What if the behaviour you keep trying to change actually makes sense?

Overthinking. The need to please everyone. Struggling to say no. Shutting down during conflict. Staying constantly busy. Detaching when things feel too overwhelming.

We often meet these patterns with frustration. We call ourselves avoidant, difficult, overly sensitive, controlling, lazy, needy, or emotionally unavailable. But what if, instead of asking "What's wrong with me?", we asked, "What did this behaviour once help me cope with?"

Difficult experiences do not always stay behind as memories. Sometimes, they show up much later in the ways we relate, react, protect ourselves, and move through the world. And these experiences are far more common than we may realise. 

A 2023 meta-analysis published in World Psychiatry, examining 206 studies involving 546,458 adults across 22 countries, found that 60.1% of adults had experienced at least one adverse childhood experience, while 16.1% had experienced four or more before the age of 18. 

More recently, a 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis published in The Lancet Public Health analysed 1,002 studies involving 2,592,879 adults across 102 countries, finding that emotional abuse was reported by 28.0% and emotional neglect by 22.1% of participants.

These numbers do not mean that every difficult behaviour is a trauma response. But they do remind us that experiences which shape how we see ourselves and the world are remarkably common, and not always visible from the outside.

This is where Compassionate Inquiry Therapy offers a different way of looking. Developed by Dr. Gabor Maté, it moves beyond simply trying to change what we do and explores the beliefs, emotions, bodily responses, and experiences underneath our patterns.

Because sometimes, before a behaviour became something we wanted to change, it was something we learned to survive.

 

When Your Definition of "Normal" Deserves a Second Look

One of the most difficult things to examine is something you have never considered unusual.

Perhaps everyone in your family communicated through sarcasm, so you learned to experience criticism as affection. Maybe achievement was so highly valued that exhaustion became indistinguishable from commitment. Perhaps nobody talked about difficult emotions, so silence became the family's version of keeping the peace.

This can make certain experiences surprisingly difficult to identify as painful. There may be no dramatic memory attached to them. There may simply be a quiet realisation that something you considered normal has been shaping you more than you realised.

This is where inquiry becomes important. Therapy does not have to begin with a crisis. Sometimes it begins with noticing that the way you have always understood your life leaves certain questions unanswered.

Psychological counselling by Aanchal Narang can provide a space to examine these questions without turning every answer into a diagnosis. The value may lie in slowing down enough to notice the assumptions underneath everyday choices and asking whether they still belong in the life you are trying to build.

 

When coping starts looking like personality

One of the quieter consequences of difficult experiences is that adaptations can become invisible.

A child who learns to monitor everyone's mood may grow into an adult who calls themselves "very intuitive." Someone who learned not to express anger may become the person everyone describes as calm. A person who learned to anticipate rejection may become exceptionally good at reading tiny changes in someone's tone.

These qualities may genuinely be part of who they are. But sometimes there is another layer underneath them.

 

What looks like personality can sometimes contain a history of adaptation.

Compassionate Inquiry Therapy creates space to become curious about that distinction. The official approach describes this process as exploring how coping patterns, internal beliefs, emotional suppression, and bodily states can become connected to earlier experiences.

That does not mean every trait has to be traced back to childhood. Nor does it mean that every difficulty is secretly trauma. It means we can become more curious about the function of a pattern before deciding what it says about us.

 

Your body can reveal what your explanation leaves out

There are things people can explain beautifully and still not fully understand.

You might know that a particular relationship was unhealthy. You might know that criticism does not define your worth. You might even understand exactly why confrontation makes you uncomfortable.

Yet your shoulders tense when someone raises their voice. Your stomach drops when someone seems disappointed. You suddenly want to apologise even when you have done nothing wrong.

The explanation exists, but the reaction arrives first.

This is one reason attention to bodily experience can become important in this form of therapeutic work. Compassionate Inquiry involves noticing present-moment body states alongside thoughts, emotions, assumptions, and memories rather than treating them as completely separate experiences.

Instead of immediately trying to make the reaction disappear, therapy can ask: What is happening right now, and what does this response seem to believe is about to happen?

That question can reveal a great deal.

 

The Cost of Being the Person Everyone Relies On

Being dependable is usually considered a strength. But there is a less discussed side to always being the reliable one.

When people become accustomed to you handling things, your competence can gradually become an expectation. You may become the person who remembers, organises, fixes, absorbs, manages, and keeps going. Eventually, even you may forget that these are things you do, rather than things you are.

A therapeutic conversation can explore what happens when competence becomes part of identity. What would it mean to not have the answer? Who are you when you are not solving something? What feelings appear when somebody else takes care of you?

These questions can uncover a relationship with responsibility that is much more complicated than simply being "responsible."

 

When Insight Needs Somewhere to Go

Understanding yourself can be valuable, but insight on its own does not always change the way you live. You can recognise a pattern and still struggle to make a different decision when the moment arrives.

Psychological counselling by Aanchal Narang can create room to explore that gap between what you understand intellectually and what continues to influence your choices. Sometimes the work is less about collecting more explanations and more about noticing what happens when those explanations are tested against your everyday life.

 

What happens when you stop fighting the part of you that is struggling?

Often, people enter therapy wanting to get rid of something: anxiety, anger, avoidance, perfectionism, jealousy, emotional numbness, or the need for control.

But trying to eliminate a behaviour without understanding its purpose can create another form of internal conflict. The person begins fighting themselves for having the reaction in the first place.

Compassionate Inquiry Therapy takes a different route. It encourages curiosity about the beliefs, emotional experiences, and unconscious dynamics beneath the visible pattern, with the aim of creating greater awareness and choice.

That can change the goal of therapy.

Instead of becoming someone who never gets triggered, you may become someone who notices the trigger sooner. Instead of never needing reassurance, you may become better able to recognise what you are actually needing. Instead of never feeling angry, you may become more capable of understanding what your anger is communicating without letting it control your behaviour.

The change is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks surprisingly ordinary.

You pause before automatically apologising. You notice that you are uncomfortable instead of pretending everything is fine. You tell someone what you need without rehearsing the conversation twenty times. You realise that saying no does not make you cruel.

These moments matter because they represent something deeper than symptom reduction: more choice in how you respond.

 

Remember: Your Past Should Not Have the Final Say

Your past can explain why you respond a certain way, but it does not have to decide how you respond forever. Healing can begin when you notice which old fears are still making present-day choices for you.

Compassionate Inquiry is therefore an approach that offers a way to look beneath the behaviour without losing sight of the person experiencing it. The goal is not to find an explanation for every part of your personality or turn your past into a reason for everything that happens today. It is about developing enough awareness to recognise your patterns, understand what shapes them, and gradually create more freedom in how you respond.