Over time, early and necessary (and sometimes life-saving) defensive maneuvers and coping strategies evolve into “patterns” of thinking, feeling, and behaving. These patterns come to operate like “organizing principles,” or beliefs about how the world works and how we must act in order to survive or thrive. These patterned coping strategies turn into invisible and automatic “habits” that influence where your attention goes and what adaptive strategies you employ to interact in the world.
