Every symptom saved you the year it was born

From WeChat public account: Brain in a Vat · cybernetics, by Preston. Image: unsplash

Because I run this public account, I’ve gotten to know many psychology students, teachers, and readers who are therapists. A few days ago, I had dinner with a friend who is a full‑time counselor.

He has been in the field for over a decade and has seen more than a thousand clients. I was curious about his work and asked him many questions. He shared many stories while protecting patient privacy.

Near the end of the meal, I asked him: over all these years, is there one sentence you say most often to your clients?

He thought for a moment, then said yes. And then he said a sentence that has stayed with me ever since:

“Every symptom saved you the year it was born.”

At first, I didn’t get it. Really, I didn’t. After he explained a bit, I half‑understood.

Over the next few days, that sentence kept coming back to me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t just a comforting phrase — it was a stark factual statement. It carried much more than I initially grasped.

Today I want to write out that whole thought process.

Procrastination, fragility, anxiety, caring too much about others’ opinions, going blank under pressure, inability to say no, stress‑eating, pulling away at the first sign of trouble in relationships.

We label these as flaws, even pathologies. They seem like broken parts in our system that we need to fix, delete, or overwrite.

So we read books, try self‑discipline, see doctors, download apps. We call it self‑improvement, optimization.

But if you’re honest, you’ll notice an awkward fact: we never really get rid of these symptoms.

Ten years ago and today — same procrastination, same people‑pleasing, same anxiety in key moments. You’ve tried many times, but with little lasting effect.

We usually explain this as lack of willpower or discipline, and conclude that’s just who we are.

And the failure to change becomes yet another flaw.

That’s the unwinnable battle I’m talking about. The core reason is that you’re fighting a completely misjudged opponent.

My therapist friend’s sentence deconstructs the nature of that “battle.”

You think these symptoms are malfunctions — but they are your “airbags.”

And you’re trying to dismantle your own airbags.

I asked him for examples. He told me a story that stuck with me.

A young woman in her twenties came to him with uncontrollable binge eating, especially late at night. She hated it and had tried everything: throwing away snacks, making pacts with friends, brushing her teeth right after dinner.

The longest she lasted was three weeks. Then one binge undid weeks of effort, followed by even deeper self‑loathing.

After some sessions, he noticed a detail: her late‑night binges almost always happened on nights after talking to her mother.

Digging deeper, he found that their phone calls — since she was a teenager studying away from home — followed the same pattern: constant evaluation, comparison, interrogation, demands to justify every decision.

She never fought back, because she couldn’t win and didn’t dare. Her coping mechanism: after the call, she would stuff down that raw, exposed feeling with food.

My friend said, if you don’t put it back in its original context, it just looks like “gluttony” or “lack of willpower.”

But in context, it was an emotional solution invented by a teenager with no one to turn to.

It’s crude, with heavy side effects — but it worked back then.

And why is she still using it? Because no one ever taught her a second way.

After that dinner, I pushed the reasoning further and found that this lens explains most psychological symptoms.

People‑pleasing often arises in families where expressing real needs invites punishment. Reading the room is a high‑level survival skill — the sharper your radar, the less hurt you absorb.

Procrastination is rarely laziness. Think about it: what you put off isn’t the hard task, but the one that will be judged. If you grew up with homework always marked up in red ink, the optimal strategy was: don’t hand it in, and you won’t be marked wrong. For many, procrastination is protection.

Emotional numbing — that “I feel nothing” state — often appears where feeling too much would make life unbearable. It’s like a circuit breaker.

Hypervigilance — the ability to instantly sense tension at the dinner table — develops in families where you had to notice danger before it arrived. Usually, one or both parents are emotionally volatile.

I realized that all these symptoms share the same structure: in that old environment, the response was effective, even optimal. In today’s environment, it’s outdated and costly.

The response hasn’t changed; the environment has.

I call it an “expired life jacket.” That jacket really saved you back then, so your body remembers it, even welded it to you. The problem is, you’re already ashore, but you’re still wearing it — so you look clumsy, absurd, uncoordinated.

Everyone tells you to take it off, but you can’t. Because in your body’s memory, taking it off equals drowning.

This isn’t just a metaphor. Anna Freud systematically mapped these defense mechanisms. Later, George Vaillant’s decades‑long research ranked them from immature to mature. The common premise of all this work is: defense mechanisms function to protect, not to destroy.

In developmental psychology, there’s the “avoidant” infant — when the mother leaves and returns, the child doesn’t cry, appearing independent. Early on, people thought that was well‑adjusted. But physiological measures showed their heart rates and stress hormones were sky‑high.

They’re not fine — they’ve just learned not to show it. Because in their experience, expressing need doesn’t help, and may even invite worse responses.

That “independence” is actually a cost.

With the above understanding, one phenomenon makes sense.

Our usual way of fixing flaws is suppression: don’t scroll, don’t overthink, don’t be anxious, don’t please, don’t eat.

The problem is that suppression backfires. Daniel Wegner’s famous white‑bear experiment: try not to think of a white bear. The more you try, the more the bear appears. He called it “ironic rebound.”

The reason is simple: to monitor “am I thinking of the bear?”, the brain must first summon the bear. Monitoring itself is a recall.

And if that thing isn’t just a thought, but a life‑jacket with a protective function, it’s even worse.

Because the moment you try to take it off, the system detects that protection is being removed.

It doubles down: anxiety spikes, urges intensify, the behavior becomes more attractive. You think it’s weak willpower — but it’s your protective system sounding the alarm.

Think about it: if these symptoms had zero benefit and only harm, they’d have been eliminated by experience. People don’t persistently repeat behaviors that are 100% harmful with zero payoff.

They persist precisely because they offer something.

Vincent Felitti, the lead researcher of the ACE study, shared an observation I find striking. Early in his career, he worked in a weight‑loss clinic and noticed a paradox: those who lost the most weight had the highest dropout‑and‑regain rates.

One woman, after significant weight loss, rapidly regained it. The reason: she was pursued by men after becoming thinner, and that attention reawakened childhood abuse memories.

For her, weight was a wall — a protective wall.

Felitti concluded: we think obesity is the problem, but for many, it’s the solution.

If you only target the weight, you’re tearing down someone’s wall without knowing what’s outside.

So my therapist friend’s statement can be pushed further: you can’t change these “flaws” because you still need them.

Until you have a replacement, your system will never let you give up the only life jacket it knows.

Regular readers know I don’t just explain theory without giving practical steps. Here are three suggestions — from cognition to behavior to mindset.

But these aren’t about accepting everything and changing nothing. Rather, they’re the only sequence I know that can actually make change happen.

1. Do self‑archaeology before decision‑making.

Our habitual self‑question is “Why am I so bad?” That question leads nowhere; it always circles back to guilt.

A different question changes everything: What does this behavior help me avoid?

Procrastination — what am I avoiding? Fear of judgment? Fear of being exposed as not that capable? Saying yes when I wanted to say no — what did I avoid? That momentary shift in the other person’s face?

When I asked myself that, I felt something strange — not shame, but a kind of tenderness.

Because you finally see that the behavior isn’t a stain on your character, but an answer you found when you had no better options.

You thought you were fighting your own depravity — but now you see you’re dealing with a need. And needs can be met differently.

2. Preserve the function, change the action.

This is the most critical step.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), Richard Schwartz’s core idea is that there are no bad parts inside — only parts stuck in extreme roles.

In practice, this means treatment isn’t about expulsion, but about freeing that part. Concretely: every successful change isn’t about losing a bad habit, but about gaining a better tool.

So stop setting goals like “I will stop binge‑eating at night.” That goal is doomed because it only subtracts.

The right format has two lines:

Line 1: The function this behavior serves for me is — to push down the overwhelming feeling of being invalidated.

Line 2: What else could serve the same function with lower cost? — e.g., after that phone call, take a 15‑minute walk; write down the unsaid words in a note, without sending it; tell a friend in advance, “I might want to talk tonight.”

These alternatives feel “weaker” than bingeing. Of course they do — they’re unskilled. Your old solution has been practiced for a decade.

Change isn’t about yanking out the old plug; it’s about plugging in the new one first. When the new one can supply power, the old one will loosen on its own.

3. Allow return, and don’t treat it as failure.

We have to admit: under enough pressure, the old life jacket will reappear. On a particularly hard week, you’ll procrastinate again, people‑please again.

What really hurts in that moment is usually not the behavior itself, but the self‑verdict: “See, I really can’t do it.”

That verdict is far more damaging than the relapse. It turns an isolated event into a sentence on your character. Psychologists call this “abstinence violation effect” — once you feel you’ve broken the rule, you let go completely. “Might as well.”

But here’s a different frame: the return of the old pattern is a re‑deployment.

It appears because your system judges that the current stress exceeds your new tool’s capacity, so it calls up the most practiced, most reliable old equipment. Functionally, that’s reasonable.

The right response is to ask: What was that stress? At what point did my new method fail? That turns a setback into a data point.

My friend made an observation I love: the real sign that a client is improving isn’t symptom disappearance — it’s a shift in how they talk about the symptom.

From a simple “I did it again” to “I noticed I did that today — I think it was because of that meeting this morning.”

When the language changes, the situation has already started to change. Because the first is a verdict; the second is an observation. And only the observer can make adjustments.

Back to my friend’s sentence.

Every symptom saved you the year it was born.

Now I understand why it struck me so hard. It’s a complete reversal of attribution. We were trained to see everything in ourselves as good or bad. Keep the good, remove the bad.

That framework is simple and useful — but it has a fatal flaw: it never asks where this thing came from, or what it was doing back then.

So we spend years fighting something that once protected us.

We’re not fighting flaws — we’re fighting the child who had no other way and could only protect themselves that way. And that battle hurts you whether you win or lose.

The real way out is not to discover your flaws and overcome them. First, crouch down and see what they protected. Then, find a better‑fitting tool to replace them.

As for the old life jacket — it deserves to be laid down with care. Because back then, it truly saved a version of you who had no other choice.

The deepest compassion for yourself is acknowledging that you had no choice back then.

From that place, change can actually begin.

From WeChat public account: Brain in a Vat · cybernetics, by Preston

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