The Price of Survival: How We Learn to Betray Ourselves

Perhaps you recognize that Sunday evening feeling that many experience. That nagging feeling, sick in your stomach even, as Monday approaches. Maybe it's not just about returning to work, but is it about returning to a version of yourself that feels performed...not you.

Research from trauma specialists like Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk, MD reveals something profound: children consistently choose attachment over authenticity. When they have to make the impossible choice between being themselves or staying safe, they learn to betray their own truth to stay in connection with their caregivers.

These early betrayals of self don't simply disappear. They solidify into what we call personality. 

You might notice this in your professional life. Maybe you recognize the automatic apology before sharing your actual opinion in meetings. Maybe you've experienced that familiar, but extreme, tiredness from keeping up showing the "right" attitude with clients or colleagues. Or perhaps you've felt the strange emptiness of success building on someone else dream, your boss, rather than on your own.

The professional who takes on projects that drain their soul because saying no might cost you in the long run. The manager who agrees to unrealistic deadlines rather than risking to disappoint their superior. The sales manager who shows a false confidence, because showing uncertainty certainly means rejection.

These aren't character flaws. They are survival strategies that once kept you safe as a child, and is now running the show in adult decisions.

We pay for this all the time in different situations: in careers built on other people's dreams while our own stay buried, in the chronic tiredness of performing, in that nagging sense that we're living someone else's life with our name on it.

You might wonder why "just be yourself" feels impossible. It is because authenticity was never safe enough to fully develop as a child. What we call personality is often a collection of adaptive strategies, a collection of stories, brilliant in their protective function, exhausting in their constant maintenance.

But this cycle can be broken, and 'recognition' is the beginning. These patterns aren't you, they are what you are conditioned to do. There is something underneath the performance, something that never fully adapted and that is waiting to be remembered rather than recovered.

Seeing this over and over again in my own practice, is why I've been working on the 'Art of Completion', a gentle process for recognizing these old protections without judgment, and gradually creating space for what was never allowed to emerge. More on that later, if you're interested.

For now, perhaps it's enough to notice: that Sunday evening feeling might not be about Monday at all. It might be your authentic self, quietly mourning another week of exile..