The Behaviours You Criticize May Be the Ones That Once Kept You Safe

Maybe you overthink decisions that other people seem able to make easily. You find yourself saying yes when you want to say no, rehearsing difficult conversations before having them, or softening what you intended to say when the moment finally arrives. Perhaps you work harder than necessary, have difficulty asking for help, or feel surprisingly uncomfortable when someone is disappointed in you.

Over time, you may have collected labels for these parts of yourself. Perfectionist. People pleaser. Hyper independent. Conflict avoidant. Overachiever. Too sensitive.

We have an extensive vocabulary for describing the behaviours we’d like to change, and much of personal development is organized around helping us eliminate them. But there’s another question worth asking before deciding that a pattern is simply a problem:

What did this once help me do?

That question is central to the work of Ranbir Puar, founder of Pure Atma Growth & Development Inc. Since 2009, Puar has worked with clients through an integrative approach that brings together conscious and subconscious work, nervous system and somatic practices, Clinical Hypnotherapy, biofeedback, neurofeedback and mindset.

Her work challenges the assumption that every unwanted behaviour should immediately be treated as a flaw to eliminate. Sometimes the very patterns we criticize in adulthood make considerably more sense when we understand what they may once have helped us navigate.

The Behaviour May Be Outdated, but the Intelligence Behind It Isn’t

Children depend deeply on their environments. They cannot simply leave difficult situations, choose different caregivers, or independently create what they need. Because safety, connection, and belonging matter, they adapt.

A child who learns that achievement brings praise may become highly accomplished. One raised around unpredictability may become skilled at reading subtle changes in mood. Another may become self-sufficient or agreeable because those behaviours help keep relationships stable.

These adaptations are not always conscious, nor does every perfectionist, people pleaser, or highly independent adult share the same childhood experience. Human behaviour is far more complex than any single explanation.

Still, responses that repeatedly help us navigate our environment can become automatic. Over time, we may stop seeing them as adaptations and experience them simply as who we are.

The child who anticipates others' needs may become a thoughtful adult. The child who learns not to need much may become fiercely independent. The child who fears mistakes may become highly conscientious.

These qualities can become genuine strengths while still carrying traces of earlier strategies for maintaining safety, connection, or belonging.

When Yesterday’s Adaptation Becomes Today’s Frustration

The difficulty is that an adaptation can remain long after the circumstances that shaped it have changed.

As an adult, you have capacities and choices that weren’t available to you as a child. You may now be able to leave situations that aren’t healthy, choose who has access to your life, express preferences, set boundaries, ask for help and tolerate another person's disappointment without losing the relationship.

Your circumstances may have changed considerably, but familiar responses don’t automatically disappear simply because the original environment is gone.

That can create a confusing contradiction. Intellectually, you may know that saying no is entirely reasonable while still feeling significant anxiety when you do it. You may understand that you don’t need everyone's approval and still find disapproval unusually uncomfortable. You may know that mistakes are part of being human while experiencing your own mistakes as though they say something much larger about your worth or competence.

Then something else happens: you begin criticizing yourself for having the response at all.

You wonder why you can’t just set the boundary, stop worrying, ask for help or care less about what someone thinks. What may once have been a useful way of navigating your environment becomes another reason to believe there’s something about yourself that needs fixing.

Puar's work offers a different way of looking at that contradiction.

The behaviour may no longer be useful without having always been wrong.

An adaptation can be intelligent and outdated at the same time.

You Don’t Have to Hate a Pattern to Outgrow It

Personal development can easily become another form of self criticism. Once we identify an unwanted pattern, we often try to eliminate it quickly: stop people pleasing, procrastinating, overthinking, or caring so much about what others think.

But forcing away a response without understanding what it has been doing for us can overlook something important.

Consider someone who has spent decades being the dependable one in her family. She knows others can manage their own responsibilities, recognizes that she is exhausted, and understands the need for boundaries. Yet when she finally says no to a request she cannot take on, she feels anxious.

That anxiety does not necessarily mean the boundary was wrong. It may simply mean the boundary is unfamiliar.

If accommodating others became associated with safety, approval, connection, or belonging, responding differently can feel uncomfortable even when it is appropriate. This helps explain why insight alone does not always create change. We can understand our patterns and still struggle when an old response is activated.

For Puar, meaningful change involves helping these different levels of experience move in the same direction.

The Nervous System Isn’t Just Learning to Be Calm

Nervous system regulation is often described as becoming calmer, but Puar takes a broader view. A healthy life includes excitement, grief, anger, uncertainty, stress, and many other emotional states. What matters is developing greater flexibility within them.

Can you experience someone's disappointment without abandoning your boundary? Can you make a mistake without seeing it as proof that you are inadequate? Can you receive support without feeling indebted, or care about another person's emotions without feeling responsible for changing them?

These experiences can give the nervous system new information about the present. The adult system can begin to recognize something that may not have felt possible before: I have choices now.

Your circumstances, relationships, resources, and capacities may have changed. You no longer have to respond to the present using only strategies developed in the past.

That does not require rejecting who you once were or treating an earlier adaptation as defective. It means allowing your responses to evolve alongside the life you are actually living.

From Adaptation to Choice

This perspective also changes the conversation about self trust.

Self trust does not mean treating every thought, emotion, or bodily response as an instruction. Our internal experiences are shaped by past learning, present circumstances, fear, intuition, desire, and habit. That is why discernment matters.

Puar organizes her work around four interconnected pillars: Self Image, Self Trust, Congruence, and Sovereignty.

Self Image considers who we learned we needed to be and whether that identity still reflects who we are becoming.

Self Trust means developing a relationship with our internal experience without dismissing it or letting every feeling determine our choices.

Congruence asks whether the way we live reflects what we privately know, value, and want.

Sovereignty considers whether we are actively directing our lives or still being governed by old patterns, expectations, and fears.

Seen this way, growth becomes less about fighting who we were and more about expanding our choices.

The person who learned to read a room can keep her sensitivity without managing everything she detects. The fiercely independent person can remain capable while learning to receive support. The high achiever can pursue excellence without tying achievement to worth. The people pleaser can care deeply about others without placing their feelings above her own.

The qualities themselves may not be the problem. What becomes limiting is the absence of choice around how and when we use them.

You’re Allowed to Update

An adaptation can deserve appreciation for what it once provided without being given permanent authority over the life you're living now. There is an important difference between believing, This is just who I am, and recognizing, This is something I learned to do. The first can make a pattern feel like an identity, while the second creates space for something new.

Perhaps growing beyond an old pattern doesn’t begin by becoming more critical of yourself. It may begin by understanding why the pattern once made sense, recognizing what’s different now, and allowing your mind and body to experience the choices that are available to you today.

You don’t have to reject the person you learned to become. Those adaptations may have helped you navigate experiences when you had fewer choices, less power and fewer resources than you have today.

You can honour the strategies that once helped you feel safe without allowing them to decide what safety needs to look like today.

Connect with Ranbir through her website, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.