What the Cacti Taught Me About Surviving Ourselves

I was standing in front of a wall of cacti in Morocco and I found myself considering how they were thriving in a landscape that offers almost nothing - no rain to speak of, soil that barely deserves the name, and temperatures that would leave most garden plants struggling. Yet

there they were. Not just surviving, but thriving.

Cacti didn’t arrive in the desert built this way. Over thousands of generations, they adapted; leaves shrank to spines to stop water loss, stems swelled to store what little moisture they could find, root systems spread wide and shallow to catch rain the moment it fell. Every strange, spiky feature of a cactus is a solution to a problem. Nothing about it is accidental. It is a plant that has been shaped, entirely, by the harshness of where it had to live.

Standing there, I found myself thinking less about the cacti and more about us. About the way we, too, are shaped by where we have to live - not deserts of sand, but deserts of a different kind. Emotional ones.

We Adapt, Too

Give a child a harsh environment and they will adapt to it, just as surely as a cactus adapts to drought. It doesn’t matter what form the harshness takes. A narcissistic or controlling parent. An alcoholic household. A home where criticism was the main language spoken. Poverty, instability, chaos. A child in any of these conditions does not get the luxury of choosing whether to adapt. They adapt, or they don’t get through it.

So they learn. They learn to read a room before they’ve stepped fully into it, to sense a shift in mood before a word has been spoken. They learn to become small; quiet, undemanding, invisible when invisibility feels safer than being seen. They learn to catch the good moments while they last, because they know instinctively not to trust them to stay. They learn to roll with the punches, because standing still hurts more.

None of this is weakness. It is, in fact, an extraordinary piece of human intelligence. A child who learns to read a volatile parent’s mood in half a second is doing something remarkably sophisticated. It just doesn’t feel that way from the inside. From the inside, it just feels like who they are.

When Childhood Coping Mechanisms Become Our Identity

A cactus doesn’t know it has spines instead of leaves. It simply is what the desert made it. And this, I think, is exactly what happens to us. The childhood coping mechanisms we built to survive - the shrinking, the vigilance, using humour as armour, the fierce independence, the need to be endlessly capable - follow us into adulthood and stop feeling like coping strategies. They start to feel like personality. Like identity. Like “just who I am.”

It doesn’t help that the people around us often prefer it that way. The quiet one is easy to overlook. The funny one keeps everyone laughing so nobody has to notice what’s really going on underneath. The capable one can be endlessly relied upon...until they can't. It suits the people around us to see us as the adaptation, so they reflect that version back to us - and because it’s reflected back so consistently, we come to believe it too. And then that becomes the self we offer to the world, the self that new people meet and believe to be simply, factually, who we are.

A survival strategy, mistaken for a self.

The tragedy isn’t that we adapted - adapting is what kept us alive. The tragedy is that those adaptations can become the lens through which we experience everything else, long after the desert has disappeared.

Long After the Desert

Here is the strange part: cacti, left in more forgiving soil, stay cacti. They don’t have much choice - that’s evolution. But we are not only shaped by evolution. We are shaped by experience, and experience can be revisited, understood, and, crucially, updated. This is where we part ways with the cactus. We can consciously adapt back.

But it rarely happens automatically, and it rarely happens quickly. More often, we don’t even notice how deeply the old strategies are still embedded until life places us in kinder surroundings and we find, to our surprise, that we don’t quite know how to grow leaves again.

This tends to surface most clearly at points of transition.

Think of the woman who has spent years raising small children. Slowly, almost without noticing, her own needs have slipped further and further down the list. Her sense of who she is has gradually become wrapped up in running a home, caring for everyone else and keeping family life moving. And then her youngest starts school.

Suddenly there are hours in the day that don’t belong to anyone else. Space opens up. And in that space, a question she hasn’t had time to ask in years starts to surface: who am I, actually, underneath all of this?

It’s a wonderful moment. It’s also, very often, a disorienting one - because the coping strategies she developed over years of putting herself last don’t suddenly disappear simply because the environment has changed. She may apply for that first job, rediscover something she’d forgotten she loved, say yes to an opportunity she’d once have talked herself out of, only to find her voice smaller than she expected, her instinct to shrink still fully intact, a harsh inner critic ready with reasons why she shouldn’t take up space. The old adaptation, still faithfully doing its job, in a landscape that no longer requires it.

Getting Help Is the Faster Route

We could, in theory, wait for these patterns to fade on their own, the way a species slowly evolves over generations. But most of us don’t have generations. We have this life, and increasingly, we have moments - like a child starting school, a marriage ending, turning 35, 40, 50, grief, illness, a diagnosis, retirement, children leaving home - that ask us to be someone bigger than our old childhood coping mechanisms allow.

This is where getting help becomes not a sign of failure, but simply the sensible, quicker route. Whether that’s through talking therapies, holistic healing, coaching or another supportive approach, having someone walk alongside us can help us recognise the patterns we’ve been living with for years and begin to understand where they came from. But understanding is only part of the picture. These adaptations aren’t simply thoughts. They become woven into the way we experience ourselves, stories we’ve repeated so often that we’ve stopped questioning whether they’re even true. They’re carried in our bodies, our nervous systems and our emotions. Many people also experience them as something deeper - something they sense energetically, intuitively or spiritually.

That’s why healing can take so many different forms. Sometimes we need to talk. Sometimes we need to sit quietly with ourselves for the first time in years. Sometimes we need someone to challenge the stories we’ve come to believe about ourselves. Sometimes we need to reconnect with our bodies, our intuition and the parts of ourselves we’ve long since stopped listening to.

Whatever path we choose, the work isn’t about becoming somebody else. It isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It isn’t even about getting rid of the adaptations. They were never the enemy, they helped us survive. The problem isn’t that we adapted. It’s that somewhere along the way we forgot the adaptations weren’t the whole of who we are.

The work is about understanding why they were needed, thanking them for protecting us through whatever we had to survive, and then beginning to let them go and rediscover who we are underneath them. Sometimes that’s through conversation, through stillness, through healing. Sometimes it’s simply through having someone walk alongside us while we begin asking different questions. However we do it, we’re doing far more than changing our thoughts. We’re changing our relationship with ourselves. And that changes everything.

And here is the part I find most beautiful. When we do this work - when we begin to loosen the grip of an old survival strategy and rediscover who we are without it - we are not only doing it for ourselves. Every person around us benefits. Our children get a mother who isn’t operating from old fear. Our partners get a version of us that isn’t hiding. Our friends get honesty instead of the performance of being fine. Healing has a way of rippling outward, exactly like a plant taking root and slowly changing the soil around it for whatever grows there next.

The cacti in that Moroccan garden were extraordinary because every part of them told the story of the environment they had adapted to survive. But they are, in the end, still shaped entirely by the desert. We are lucky enough not to be. We get to notice the spines we grew to survive. We can understand why we needed them and we can thank them for protecting us. But we don’t honour our survival by keeping the spines forever. We honour it by recognising why we grew them - and by discovering who we become when we no longer need them.

If this blog resonates with you and you’re beginning to wonder who you are beneath the adaptations, I’d be honoured to walk alongside you. Whether through Reiki, Shamanic Healing, Sound Therapy or simply a conversation about where to begin, you’re warmly welcome to get in touch.