The Brilliance And Cost Of My Adaptive Child
July 02, 2025
layout: post title: “The Brilliance and Cost of My Adaptive Child” date: 2025-07-02 tags: [inner child, self-healing, trauma, reparenting, wholeness] description: “A reflection on how the adaptive child within me creates new pathways when I’m wounded, and how I’m learning to honour both that brilliance and the need to sit with pain.” emotions: [“hope”, “grief”] —
There’s a part of me that doesn’t get enough credit.
It’s not the adult me — the one who reflects and re-parents and shows up calmly.
It’s not the five-year-old me either — the one who curls up when he feels unloved or excluded.
It’s the adaptive child — the one who springs into action the moment that old wound of “I’m not welcome” or “I don’t belong” is touched.
The one who says:
“Okay… no one wants me? Fine. I’ll build my own world.”
A Pattern That Saved Me
Time and time again, when I’ve felt shut out, left behind, or rejected, something incredible happens in my mind:
A part of me creates a whole new route through life.
It’s fast. It’s driven. It’s often brilliant.
It dreams up independence.
It maps out escape routes.
It strategizes entire futures that don’t rely on anyone’s love or validation.
And honestly? It’s amazing what I’ve been able to create from that space.
My poker career.
Alternative plans when therapy paths closed.
A fierce inner resolve to survive.
Integration and Wholeness
What’s been happening more recently is different, though.
Now, when I revisit those places where I once felt ostracized — with my Wise Adult beside me — I often find that the story I believed… wasn’t fully true.
I wasn’t excluded. I wasn’t hated. I just felt like I was.
And that is healing.
Not because the pain didn’t happen — but because I now have the capacity to stay present with it.
To soothe the five-year-old.
To thank the adaptive part.
And to integrate them both into something whole.
Is It the Golden Shadow?
Sometimes I wonder if this adaptive part of me — the one that drives, dreams, and builds — is what Jung might call the golden shadow.
It’s a survival gift. But it comes at a cost.
The energy it takes to constantly rebuild my life from the ground up — every time I feel unloved — is immense.
It’s exhausting.
Would a securely attached person need to do this? Probably not.
But I wasn’t given that foundation. I had to build it later, brick by brick, far after the blueprints were handed out.
Giving Credit Where It’s Due
I don’t want to shame myself for doing what I had to do.
Yes, I’m learning to sit with disappointment more now.
Yes, I’m learning to re-parent the part of me that feels things too deeply to bear.
But I still want to honour the part of me that kept me going — the adaptive child who said:
“If we can’t be loved here, we’ll find a way to survive elsewhere.”
He doesn’t always get it right.
He doesn’t always feel safe.
But he’s never stopped trying to protect me.
And for that, he deserves gratitude — not guilt.
Closing Thought
The goal isn’t to get rid of these parts.
It’s to integrate them.
To be someone who can both sit in the pain and build something beautiful from it.
To keep all the pieces — the dreamer, the feeler, the adult — and choose, with intention, how I want to live.
And right now, I’m choosing wholeness.