My daughter has just finished her first year at college.
A few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined that being possible.
After some difficult experiences at school, she spent three years being home educated. Like many parents whose children have struggled in educational settings, we carried a lot of anxiety about what would happen next. Would she be able to cope with college? Would she find her place? Would it just be too challenging for her?
But not only has she settled in well, she has absolutely flourished. Last week, she was awarded Student of the Year on her course!
Watching her development has been both moving and fascinating.
Because whilst it’s tempting to see this as a story about resilience, determination or personal growth, I think there’s something else going on.
The biggest change wasn’t her.
The biggest change was the environment.
Too often, when people struggle, we assume the issue lies within the individual.
We look for deficits, weaknesses or limitations. We ask what needs fixing. We focus on helping people become more resilient, more confident, more capable.
Sometimes that’s necessary and appropriate.
But often the person isn’t the problem.
Sometimes they are trying to function in an environment that doesn’t allow them to thrive. When my daughter was in school, she was focused only on survival.
As a psychotherapist and coach, I see this regularly.
People come to me believing there is something wrong with them because they are anxious, disengaged, exhausted or lacking confidence.
Yet when we begin to explore their experiences more deeply, we often discover that their responses make perfect sense within the context they have been living or working in.
Human beings are remarkably adaptive.
When we experience environments that feel unsafe, critical, unpredictable or overwhelming, we adapt in order to survive.
We become quieter.
We second-guess ourselves.
We withdraw.
We stop taking risks.
We mask parts of who we are.
We focus on getting through rather than growing.
From the outside, these adaptations can easily be mistaken for a lack of capability.
In reality, they are often signs of a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
What I’ve learned from watching my daughter over the past year is that when people feel safe enough, supported enough and accepted enough, amazing things can happen.
The qualities that seemed absent often weren’t absent at all.
The confidence was there.
The intelligence was there.
The creativity was there.
The potential was there.
It had simply been buried beneath the effort of trying to cope.
Seeing her flourish has reminded me that many of us carry stories about who we are based on environments that were never designed for us to thrive in.
We decide we’re not confident enough.
Not clever enough.
Not resilient enough.
Not capable enough.
But what if those conclusions aren’t the truth?
What if they are simply the conclusions we reached whilst doing our best to survive?
Sometimes growth is about finding the conditions that allow us to become more fully ourselves.
And perhaps that’s the question worth considering:
Are you struggling because something is wrong with you?
Or are you trying to grow in an environment that only allows you to survive?