Deep-seated trauma can push people to develop no end of unique and even quirky coping skills. But once developed, because they have a track record of some success, such skills will likely continue to be called upon for new situations even if the underlying trauma is handled well and healed. To what extent do such behaviors that would be better off abandoned, continue to have a life of their own and become a bad habit, rather than being eliminated once healing has been achieved?

This phenomenon is very common and is a typical consequence of having karmic trauma taking place in one's life. The individual involved will be motivated to process what has happened and adapt in some way. This is what leads to the coping strategies you speak of which are a kind of defensive mechanism to help them get through the challenge as well as its aftermath in many cases. The fact these coping strategies can be maladaptive is a consequence of the nature of the wounding that takes place during the trauma itself. Once that has occurred, the need to cope is because there is a residue of continued suffering that maintains that wounding and awareness, and this demands a response of some kind because it is seen as a real threat to be taken seriously. A coping strategy is a kind of routine and a habit, and this is the clue to its nature. In fact, it is embedded within the physicality of the individual to some extent, as well as an energetic signature within the akashic records of all that happens, that is referenced by the deep subconscious to understand what has taken place and to keep it in awareness and on the radar screen, so to speak, to guard the self in watching for a future reoccurrence with some planning underway in how to handle it in the future should it come again. The persistence of the pain that motivates a person to have a kind of defensive maneuver that is seen as a coping strategy is in actuality, a consequence oftentimes of cellular memory that is preserving the pain of the prior trauma, and it is actively throbbing and buzzing and ringing alarm bells, perhaps at a low level, but will nonetheless get noticed and this provides a motivation and incentive to raise the drawbridge, so to speak, to put up the shields, to gird oneself for a potential attack, and thus be in more of a mood of apprehension, concern, quiet reserve, watchfulness, and not to be freewheeling and carefree and lighthearted. So it will affect the demeanor of the individual as well as their ongoing emotional experience, because cellular memory is a kind of landmine of its own. It is the most difficult part of a trauma to heal, and this explains a lot of the subsequent emotional fallout from a trauma event when a person continues to suffer in various ways with nightmares, sleeplessness, increased anxiety, obsessive recurring thoughts about the type of event in question as though they are rehearsing again and again for a return engagement, and in the process reminding themselves of all that happened in stirring up the old pain, so this can become a vicious cycle of rewounding and intensification. Cellular memory will fade if ignored for long enough time, but if there is a repeat event of a similar trauma, this will reinvigorate the cellular memory and reinforce it and can bring back a set of symptoms and exaggerated coping response that was learned previously that faded, but is now reborn. So these are some of the mechanisms of vulnerability that must be considered and reckoned with in terms of ongoing healing. It is best to do as comprehensive and thorough a job as possible, given that ability of consciousness to reengage and begin to fret over things that have been healed previously, and because they are real and are a danger, will reconnect to the memory of what happened and then raise it to a level that becomes painful out of a kind of compassion and sympathy for the self, knowing from hard-won experience how difficult it was. So a person can work themselves into a tizzy and reopen a wound that is healed.