Why Change Feels So Hard: How Secondary Gain Keeps You Stuck

You’ve probably said it before: “If only I could just change this, then I’d be unstoppable.”

Maybe “this” is the relationship dynamic that drains you. Or the limiting belief you’ve journaled on a hundred times. Or the habit you know isn’t serving you, like doom scrolling on social media or staying up too late.

And yet… the pattern, dynamic, habit, or behavior clings.

You’ve set intentions, pulled cards, written affirmations, maybe even done the therapy and coaching—but the pattern always seems to loop back around. That tug-of-war between wanting change and staying stuck can feel exhausting, even discouraging.

Here’s the hidden truth most people don’t realize: Sometimes, part of you is benefiting from the very pattern you want to release.

Not because you’re broken, lazy, or doing growth “wrong.” But because your unconscious mind—the part running over 90% of your thoughts, behaviors, and decisions—believes holding onto it is protecting you.

That hidden benefit is called secondary gain, and until you uncover and release it, letting go will always feel like a fight.

What Is Secondary Gain (and Why It Keeps You Stuck)

Secondary gain is the hidden benefit—often unconscious, but sometimes conscious—that you receive from holding onto a struggle, belief, or behavior, even when a part of you genuinely wants to let it go.

It’s not manipulation. It’s not weakness. It’s survival.

Your unconscious mind stores emotional imprints from childhood, generational patterns, and past life experiences. It doesn’t separate helpful from harmful. It just clings to whatever once kept you safe, loved, or seen.

That’s why you might long for freedom consciously, but still feel yourself circling the same loop unconsciously. To your unconscious mind, and to your ego, the familiar feels safer than the unknown. The old pattern may keep you stuck, but it also feels predictable, and predictability can masquerade as safety.

Some common examples of secondary gain:

• Receiving care, attention, or sympathy through struggle
  Sometimes pain or difficulty becomes the doorway to connection. If you only felt nurtured when you were sick as a child, part of you may unconsciously believe that suffering is what earns love. As an adult, staying in struggle can attract care and attention from others but it comes at the cost of your empowerment.

• Avoiding conflict or responsibility by staying unwell, stuck, or small
  Change often brings new responsibility. If your unconscious associates growth with pressure or confrontation, it might keep you “stuck” as a way of buying safety. For example, if you’re unwell, people may not expect as much from you which feels like relief, but also keeps you from stepping into your full power.

• Maintaining identity through suffering (“this is just who I am”)
  When pain or hardship has been part of your story for years, it can become woven into your sense of self. You might say, “I’m just an anxious person” or “Good things don’t happen for me.” Even if those identities are painful, they feel familiar and the unconscious prefers familiar over unknown.

• Using pain as an excuse to avoid growth or risk
  Your unconscious mind and your ego may keep you focused on what hurts because it feels safer than risking the unknown. For instance, if you’re caught in the loop of “I can’t move forward until this is fixed,” your attention stays locked on the problem. That protects you from having to risk failure, rejection, or stepping outside your comfort zone.

• Escaping deeper emotions by focusing on the surface struggle
  Sometimes a visible problem—like stress at work, conflict in a relationship, or even a physical symptom—keeps your attention on the surface so you don’t have to face the deeper grief, anger, or loneliness underneath. It’s not that the surface struggle isn’t real, but it can serve as a distraction from the rawer emotions your unconscious isn’t ready to process yet.

Why Your Unconscious Mind Holds On

Your unconscious mind’s first job isn’t to bring you happiness, it’s to bring you safety. It’s scanning for danger 24/7 and defaulting to familiar patterns, even painful ones, because familiar feels safer than the unknown.

This is why you can consciously say, “I want love, abundance, and peace,” but if your unconscious programming is whispering, “Relationships always result in abandonment,” or “Standing in the spotlight makes me a target,” your nervous system will resist.

You’re not lazy or unmotivated. You’re running on old instructions.

This is exactly why secondary gain shows up: part of you is unconsciously invested in the payoff of staying stuck, because that feels less risky than stepping into the unknown.

How to Work with Secondary Gain (Instead of Fighting It)

You don’t have to battle your unconscious mind. You just need to bring curiosity and compassion to the hidden purpose behind your resistance. Here’s how I guide my clients through this in The Reclaimed Mind:

1. Identify the Hidden Benefit

Get curious: What does is this pattern or behavior giving me?

It might give you permission to rest. It might earn you attention. It might protect you from judgment. Naming it isn’t about shame, it’s about awareness.

2. Create Safety, Not Pressure

Your unconscious mind won’t let go until it feels safe. That’s why we start by releasing repressed emotions and dissolving the limiting beliefs beneath the struggle. In The Reclaimed Mind, we use modalities like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotherapy to reprogram those patterns so your unconscious mind learns to protect you in healthier ways that empower you.

3. Find a Healthier Replacement

Every secondary gain points to a real need. If staying stuck gives you attention, what healthier ways could you feel seen? If holding onto stress gives you identity, how else can you be recognized for who you are becoming? We map new ways to meet the need that don’t keep you trapped.

4. Empower Your Choice

When you see the full picture, the cost and the hidden benefit, you finally get to choose. Do you want to keep the pattern, or are you ready to release it? Either choice becomes conscious, instead of automatic.

These steps sound simple on paper, but when you’ve lived inside a pattern for years, the hidden benefits can feel very real, even comforting. I know this not just from my clients, but from my own family. One of the clearest examples I’ve witnessed was with my mother.

When Secondary Gain Keeps Us From Our Own Strength

When my mother was alive, she would often talk about how she was raised. The only time she felt real nurturing from her own mother was when she was sick or in pain so illness became the doorway to love.

As an adult, that early pattern never fully left her. She struggled with believing she could take care of herself, and I often found myself stepping into the “mother” role with her.

Later, when she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, I became her full-time caretaker. But even before her diagnosis, she carried the unconscious belief that she always needed someone else to step in and that she wasn’t capable on her own.

Her need to be cared for came from an old survival strategy—the belief that love only arrived when she needed rescuing. It felt comforting, but it also kept her disempowered.

It kept her stuck in fear-based patterns and habits rather than allowing her to step into her own strength and mother herself. This led to her engaging in unhealthy coping mechanisms and constantly searching outside of herself for the next thing that would “save” her.

My mom was aware of some of this programming, but she passed before she could fully heal it. And yet, in her own way, she gave me a powerful gift: the reminder that love and support don’t have to come at the cost of our empowerment.

Her story taught me how important it is to break those old patterns, not to take away care, but to learn how to receive love while also standing firmly in our own strength.

Secondary gain can sneak its way into our lives and what once served as a strategy for love or safety can quietly become the very thing holding us back from stepping fully into our power. The good news is, these patterns can be released.

The Freedom That Comes From Release

If you’ve been stuck in the loop of “I wish I could just change this,” the issue isn’t willpower. Sometimes your unconscious mind still sees a hidden benefit in holding on.

Secondary gain isn’t sabotage. It’s protection. But the same strategies that once kept you safe are now keeping you stuck.

When you uncover those hidden benefits, create safety, and reprogram your unconscious mind, everything changes. The tug-of-war ends. The resistance softens. And you finally create space for what you actually want: peace, clarity, and freedom.

Letting go doesn’t mean losing yourself, it means shedding the outdated roles, beliefs, and survival strategies so you can meet the world as your most authentic self.

Your Next Step

If you’re ready to stop looping in patterns that drain you and start releasing them for good, I invite you to book a Discovery Call.

In The Reclaimed Mind, we use a structured and sequenced unconscious reprogramming process to go straight to the root—uncovering the hidden benefits, dissolving old programming, and aligning your unconscious mind with your conscious desires. 

The result? Freedom that doesn’t just feel good in the moment, but actually lasts, because your soul didn’t come to cling—it came to rise.