Your pain was once your strength
Posted on May 09, 2025 by Dr Michael (Mickey) Hobbs, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
You're not broken. Humans don't break; machines do. Understanding your coping strategies can highlight to you what your strengths actually are.
Whether we’re talking about unhelpful habits, coping strategies, workaholism, hyper-vigilance, perfectionism, co-dependency, dysfunctional movement patterns, or even back pain, don’t forget that at some point it was likely a very helpful strategy to develop. It kept you alive, it helped you cope. While it may now be frustrating or hindering, at some point, it was appropriate, and even beneficial. This coping strategy is highly specific to you, and you developed it because it was the most effective strategy for YOU, with all of your personality traits, strengths, habits, and nuances. In fact, you can look at your coping strategies as indicators of what your underlying strengths may be.
As I like to say, “You’re not broken. Humans don’t break; machines do. You’ve been adapting, we’re always adapting. Befriend the strategy in order to understand it. It’s been carrying the team, potentially for a very long time."
Even in direct trauma, we can see how system failures help keep us safe. Dissociation, disembodiment, workaholism, rationalisation, and continuing to play small are all effective strategies at certain points in our lives. Even limping around after an injury was initially a very useful thing to do! It just may not be that useful for you years later, after the original injury has healed, and you are now getting hip or back pain because you are continuing to limp.
When we remind ourselves that our pain was once our strength, we can have a lot more compassion for ourselves and our process. Shaming ourselves into change isn’t a sustainable long term strategy. It’s why a lot of coaching programs don’t work. Being pulled towards a vision of yourself, rather than being pushed by shame or pain, requires more imagination, but is ultimately more successful over the long-term. If we can learn to regard even our pain points with compassion, when life gets challenging, we can navigate through it with more success.
And so here’s an inquiry for you to sit with: how did this pain once serve me?
