My friend was slapped and beaten a lot as a child. She had a mother with a temper and a nasty brother who was borderline sadistic, so she spent a lot of time getting the crap pounded out of her. Which wasn’t at all fair.

She soon learned that in the presence of her family, to speak truth was to invite another hard, cold whack to her cheeks, and possibly something even more painful from her brother later on. Her family wasn’t looking to help her; in fact, at times it seemed as though they were constantly probing her for weaknesses, and a speck of honesty would only be neatly filed away to be used against her later.

She learned, pretty quickly, to lie. And lie well. If she was angry, larger people would punish her for daring to be upset, so she learned to stuff all that down and force a smile to her face. If she wanted something, all honesty would get her was at best a lecture and at worst a pounding and then constant taunting from her brother, who would rub salt in her wounds because she’d been so dumb to ask for a stupid thing – so she learned to sneak around the edges.

You didn’t ask. You just quietly did things in the margins and hoped that folks didn’t notice.

Thankfully, my pal got out of that family, and actually made something of herself. She went to college, got herself a decent job, then found a pretty good husband.

At which point things began to fall apart.

The survival tactics she’d learned in her mother’s house kept her alive as a child, but as a grownup they were tearing her apart. It was a most excellent thing to lie about your feelings all the time when you were trapped, powerlessly, by a woman who could punish you at will – but when you were married to a man who was actually concerned for your well-being, keeping your emotions hidden meant that he couldn’t actually do anything for you.

She had the life she wanted at last. But because she was always smiling and nodding at whatever her husband did no matter what she thought of it, her new partner came to believe that everything he did made her happy. That’s rarely a good situation.

Then the troubles started. She wasn’t happy, and wasn’t expressing it. And of course, as she’d been trained, when you’re not happy and you want something the first thing you do is to avoid telling anyone at all costs. She soon discovered that buying things made her happy, and so she went out on gigantic shopping expeditions, then burned the credit card bills so he wouldn’t be able to yell at her. She ran up tens of thousands of dollars in debt, had secret drawers full of fine clothes that she didn’t dare to share with her husband.

She was anxious all the time because she had to not let him know what was going on, and yet couldn’t fix it. In the process of trying to calm down, she became addicted to painkillers.

She still wasn’t happy. Now she was in debt and on drugs, with a husband who’d been lead to believe that he was doing a great job, barely keeping the lid on a cauldron of secrets.

Thanks in part to her own habits, she had escaped one hell with a phenomenal intelligence and a fine force of will…. Only to land straight in another.

My friend eventually straightened herself up, but the interesting lesson here is that the things you need to learn to thrive in one lifestyle can be the exact same traits that ruin your next lifestyle. Life’s a mutable thing, changing all the time, and there’s not a single lesson that applies everywhere.

Sometimes, one survival trait even cuts off a larger issue. In response to my post on possible bad habits among the poor, Mattador said, “these beliefs and attitudes didn't grow out of nowhere. They're directly related to the circumstances these people (including me) grew up in, and they're useful attitudes, even survival mechanisms. I'm learning to cope with them and work around them myself, but if I had never had them, there are times in the past that stress would have pretty literally driven me insane.”

I don’t doubt that. Living poor is hard, and it probably causes a lot of ingrained coping skills. It’s entirely understandable. But that doesn’t mean those habits are necessarily good in the long run, or any habits learned in a time of trauma are necessarily helpful later on.

I had a terrible middle school experience where I was isolated and occasionally beaten by my schoolmates. It was a traumatic, lonely time, but the thing I have to remember is that it’s over. Even so, there are still times I react as though I was a greasy-haired misfit with no friends and a world tilted against him… And generally, when I do react that way, it’s to my detriment.

A bulldozer’s an awesome tool if you’re looking to build a house on new ground. It is, unfortunately, a pretty terrible tool if you want to maintain a house, and the lesson here is that sometimes, for your own survival in a new and better place, you must unlearn the things you learned so well and take on a new rules set.

Look around you. It’s entirely possible that your environment has changed, and for the better. If you’re lucky, it might be time to let go of a few old tools.

(Tell me I'm full of it)