by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
There’s Nothing ‘Wrong’ With You – You’re Just a Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation
One of the hidden assumptions many spend their lives filtering things through is this old chestnut:
“There’s something ‘wrong‘ with me“.
This doesn’t necessarily show up in a melodramatic, headline-grabbing way but in the low‑grade but persistent sense that their personality is ‘flawed’, ‘defective’, or fundamentally ‘off’ in some unknown way.
Normally, this shows as feeling held back in life by certain traits or personality ‘defects’:
Being too passive, too intense, too guarded, too needy, too controlling, too emotional, too distant, etc. etc. etc. – whatever the label, it carries the same underlying heaviness of “If only I weren’t like [x], my life would ‘work’ and everything would finally be [okay]”.
This underlying assumption of worthlessness – which is really just an extension of unresolved shame – sits at the root of a lot of the frustration, stagnation, and self‑sabotage that causes people to end up being ‘stuck’ – not because they lack intelligence, discipline, or insight but because they’re in a constant battle with themselves as they try to ‘improve‘ a personality they secretly resent.
Here’s the part that often gets missed, though:
Many of the so‑called ‘defects’ people struggle with are not signs that something has gone wrong inside them:
They’re a normal reaction to a messed up situation.
Once you really see this, everything changes.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
A Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- There’s Nothing ‘Wrong’ With You – You’re Just a Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation
- The Hidden Cost of Believing You’re ‘Broken’
- How Ego Is Built as Armour
- Judging the Survival Strategy Makes Everything Worse
- Explanation Is Not Excuse – It’s the Gateway to Transformation
- Realness: Why Acceptance Is the Only Way Forward
- Normal Reaction vs Abnormal Interpretation
- Stepping Out of Autopilot
- Real Vision Over Unreal Programming
- The Real Path: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
- A Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation: Practical Steps for Implementation
- The Final Word: A Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation
The Hidden Cost of Believing You’re ‘Broken’
Most people aren’t struggling because life is objectively hard (though it often is in the short-term) – they’re suffering because they believe their reactions to life are ‘wrong’.
What this means is that they’re constantly judging their own coping mechanisms for dealing with life:
They look at how they behave under pressure and how they withdraw, people‑please, overthink, explode, numb out, chase validation, avoid intimacy – or whatever other ‘defect’ they think they have – and then jump to the false conclusion that their personality is the problem.
From there, the inner war rages on and they find no peace in their own lives:
“I shouldn’t be like this”.
“I should be stronger”.
“Other people don’t react this way”.
(“Shoulds“, “Shouldn’ts” and comparisons are always going to be a one-way road to misery).
Underneath all of these (unreal) thoughts are what I often call the Unholy Trinity:
Shame, guilt, and/or trauma.
These forces don’t just lead to emotional pain but also end up shaping our self-image in the form of the ego – the personality structure we develop to keep that pain at bay because when shame, guilt, or unresolved trauma are running the show (usually unconsciously), the ego builds defensive strategies (including our belief system) designed to protect us from being hurt again.
What this means is that control freakery, perfectionism, emotional numbness, hyper‑independence, people‑pleasing, distrust, self‑judgement, and all these other less-than-ideal personality traits that hold us back in life aren’t random flaws: they’re survival mechanisms.
How Ego Is Built as Armour
The ego isn’t ‘evil’, it’s not the villain of the story, and it’s not something that you need to “kill” (because it’s not real) – it’s just a way of REACTING to life based on what you’ve been through and filtering life through your past experience instead of the present.
It normally goes like this:
When a child or young adult goes through something that cause shame, guilt, and/or trauma to disconnect them from themselves – for example, abuse, neglect, betrayal, chronic criticism, or emotional chaos -the nervous system learns one lesson very quickly and adapts accordingly:
“The world isn’t safe and I’m not enough as I am”.
So the ego steps in to manage the (perceived) danger:
This shows up as an unreal self-image (the ego) and a supporting set set of habits, beliefs, emotional reactions, and behavioural patterns that try to maintain control and avoid the re‑triggering of more shame, guilt, or pain.
This is why people often:
- Become control freaks to prevent chaos from returning and triggering their shame.
- People‑please to avoid rejection or punishment (which would also trigger their shame).
- Shut down emotionally to avoid being overwhelmed or having their nervous system go into ‘freeze’ mode.
- Distrust others to avoid betrayal and triggering old wounds.
- Seek attention to compensate for neglect.
- Suppress sexuality to avoid shame or uncontrolled lust.
In all of these cases (and similar), the ego isn’t trying to ruin your life – it’s simply trying to stop you from hurting all over again and having to face unhealed ‘stuff’ from the past before you’re ready to do so.
The problem isn’t that these defences exist but that we judge ourselves for having them which stops us from ever dropping our defences and growing REAL again.
This is why seeing this things as a normal reaction to a messed up situation is something that can help you to start living again…
Judging the Survival Strategy Makes Everything Worse
Because shame is driving them, many people turn their survival mechanisms into evidence that they are fundamentally flawed and so they don’t just notice their patterns and then do something about them – they attack themselves for them and stay stuck.
This creates a second layer of unnecessary suffering in their relationships with themselves (and then in their relationship with life by extension).
For example:
- Someone grows up with a domineering parent and learns to survive by being agreeable and compliant.
As an adult, they berate themselves for being passive and ‘spineless’ and think it’s just “who they are” (when, actually, this can let go of this because it’s unreal and a distortion of who they actually are in their realness). - Someone experiences a deeply traumatic event that overwhelms their nervous system and so they struggle to trust people later in life and judge themselves for being guarded or paranoid (because they think their nervous system dysregulation is who they actually are when it’s actually just something they have).
- Someone is emotionally neglected by an absent parent and grows up craving attention and so they secretly despise themselves for being ‘needy’ (when it’s actually just a strategy for winning ‘love’ that needs fine-tuning).
- Someone is sexually abused and becomes disconnected from their body so they start judging and distancing themselves from their own sexual feelings.
This leads to a state where lustful or intrusive sexual thoughts arise and they interpret them as moral failure instead of just being part of the human condition. - Someone is cheated on, the betrayal cuts deeply, and so years later, they can’t fall in love without fear of history repeating and so they shame themselves for being ‘emotionally unavailable’ (when they’re just protecting themselves more than is required because of what the ego is showing them).
In every case – and millions of stories just like these – the behaviour is not a sign of defect but is just:
A normal reaction to a messed up situation.
When people fail to see this, they end up fighting themselves instead of healing because they just create unnecessary friction and tension in themselves that stops them letting go and finding their realness again.
Explanation Is Not Excuse – It’s the Gateway to Transformation
Before I get too carried away, there’s an important distinction to probably be made here:
Understanding your patterns as “a normal reaction to a messed up situation” doesn’t mean excusing them indefinitely or avoiding responsibility for change – it means removing the unnecessary self-judgement from the process so you can accept yourself and then build something real.
Self‑judgement never leads to realness because it puts mental and emotional blocks between yourself and the actual flow of your life and so it leads to paralysis, repression, or compulsive ‘self‑improvement‘ that never quite works.
Acceptance, on the other hand, creates space and openness so that you can get out of your own way.
For example, when you can say to yourself “Of course I became like this after what I’ve been through” (a normal reaction to a messed up situation) then your attitude to the aspects of your personality that are holding you back softens, your perspective widens, and the problem is no longer about ‘You’ at a fundamental level but about how you identify with your reactions.
Instead of “I am broken” (or whatever else) it becomes “this is how a nervous system adapted to survive” and – once you’re no longer at war with yourself – real change actually becomes possible because you have a foundation of ACCEPTANCE on which to start building.
Realness: Why Acceptance Is the Only Way Forward
From the perspective of realness, judgement is always a sign of unreality because it means you’re not ACCEPTING the truth about things (acceptance is the opposite of judgement and all you can do with the truth is accept it).
Judgement says: “Reality should be different“.
Acceptance says: “This is what happened, this is how it is, and this is how I am”.
Being real doesn’t mean ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ what happened because reality doesn’t ‘care’ what we like or dislike – it just means seeing it clearly from your AWARENESS instead of being clouded by your DISTORTIONS.
Any time you judge yourself, you fragment yourself and become even more disconnected from yourself (which is the fundamental problem because the “normal reaction to a messed up situation” is that we hide our wholeness behind fragments).
Any time you judge yourself, you create more internal resistance, more emotional ‘stuff’ to be triggered, and more distance from wholeness which just means you end up living in the Void.
Acceptance, by contrast, integrates whatever you’ve been conditioned to hide from yourself which allows the nervous system to settle and the ego to loosen its grip because your emotions are no longer seen as a ‘threat’.
This is why acceptance isn’t passive but is in fact deeply practical because when you stop judging your reactions, you stop feeding them, and so you can go DO something real with your life.
Normal Reaction vs Abnormal Interpretation
Many people suffer unnecessarily, not because their reactions are extreme – but because they judge those reactions as being abnormal when they’re NOT:
The belief that your survival instincts are an abnormal reaction to a normal situation just fuels shame, stops you feeling what you need to feel, and stops you from accepting what you need to accept.
In truth, most of the experiences that wire shame and trauma into us are not normal at all – they’re distortions and often the result of someone else’s unreality pulling us into unreality.
(I.e. intergenerational trauma etc).
Neglect isn’t normal.
Abuse isn’t normal.
Chronic emotional invalidation isn’t normal.
Betrayal isn’t normal.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody is to ‘blame’ (they were just acting on autopilot in relation to their own shame, guilt, and/or trauma too) but it does mean that your reaction makes sense.
What definitely doesn’t make sense is blaming yourself for adapting to whatever you went through.
Stepping Out of Autopilot
Once you become AWARE and ACCEPT your patterns as conditioned reactions rather than personal ‘failures‘, something important happens:
You create distance between who you are in your realness and what you do when you act on autopilot because of how you were conditioned to react.
This is where you find the freedom to start growing REA again because you can start asking yourself better questions:
- Who would I like to become when I’m not running on survival mode/autopilot?
- What would I choose if I were present instead of programmed?
- What kind of life feels real when I’m regulated and not in nervous system dysregulation?
Your past no longer defines your future – it simply explains your starting point so that you know what materials you have to build with.
Real Vision Over Unreal Programming
Survival mechanisms are backward‑looking because they’re always reacting to what was (or appeared to be – who knows for sure?).
On the other side of the coin, vision is forward‑looking because it asks what you want to create with what you have in the present.
When you stop identifying with your defensive patterns, you can begin to act from intention rather than reaction but this doesn’t happen by forcing things…
It comes from calming your nervous system and dissolving shame so the ego no longer needs to dominate and you can actually make a CHOICE.
The Real Path: Awareness, Acceptance, Action
Healing and growth don’t require endless bouts of self-analysis or ‘fixing’ but they honesty and courage to look beyond your distortions and uncover the truth instead.
The process is simple, though not always easy (I walk my coaching clients through this process):
Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego): See your ego and its patterns clearly without judgement, noticing how they formed, and what they’re protecting you from.
Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self): Embrace the truth of your experience, let go of the idea that you should have been different or other than whatever it is that you are, and embrace the parts of yourself and life you’ve been hiding from (to keep the ego in place).
Action (Trust Yourself and Life): Move forward as if shame is not the authority on your life and act in alignment with what’s real now by doing what you can (trusting yourself) and letting life fill in the blanks to do what you can’t or to reveal the next step (trust life).
Real action doesn’t require perfection or for fear to disappear – it moves with and through fear, without obeying it.
If you want to go deeper into trusting yourself and life by growing real then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.
A Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation: Practical Steps for Implementation
- Reframe One Personality ‘Defect’ You Note In Yourself:
Choose one trait you judge yourself for and ask yourself “What situation might this have helped me survive?” Write it down and be grateful for it. - Remove ‘Moral’ Language and Value-Judgements:
Replace words like ‘weak’, ‘pathetic’, or ‘broken’ with neutral descriptions that describe behaviours that can be changed – not a ‘fixed’ identity. - Notice Autopilot Moments:
When a pattern shows up, don’t fight it – simply notice “This is the programme running“. It’s not YOU. - Create a Simple Vision:
Ask yourself: “If I were acting from presence today, what would I do differently?” Try and find ONE REAL THING that you can do. Then do it. - Act Without Waiting to Feel ‘Ready‘:
Take small actions aligned with your vision for realness – even if old emotions are still present. Act AS IF you’re on the path to becoming real right now.
(Real = not conditioned by shame etc.). - Return to Acceptance Daily:
Acceptance isn’t a one‑off insight that you ‘get’ as a concept…it’s a HABIT. Each time you step away from judgement, you move closer to wholeness (so keep doing it).
The Final Word: A Normal Reaction to a Messed Up Situation
You’re not defective – you’re adaptive…just like every other human being on the planet!
What you’re carrying makes ‘sense’ when you understand where it came from and – once you stop punishing yourself for surviving – you free up enormous energy to live your real life instead of a distortion of it.
Being real means seeing clearly, embracing the truth, and moving forward anyway – not because the past didn’t ‘matter’ but because it no longer gets to decide who you become or set the standards for how you judge yourself.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to start accepting yourself and building a real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get in the flow again.
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