What does it mean to be well adapted? It may sound like something unambiguously positive. But… adapted to what?
Survival may require you to be “well-adapted” to a toxic environment: a family that is in some way abusive, a boarding school where vulnerability is punished, professions and corporations that reward overwork and compliance, peer groups where aggression or moral numbness are the price of belonging. In these situations, adaptation for survival might come at a psychological cost.
The child who learns not to feel in order to survive the emptiness of the home or the bullying of boarding school, the junior doctor who suppresses awareness of their bodily limits to endure brutal hours and achieve, the teenager who joins a gang to find safety and identity. They all adapted – they made appropriate and rational choices that offer survival, even success.
The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas referenced this in his idea of normative illness: ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are widely accepted, even admired – yet pathological.
Here takes place the clash of attachment versus authenticity. To remain attached to parents, peers, or institutions, you may have to give up something of yourself. The child learns, usually unconsciously, that belonging is conditional. To belong you must be this way, not that way. Feel this, not that. Authentic impulses are suppressed so that the relationship is preserved. Over time your compromise becomes your character. What began as a survival strategy becomes a way of being.
What is lost may be something essential: spontaneity, sensitivity, the capacity for intimacy, even a sense of your existence. Adaptation, in these cases, means internalising something of the sickness of your environment. And the individual looks OK from the outside, exactly because the illness is normative in that environment.
A more appealing notion of adaptation might involve remaining true to your heart, holding on to your conscience in an immoral system. Feeling outrage where numbness or cruelty is typically rewarded. Staying emotionally alive in places that regard emotion as weakness. But this kind of adaptation comes with its own cost: you risk disapproval or being outcast.
Being “well adapted” is not always a moral possibility. The question is not just how well adjusted you are, but what you have adjusted to. In a toxic environment or culture, which parts of yourself had to be sacrificed in order to belong?
Image credit: David Zwaila
