Adaptation is a way of changing in response to what a person’s environment rewards, requires or makes safer.
An adaptation may use a real strength: competence, charm, independence, care, quiet, beauty, humour. It becomes harder to see when that strength stops feeling available by choice and starts feeling compulsory.
In The Sensual Hero’s Journey, adaptation is not evidence that the self is fake. It is intelligence shaped by context. The question is whether an old solution is still deciding what feels possible now.
Different from: identity. Identity is the larger experience of who you understand yourself to be. Adaptation is one influence on how that identity was formed and maintained.
Related: The Shaped Self; Protection; Agency; That’s Not Me.
