People struggle to change their behaviour (even when they desperately want to) because past trauma distorts perception—making stagnation feel like safety and making necessary change feel like danger. Gabor Maté's decades studying addiction revealed this pattern: people recognise they're harming themselves yet continue because stopping would force them to face what the behaviour has been covering up all along.
This mechanism extends far beyond simple dependency. When someone experiences trauma, the psyche develops compensatory architecture—perceptual scaffolding that makes the unbearable tolerable. Like a potter reshaping a vessel around a crack rather than repairing it, consciousness moulds itself around the wound. The adjustment works