By Annie Wright, LMFT · Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (#95719)Last updated May 2026

Remember, it was always an attempt to help yourself…

Emotional Regulation & Nervous System • August 31, 2019

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

SUMMARY

Whatever you’ve done to survive. The numbing, the shutting down, the people-pleasing, the overworking, the glass of wine that became two. It was always an attempt to help yourself. Not the most elegant attempt. Not one you’d necessarily keep. But an attempt. This post is about releasing the shame around those strategies by understanding what they were actually trying to do.

Last updated: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

DEFINITION MALADAPTIVE COPING

A clinical term describing behaviors or thought patterns that were once adaptive. Helping an individual manage stress, threat, or overwhelming emotion. But that have become counterproductive over time. It was a solution to a real problem, selected by a nervous system trying to survive. Research by Peter Levine, PhD, developer of Somatic Experiencing and author of Waking the Tiger, emphasizes that these patterns are stored in the body as well as the mind, making purely cognitive approaches to change limited in their effectiveness.

In plain terms: Maladaptive coping means your self-destructive habit made sense once. It was a smart, creative solution to a problem you were facing with the resources you had at the time. The fact that it’s causing problems now doesn’t erase the fact that it worked when you needed it most. Healing isn’t about attacking the habit. It’s about understanding what need it was meeting and finding more sustainable ways to meet that need.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Most of us carry around shame for habits we have or have had in the past.
2. This list could go on and on.
3. Self-Destructive Habits Always Start As Attempts To Self-Support.
4. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
5. What worked well at one point stops working so well anymore.
6. Remember: what seems harmful now was once an adaptation.
7. And this. Building choice. Is what the work of therapy is all about to me.
8. From Survival Strategy to Conscious Choice: Transforming Maladaptive Patterns
9. Frequently Asked Questions

Relational trauma refers to the emotional and psychological wounds that develop from harmful or neglectful experiences in early close relationships, especially with caregivers or significant others. It is not about one isolated event or a single betrayal; it’s about ongoing patterns where your needs felt unsafe, unseen, or confusing, shaping how you relate to yourself and others. For you, as an intelligent, driven woman, relational trauma often hides behind your achievements, it’s the silent influence that undermines your self-worth and complicates your coping strategies. Understanding relational trauma matters here because it reframes your self-destructive habits not as failures but as survival tools your nervous system created to manage that early pain. Holding this both/and truth, your trauma is real, and your coping made sense, is the foundation for moving toward healing and conscious choice.

• You might be quietly carrying shame around habits like numbing with wine or isolating, believing these patterns mark you as broken, when in truth, they are your nervous system’s early attempts to protect and soothe you in painful moments.
• Relational trauma isn’t about one event but patterns of unmet needs and confusing attachments that shape your coping strategies, often hidden beneath your drive and success, quietly influencing how you relate to yourself and others.
• Healing begins when you replace shame with curiosity, recognizing your self-destructive habits as survival strategies, and start practicing conscious choice, shifting from automatic defense to deliberate actions that genuinely support your well-being.

1. Most of us carry around shame for habits we have or have had in the past.
2. This list could go on and on.
3. Self-Destructive Habits Always Start As Attempts To Self-Support.
4. Signs You May Be Carrying Relational Trauma
5. What worked well at one point stops working so well anymore.
6. Remember: what seems harmful now was once an adaptation.
7. Freedom: Growing Choice Around Our Self-Destructive Habits.
8. And this. Practicing choice. Is what the work of therapy is all about to me.
9. Inquiries To Reflect On Your Own Self-Destructive Habits:
10. From Survival Strategy to Conscious Choice: Transforming Maladaptive Patterns
11. Wrapping This Up…
12. Additional Resources:

“You may shoot me with your words, / You may cut me with your eyes, / You may kill me with your hatefulness, / But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist

QUICK ANSWER · UPDATED JUNE 2026

Self-destructive habits, including overworking, numbing, people-pleasing, substance use, and compulsive behavior, almost always began as attempts at self-support rather than self-harm. They were the best available strategies for managing an environment that was too much, too unpredictable, or too emotionally unsafe. Understanding this reframes shame: what looks like weakness was once a form of ingenious adaptation. In my work with driven women, releasing the shame around old coping patterns is one of the most important early steps in healing, because shame keeps a person locked in the behavior they’re trying to leave.

In short: Self-destructive habits almost always began as survival strategies, the best available way to manage overwhelming emotional environments, and releasing shame about them requires understanding what they were originally trying to do.

HOW I KNOW THIS

With more than 15,000 clinical hours supporting clients in understanding and shifting old coping patterns, I’ve watched shame be the primary obstacle to change far more often than lack of motivation. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, documented how survival adaptations formed under threat become encoded in the nervous system and persist as automatic behaviors long after the original threatening conditions have passed (van der Kolk 2014).

Most of us carry around shame for habits we have or have had in the past.

DEFINITION RELATIONAL TRAUMA

Relational trauma refers to psychological injury that occurs within the context of important relationships, particularly those with primary caregivers during childhood. Unlike single-incident trauma, relational trauma involves repeated experiences of emotional neglect, inconsistency, manipulation, or abuse within bonds where safety and trust should have been foundational.

The history of bulimia…

SUMMARY

Every self-destructive habit. From numbing with wine to compulsive shopping to isolating on the couch. Started as an attempt to help yourself cope with something painful. This reframe isn’t about excusing harmful behavior; it’s about replacing shame with curiosity so you can actually understand what your nervous system was trying to do, and find better ways to meet those same underlying needs.

Shame vs. Self-Compassion in Healing

Shame is the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Distinct from guilt, which focuses on a specific action. In the context of healing relational trauma and self-destructive patterns, shame often keeps people stuck, while self-compassion. Recognizing that your coping strategies made sense in the context they arose. Creates the safety needed for real change.

Related reading: What does it mean to be an ambitious, upwardly mobile woman from a relational trauma background?, Attachment Trauma: How Early Relationships Shape Your Adult Connections, Trauma and Relationships: When Your Professional Strengths Become Your Relationship Blindspots

The history of porn addiction…

And the history of cutting…

The fact that we tolerated shitty partners just so we could feel loved…

The fact that we cheated on our partner so we could feel alive again…

Not speaking up and pushing back when the cool girls made fun of our elastic-waisted jeans in grade school… 

Compromising our boundaries and integrity just to be friends with those girls…

Using edibles each night just to find enough peace to sleep…

Having a bottle of wine after a long day of work and watching the clock for the minute it turns five because you’re craving it…

Weekends spent isolating at home, compulsively watching Netflix and scouring for more 10-season-plus shows to get lost in…

The heft and girth of our bodies, considered overweight by nonsensical BMI standards and the result of comfort eating through hard decades…

The mountainous credit card debt, accumulated from online shopping and a lack of financial sobriety…

This list could go on and on. 

I’m sure you have your own self-destructive habits and behaviors you don’t feel great about. 

The kind of habit or behavior, if you were in my therapy office, you might share with me but still feel embarrassed or even guilty about. 

And there’s something I would tell you if you did choose to open up to me about this. 

Something important which you really need to hear: 

Remember, it’s always an attempt to help yourself.

To learn what this means and what else I would say to you (believe me, it’s important), keep reading.

Self-Destructive Habits Always Start As Attempts To Self-Support.

“What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.” ― Alice Miller, Ph.D.

When we’re younger, and I don’t just mean child young, but teens, twenties, even in our thirties, and we’re in emotional pain (whether this is because of neglect, abuse, rejection, isolation, or being socially cut off), we cope as best we can. 

For example, a child may turn to food and compulsive eating, binging, and purging because that’s one of the few sources of “nourishment” she can access, because she feels less when her stomach is full, and she feels numb and emotionally disconnected after she purges. 

She is and was attempting to care for herself in whatever way she could with the probably limited set of options and resources she had at the time. 

And maybe this worked. 

In fact, it could have worked very well. Occupying her nights, letting her survive an emotionally painful and brittle homelife.

But then her coping mechanism stops working so well. 

This same girl gets caught stealing food to binge and purge on. Her body starts accumulating the effects of her coping. 

The enamel on her teeth wears off. The blood vessels in her eyes might burst because of the force of vomiting, the stomach acid may damage her vocal chords, ruining her dreams of landing the lead in her high school musical. 

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What worked well at one point stops working so well anymore.

But still, she keeps doing it because she doesn’t know what else to do instead and it’s taken the form of a compulsion for her, an addictive behavior.

It’s a vicious cycle.

You can apply this hypothetical to any of the above points in the intro or to whatever habit/behavior of your own in the present or in your past that you feel embarrassed about: food additions, bad romantic choices, financial irresponsibility, compromising your boundaries, compromising your relationships, even, perhaps, compromising your life.

What’s important here is not that you personally identify with having had a history of binging and purging yourself but rather to recognize that the root of almost any addictive/compulsive/self-destructive behaviors are attempts to take care of ourselves in whatever way we thought was possible or that we had access to.

Remember: what seems harmful now was once an adaptation.

A strategic and probably effective adaptation!). To challenging circumstances at some point earlier.

When we can hold this lens of compassion for the parts of our past (or the behaviors we presently hold!) that we have shame and regret around, we can, believe it or not, allow for the possibility of change to occur.

According to the paradoxical theory of change, a contribution to the field of psychology by Fritz Perls, the paradoxical theory of change states that the more you try to be something you’re not, the more you’ll stay right where you are.

So in our attempts to move forward, to grow, and to create something different for ourselves we are ironically called upon to accept and even have compassion for the self-destructive (and other-destructive) behaviors and habits that we may have had in the past.

Because of this, I invite you to reframe how you have thought about those shameful, painful habits and actions of yours in the past, not only because it will likely feel better for you to have more grace and compassion for yourself, but also because you won’t grow as much or as well unless you can actually accept those parts of you.

“The longing for sweets is really a yearning for love or “sweetness.” ― Marion Woodman, Ph.D.

Freedom: Building Choice Around Our Self-Destructive Habits.

“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behavior.” ― Gabor Maté, M.D.

When we can recognize that every behavior and habit of ours that we had or currently have was actually an attempt that was designed to support ourselves but also recognize that it was a maladaptive attempt. Meaning an attempt that is dysfunctional and actually doesn’t produce the outcomes that you actually want. We can then address the question of what else is possible instead.

That same young woman, trapped in the vicious cycle of bulimia to cope with her chaotic and abusive family. Is now grown.

She’s an adult with distance from them and more agency in the world, and while she still binges and purges, she has more options and resources than she likely did back then.

We can begin to explore what more adaptive, supportive choices might look like for her. When she feels the relentless despair and anxiety at night that’s so lifelong familiar to her.

We can book her therapy for times in the evening.

We can build social gatherings and opportunities into her calendar. To help her decrease her sense of isolation and to connect with others.

We can work in our counseling sessions to help her expand her abilities. To tolerate those challenging feelings.

We can remove the trigger foods from her house.

We can practice something different. Because circumstances and her capacities are now different.

We can create choice for how she responds to challenging feelings when before there felt like there was no choice, there was only a default option.

And this. Practicing choice. Is what the work of therapy is all about to me.

When we are acting compulsively. And I don’t just mean in actions such as daily bulimia, but I also mean with repeated, compulsive thoughts and beliefs , “I married the wrong guy.” “I’ll never make enough money.” “I’m too fat to find love.” etc, we aren’t that free.

Again, we come by those thoughts/habits/behaviors honestly, but if they are the only ways we imagine we can respond to a situation or view ourselves, we’re not that choiceful.

Doing the emotional work to expand your abilities to choose different behaviors/thoughts/beliefs will allow you to be responsive to life, rather than reactive.

It will help us build more adaptive behaviors and habits for you versus perpetuating maladaptive ones.

This work can take some time. Remember, it took a while to form the other habit/behaviors. But it is worth it.

And through this process of growing different choices and taking steps to tolerate more emotional discomfort, it’s critical we recall, again and again, that those former habits, the ones we’d prefer no one ever knew about, were always attempts to take care of ourselves.

I actually do think we’re naturally driven to feel good and to try and take care of ourselves, it’s just that sometimes we do so in ways that aren’t quite that effective.

But that’s okay! It simply says you’re driven to take care of yourself and now we just have to find other ways you can do this.

“For me, vulnerability led to anxiety, which led to shame, which led to disconnection, which led to Bud Light.”. Brené Brown, Ph.D.

Inquiries To Reflect On Your Own Self-Destructive Habits:

“When clients self-harm, for example, these days, we understand their actions to be instinctive, rather than thought out, an effort to regulate or relieve, rather than punish.” ― Janina Fisher, Ph.D. (PMID: 16530597)

• Taking inspiration from the list in the intro and reflecting on your own life, what would you say is one habit of yours that you’ve had (or still have) that you don’t feel so great about?
• In what ways can you see that this habit was an attempt to support yourself?
• What options did you at that age (when the habit started) feel like you had?
• In what ways was this habit actually a really clever and effective way of taking care of yourself back then?
• What did it give you when you did this habit/behavior? (think: relief, numbness, a sense of connection, fitting in, etc.)
• At what point did this habit/behavior stop working quite so well for you?
• In what ways did this habit/behavior actually get (or still gets) in the way of a life that feels connected and good?
• What other options do you see for yourself instead if you were to stop doing this behavior/habit?
• What supports might you need to even see those other options and/or pursue them? (think: therapy, AA meetings, etc).
• What’s the cost to you if you keep doing the maladaptive behavior?
• What’s the potential benefit to you if you can create more choice around how you respond to difficult emotional times?
• Can you have grace and compassion for your past self (and even your present self) for making the choices that you did?
• Can you acknowledge that you did the best with what you had at the time and does it feel supportive (even a little bit) to have just a little more self-compassion when we hold this reframe?

“Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.”. Brené Brown, Ph.D.

From Survival Strategy to Conscious Choice: Transforming Maladaptive Patterns

When you sit across from your therapist, ashamed about the wine bottle you empty nightly or the credit cards you’ve maxed out, they see something different than moral failure. They recognize these behaviors as brilliant survival strategies that became outdated software still running in your adult life.

Your therapist helps you understand that what are the tools in your emotional first aid kit began developing long before you had conscious choice. That eating disorder wasn’t rebellion, it was the only way a powerless child could feel control. The toxic relationships weren’t stupidity, they were attempts to find love using the only template you knew.

Together, you explore what each behavior provided: did binging numb unbearable loneliness? Did shopping create momentary feelings of abundance when life felt scarce? Did staying with harmful partners at least mean not being alone? Understanding the function helps identify what needs must be met differently.

Your therapist introduces the paradoxical theory of change, how fighting against these parts of yourself actually keeps them stuck. Instead of shame-based willpower attempts, you practice radical self-compassion, recognizing that younger you did the absolute best with extremely limited resources.

The work involves expanding your window of tolerance for difficult emotions that these behaviors helped you avoid. Your therapist helps you slowly build capacity to sit with anxiety without wine, to feel loneliness without Netflix numbing, to experience vulnerability without destructive relationships.

Most importantly, you develop choice where there was only compulsion. Instead of defaulting to familiar patterns, you practice pausing, recognizing the urge, and choosing from an expanded menu of responses. Not perfectly, not always, but increasingly, transforming survival into conscious living.

Wrapping This Up…

I’d love to hear from you in the comments here on the blog:

Does this reframe. That any self-destructive behavior and habit you’ve had/have was always, at some level, an attempt to support yourself. Feel helpful to bear in mind? Can you understand how, when you accept this part of you and this part of your past, it will actually allow for change to take place in your life? What comes up for you as I share this with you?

Leave me a message in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Additional Resources:

• Neuroplasticity and the Critical Practice of Speaking More Kindly to Yourself.
• What are the tools in your emotional first aid kit?

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Warmly, Annie

Further Reading on Relational Trauma

Explore Annie’s clinical writing on relational trauma recovery.

• Narcissistic Abuse & Recovery Guide
• Childhood Emotional Neglect Guide
• Attachment Styles Guide
• Complex PTSD Guide
• EMDR Therapy for Women
• Inner Child Work Guide
• Trauma and the Nervous System
• Intergenerational Trauma

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. PMID: 25699005.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly. Penguin Audio, 2012.
• Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
• Woodman, Marion. Addiction to perfection. Inner City books, 1982.
• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House, 1969.

CONTINUE READING

Related essays from the archive

• 16 Things About Relational Trauma Recovery I Wish I’d Known
• Dismissing and Diminishing Your Past Keeps You From Healing
• 20 Common Experiences When You Endure Relational Trauma
• 10 Years Later: Reflections on Relational Trauma Work
• People-Pleasing and the Fawn Response: A Therapist’s Guide for Driven Women

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About the Author

Annie Wright, LMFT

LMFT #95719  ·  Relational Trauma Specialist  ·  Author, W.W. Norton 2027

Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.

As a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719), trauma-informed executive coach, and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, she guides driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.

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Both/And: These Habits Were Helping You and They Are Now Hurting You

I want to sit with the both/and of self-destructive habits for a moment, because I think it’s the most clinically important thing I can offer on this topic.

The habit was helping. And the habit is now hurting. Both are true. Neither cancels out the other.

This framing matters because most of us approach our self-destructive habits from one of two inadequate positions. Either we minimize them (“everyone drinks too much sometimes, it’s fine”) or we catastrophize them (“I am fundamentally broken for doing this”). Neither position allows for actual change. Minimizing removes the urgency. Catastrophizing removes the self-compassion that change requires.

The both/and position holds something more accurate: this behavior served a real function, it was a legitimate response to a real need, and it is also costing you more than it’s giving you now. You deserve to understand why you have it, and you deserve support in finding something that works better.

Megan had been a smoker since she was sixteen. The age when her parents’ marriage dissolved in a way that nobody in the family was allowed to talk about. She knew, intellectually, that smoking was bad for her. She’d quit several times. What she hadn’t done was connect the smoking to the function it served: a reliable, solitary ritual that belonged entirely to her. Something she could do alone, in a moment of pressure, that sent a clear signal to herself and others that she needed a pause.

When we explored what the cigarette was doing rather than just the fact that it was “bad,” she could start to grieve the loss of it while also looking for better alternatives. The grief was important. You can’t fully commit to changing something you haven’t been allowed to appreciate. The smoking had kept her company through some of the loneliest years of her life. It deserved acknowledgment before she walked away.

The Systemic Lens: Self-Destructive Habits Don’t Develop in a Vacuum

One of the things I notice in wellness spaces. And in some therapy spaces. Is how quickly conversations about self-destructive habits become purely individual. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What do you need to change?

These are valid questions. But they miss something important about the context in which coping behaviors develop and persist.

The driven women I work with developed many of their self-destructive habits in response to real environmental conditions. Working in cultures that rewarded overperformance and punished rest. Growing up in homes where emotional needs were treated as weakness or inconvenience. Navigating professional and social environments where the cost of appearing vulnerable was very, very high. These aren’t background factors. They’re the soil from which the coping strategies grew.

Gabor Maté, MD, physician, addiction expert, and author of In the Field of Hungry Ghosts, has written extensively about how addiction and self-destructive habits are rarely about personal weakness or poor choices. They’re about pain. Specifically, about the attempt to manage pain that has nowhere else to go. And that pain, Maté argues, is almost always shaped by the relational and social environments that produced it.

This doesn’t absolve anyone of responsibility for their behavior. But it does reframe the work. If you’re trying to stop a self-destructive habit without also addressing the conditions. Internal and external. That are still generating the need for it, you’re working against yourself. You’re trying to remove the smoke alarm without addressing the fire.

True healing often requires both: the internal work of understanding and processing the underlying need, and the external work of changing what can be changed about the conditions that keep that need so urgent. Sometimes that means changing work environments. Changing relationships. Changing what you say yes to and what you protect yourself from. The habits didn’t develop in isolation. The healing doesn’t have to either.

Credentials & Licensure

License

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Licensed in 14 U.S. Jurisdictions, including Colorado (telehealth only), and Registered for Telehealth in Florida

CA LMFT95719 · CO MFT.0003236 (telehealth only) · CT 003806 · DC LMFT200001447 · FL TPMF356 (out-of-state telehealth registration) · IL 166.012270 · ME MF8600 · MD LCM1206 · NH 1030 · NJ 37FI00254800 · NY 002805 · TX 206391 · UT 14300323-3902 · VA 0717002589 · WA MFT.LF.70098096

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Featured Expert Commentary

Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.

Client stories and examples in this article are composites or have been de-identified. They do not describe any individual client.

Editorial Standards

Written by Annie Wright, LMFT (CA LMFT #95719, EMDRIA-certified, 15,000+ clinical hours). Elizabeth Anne Wright, LMFT (California LMFT95719; New Jersey license 37FI00254800; Maryland LCMFT LCM1206), actively licensed in 14 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida and accountable for all content published under her name.

Last updated August 7, 2026. First published August 31, 2019.

Her writing is grounded in current professional literature and her own clinical training and experience. Composite client vignettes are not real clients; they are pattern-composites drawn from clinical experience with dozens of similar cases.

Editorial Policy · Medical Disclaimer

Written and Edited by Annie Wright, LMFT. Annie is responsible for the content of this article. See our Editorial Policy for details.

This article is educational and is not a substitute for therapy, diagnosis, or a clinical relationship with a licensed mental health provider. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (US) or visit findahelpline.com.

Cite this article
Wright, A. (2019, August 31). Remember, it was always an attempt to help yourself…. Annie Wright, LMFT. https://anniewright.com/self-destructive-habits-remember-it-was-always-an-attempt-to-help-yourself/

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