe that you as you have matured you have moved from one to another?
What familiar loop do my partner and I seem to fall into when we’re under stress?
If this pattern had a job, what might it be trying to protect?
What old story or fear might be getting activated beneath the surface of our current conflict?