It is hard, if not impossible, to wholly change our past experiences, to feel and act a "different" way. It takes time in a new situation to have its experiences tip the scale; if you spent most of your life in situation A, then it makes sense that it will take a similar amount of time in situation B to make B the dominant one?

For those of us who have had difficult childhoods, that's basically 20 years of our lives and it can take another 20 years of work moving forward as well as healing the past to get to a "different" state of being.