"Maladaptive" traits or traits that have kept you alive?
As a therapist and person living with complex trauma, I quite literally cringe at the word maladaptive. I feel my stomach drop and my throat tightens, a familiar feeling of indignity, anger, and humiliation. I roll my eyes and pause to take a deep breath. Without a doubt, my protective parts are guaranteed to come forward. Many mental health professionals would disagree with me on this, and maybe it is personal. But, we need to talk about why describing traits as maladaptive is harmful from a decolonized lens.
There is something that feels shameful about describing traits as maladaptive. Google defines maladaptive as "not providing adequate or appropriate adjustment to the environment or situation." Therapists often use the word maladaptive to describe coping strategies they deem as unhealthy or toxic, in particular substance use, self harm, disordered eating, behaviors that are avoidant or aggressive, and my least favorite, daydreaming.
As a child who grew up in a volatile home, I developed a few traits that kept me safe. I people-pleased (more clinically known as a fawn nervous system response to danger) in an attempt to manage my caregivers' feelings and manipulate their next moves. I dissociated to keep my social butterfly self separate from my home self, which was in survival mode. I developed OCD from my trauma in an attempt to stay in control when I actually had very little control of my circumstances, especially coming from a working class background. I escaped my reality by drawing, reading, writing stories, and yes, even daydreaming.
While I am eternally grateful to each of these traits that have become protective parts of myself that still come forward from time-to-time, many mental health professionals would likely pathologize these behaviors and call them maladaptive. This is incredibly shaming. At the same time, this isn't to say that these traits cannot or should not shift. Yet, the traits that folks develop as a result of complex trauma very often actually keep them alive—even the "toxic” and “unhealthy" ones. Even in the case in which the complex childhood trauma is over, most of us are still surviving the traumatic effects of late stage capitalism, racism, sexism, trans/homophobia, and living in a genocidal state—not to mention the long-lasting impacts of intergenerational trauma. How can we possibly expect people living in a traumatizing world to conform and adjust to their environment in ways that white supremacy culture—including and most definitely the mental health field—deems acceptable? How can we possibly call people's coping strategies as a result of oppression "maladaptive"?
This is where Internal Family Systems (IFS) comes in handy in my work as a trauma therapist. Until we can actually contextualize our traits as protective and solutions to our problems, we may find ourselves stuck in a loop of trying to change, but falling back on the traits that have worked for us for so long. IFS is a compassionate way to get to know these traits that we've developed—or what we call in IFS our parts—without shame. For me, my common protectors are my people-pleasing part, my OCD part, and my dissociated part. When I approached these parts with curiosity instead of judgement, I realized that for all these years, they've helped me navigate the world. They've helped me cope with years of chronic trauma. Once I befriended my parts, they softened. And over time, I've been able to give them space to evolve in ways that better serve me and my community.
As a field, my hope is that clinicians are moving away from describing any traits and behaviors as a maladaptive and understand how every single one of our traits that helped us survive trauma are, in fact, extremely adaptive. We have to be able to see this traits as solutions first before we can implement changes in our lives and experience embodied healing.
