Many of us learn early in life how to adapt ourselves to the world around us. We learn how to behave, how to gain approval, how to avoid conflict, how to be helpful, successful, quiet, independent, or responsible. These adaptations can serve us well. They help children find their place within their families and make sense of the relationships around them. But as we grow older, the strategies that once helped us belong may not always help us become fully ourselves. Adulthood brings a different question: Who am I when I am no longer simply adapting to what other people expect of me?
The Child We Learn to Be
As children, we have limited power over our environment. We depend upon adults for safety, care, approval, and belonging. It is therefore natural for a child to become highly attentive to what is expected of them. A child may learn that being good brings approval. Another may discover that achievement gains recognition. Someone else may become the peacemaker in the family, learning to anticipate other people’s moods and keep the emotional environment calm. Some children become independent very early because they learn that relying on others feels uncertain. Others become highly accommodating because maintaining connection feels particularly important. These responses are not signs of weakness. They are adaptations. The child is working out, in the best way they know, how to belong and remain emotionally safe.
When Adaptation Becomes a Pattern
As we grow older, these early adaptations can become part of our behavioural patterns. What was once a response to a particular environment can gradually become an automatic way of approaching life. The person who learned to please others may continue to put other people’s needs before their own. The child who learned to avoid conflict may become an adult who struggles to express disagreement. The child who received approval primarily through achievement may become an adult who finds it difficult to feel worthwhile without succeeding. The person who learned to manage everyone else’s emotions may find themselves continually anticipating how others will respond before allowing themselves to have their own response. These patterns can become so familiar that they feel like personality. Yet sometimes what we call “this is just who I am” is actually a learned way of being.
Understanding the Adult Self
Transactional Analysis (TA) offers a useful way of understanding these different aspects of ourselves. Within TA, the Parent, Adult, and Child ego states describe different ways of thinking, feeling, and responding. The Child can carry the emotional experiences and adaptations of earlier life. The Parent can contain messages, values, rules, and attitudes absorbed from important people around us. The Adult has a different role. The Adult is the part of us capable of observing what is happening in the present, considering information, reflecting, and making choices based on current reality. This does not mean becoming detached from emotion. The Adult is not emotionless. Rather, it allows us to recognise our emotions without automatically allowing old emotional patterns to determine our behaviour.
From Reaction to Choice
One of the important movements towards adulthood is the gradual shift from automatic reaction towards conscious choice. This can be easier to understand when we notice what happens during emotionally charged situations. Someone may receive criticism and immediately feel small, defensive, or ashamed. Another person may experience disagreement and feel an urgent need to restore harmony. Someone else may become angry when they feel controlled and respond by withdrawing or becoming oppositional. The emotional response may belong partly to the present moment, but it can also carry something familiar from the past. The Adult position allows us to pause. Instead of asking only, “Why am I reacting like this?”, we can begin asking: What is actually happening here? “What am I feeling?” “What do I need?” “How do I want to respond?” This pause creates something extremely valuable: choice.
Authenticity is Responsibility
Living authentically does not mean saying whatever comes into our minds or acting on every emotion. It is not about rejecting responsibility or ignoring the needs of others. Authenticity involves becoming more honest about our internal experience while remaining capable of considering the wider situation. We can feel angry without becoming aggressive. We can feel disappointed without blaming someone. We can disagree without creating conflict. We can say no without believing that we are a bad person. We can care about another person’s feelings without taking responsibility for regulating them. This is part of becoming responsible and psychologically adult.
When the Adapted Child Is Triggered
One of the difficulties is that old adaptations can become activated very quickly. A conversation with a parent may suddenly make an adult feel like a child again. A disagreement with a partner may trigger an intense need for reassurance. A request from a manager may evoke feelings of inadequacy or fear of disappointing someone. In these moments, the Adult can become harder to access. This is where emotional regulation becomes important. Rather than trying to suppress the reaction, we can learn to notice it. “Something in me feels threatened.” “I recognise this feeling.” “I don’t have to respond immediately.”
The aim is not to eliminate the Child or the Parent within us. These parts contain valuable experiences, emotions, values, and learning. The aim is to allow the Adult to become more available to them.
From Inherited Expectations to Personal Values
As we move through adulthood, another important question begins to emerge: What do I actually believe? Not what did my family believe. Not what will make other people happy. Not what will make me appear successful. Not what I was taught I should want. But what genuinely matters to me?
This can be surprisingly difficult. Many people reach their twenties or thirties before realising that some of their goals were inherited rather than chosen. They may have pursued a particular career because it represented success within their family. They may have entered relationships according to expectations they had never consciously examined. They may have learned that stability, achievement, marriage, independence, or financial success were the measures of a good life. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. The important question is whether they are chosen.
The Courage to Reconsider
Authenticity sometimes requires us to reconsider parts of our lives that once seemed certain. This can be uncomfortable. We may discover that something we worked hard to achieve no longer feels meaningful. We may realise that a relationship pattern we once accepted no longer feels healthy. We may begin setting boundaries that others are not accustomed to. This does not necessarily mean that we are becoming selfish or difficult. Sometimes growth simply makes old patterns more visible. The challenge is learning to tolerate the discomfort that can come with doing something differently.
Becoming the Author of Our Own Life
Moving from adaptation towards authenticity is not something that happens all at once. It is a gradual process of becoming more conscious of the choices we make and the reasons behind them. We begin to notice when we are seeking approval. We recognise when fear is making a decision for us. We become aware of the difference between what we genuinely want and what we believe we should want. We learn that another person’s disappointment does not automatically mean we have done something wrong.
Slowly, the centre of decision-making moves inward. We become less dependent upon external reactions to tell us who we are.
How Therapy Can Help
This process can be difficult to navigate alone because many of our adaptations operate outside conscious awareness. Therapy provides a space to explore these patterns without judgement and to understand where they came from. It can help us recognise the difference between an old emotional response and what is actually happening in the present. It can also provide an opportunity to explore the beliefs we have inherited, the roles we have adopted, and the expectations that continue to shape our choices.
Rather than simply asking, “How can I stop doing this?”, therapy can help us ask a more useful question: “What would I choose if I were responding from my adult self?”
From there, new possibilities begin to emerge.
A Compassionate Perspective
The goal of adulthood is not to leave our childhood selves behind. The child within us carries important experiences, emotions, creativity, vulnerability, and memories. Our earlier adaptations deserve understanding rather than criticism. They helped us navigate the world we were given. But adulthood gives us something that childhood could not: greater freedom to reflect, question, choose, and change. We can honour the ways we learned to survive while deciding which ways of being we want to carry forward. Authenticity is not about becoming someone completely different. It is about gradually becoming more fully ourselves. It’s about meeting the version of ourselves that we most want to be.
Collette O’Mahony is a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor in private practice, working with clients online. She writes regularly on mental health and emotional wellbeing, with a focus on self-discovery, developing self-awareness, and supporting individuals to take meaningful responsibility for their inner lives. To book a free introduction session click here.
