When Coping Becomes the Problem: Understanding Your Symptoms with Compassion

One of the most life-changing insights I’ve seen in therapy is this: the symptoms that bring people in—anxiety, depression, perfectionism, emotional overwhelm, people-pleasing, shutdown, rage—often began as coping strategies.

At some point in your life, these patterns helped you survive something difficult.

Maybe you learned to be the "good kid”—always agreeable, always achieving—because approval was the only way you felt safe or noticed. Maybe you learned to keep your feelings tightly locked away because expressing needs was met with dismissal or punishment. Maybe you became hyper-independent because no one came when you needed support.

These weren't flaws or failures. They were smart, protective responses to what your nervous system once understood as threat or instability.

But here’s the catch: our brains don’t always know the danger has passed. Emotional memories—especially those held in the amygdala and brainstem—don’t carry a built-in timestamp. So when something in the present reminds your nervous system (even subtly) of something painful from the past, it can react as if it’s happening again.

You might find yourself panicking after a mildly critical email from a coworker, feeling like a total failure when you make a small mistake, or shutting down emotionally when your partner asks for connection.

These aren’t overreactions—they’re past reactions, still alive in your nervous system.

This is why insight alone often isn’t enough. You might understand why you feel the way you do but still struggle to change the pattern. That’s where experiential and memory-based therapies come in.

Approaches like Coherence Therapy, IFS (Internal Family Systems), somatic work, and inner child work help you gently revisit the emotional learning underneath your symptoms. Rather than just talking about the past, these methods allow you to feel the emotional truth of what happened, and—crucially—to update those emotional memories in real time.

For example:

• A client struggling with perfectionism might uncover a deep fear of being rejected or shamed that came from early experiences of conditional love. Through guided experiential work, they connect with the younger part of themselves that internalized this fear and, with compassion and safety, help that part realize things are different now.

• Someone who constantly shuts down in relationships may trace this pattern back to a time when closeness meant being vulnerable to hurt or neglect. Through somatic or parts work, they learn to notice when their system is going into shutdown—and give that part of themselves the reassurance and boundaries it never had.

These therapies help the emotional brain relearn what is true now. That you’re safe. That you’re enough. That you have choice.

And all of this starts with self-compassion—recognizing that your symptoms aren’t signs of brokenness, but signs of how hard you’ve worked to stay safe and get through.

Healing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about meeting the parts of you that are still living in it—and gently bringing them into the present.

How Memory Reconsolidation Creates Real, Lasting Change

Many people come to therapy after years of trying to think their way out of patterns—reading all the books, gaining tons of insight, even doing talk therapy—and still find themselves stuck. That’s because the emotional brain doesn’t speak the language of logic or insight. It responds to felt experience.

This is where memory reconsolidation offers something truly powerful.

Memory reconsolidation is a brain-based process that allows emotional memories to be updated at the neural level. When an old emotional learning—like “I’m not safe,” “I’m not good enough,” or “I’ll be abandoned”—is reactivated in the right emotional context and contradicted by a new, felt experience, the brain can revise that original learning. And when this process happens, the old memory doesn’t just get overwritten—it actually loses its charge.

For example, if a part of you believes that asking for help will lead to rejection (because that’s what happened in the past), simply knowing this logically won’t change how your nervous system reacts in the moment. But if that memory is activated in a safe, supported therapeutic space—and you have an emotionally meaningful experience of being heard and supported—your brain gets the message: “This isn’t true anymore.”

That’s when things begin to shift. Not through effort or willpower, but because your brain no longer sees that old belief as necessary for survival.

Memory reconsolidation isn’t just about relief—it’s about freedom. Freedom from patterns that once kept you safe but are now holding you back. And when the emotional brain no longer carries that old fear, shame, or urgency, your present becomes a place you can actually live in—not just survive.