Why We Need Coping Skills

• It’s not uncommon for many people, mental health professionals included, to think of coping skills as “a crutch”.
• Many folks get stuck because they hold beliefs that they (or their patients) “should be able to feel their feelings as they are”, rather than accept that people may need to learn how to tolerate their emotional world through the use of moderators (like coping skills) that make emotions tolerable enough for us to be present with and then make use of.
• We all have varying levels of skill at interfacing with our emotional world constructively. Those of us that didn’t have strong models for accepting, managing, and constructively expressing emotions are more likely to need to learn coping skills. Those of us that had them modeled for us are likely to find the tactics and concepts intuitive.
• When we are not as skilled at naturally accessing our emotions in a constructive manner we may feel overwhelmed by them or numb and unable to be in touch with them. This is where the intentional use of coping skills tailored to you and your individual strengths and needs come in.
• Those that struggle with flooding / emotional overwhelm may need distraction and present centered coping mechanisms (like grounding or meditation). Those that struggle with finding and feeling their emotions may need embodiment based coping skills like body scans, or deep breathing which help you connect more sustainably to yourself.
• Even if you have strong emotional regulation skills (whether they were learned or came to you intuitively) there are also conceptual coping skills that are useful for everyone to learn and practice that help improve relationships with others, your relationship with yourself, and your communication.
• There are many conceptual coping skills (see comments for ones I have covered in this account). An example: approaching a situation from a nonjudgmental stance. Instead we work to be descriptive and in doing so reduce the likelihood that judgments get in the way of our ability to get to the core of our reactions, preferences, values, and needs.
• Other conceptual coping skills include acceptance, (where we work to acknowledge the limits of our control, and the reality – as it really is – in front of us) and willingness (which means openness and readiness to interface with your situation in in a manner that has your short and long term goals in mind).
• Many of us get stuck because our life long way of doing things, feeling our feelings, problem solving, and addressing conflict feel like a core part of us – just who we are and how we are. But, if we can be open to expanding our approach, and integrating coping skills we can change lifelong patterns that haven’t served us.

One of the things I encourage in my practice, as well as in this account, is being able to live in harmony with your inner world, which does require an ability to tolerate your feelings and respond to them in a constructive manner. However, many of us get stuck because we don’t know how to feel our feelings without ruminating (I.e. keeping them activated in a cyclical manner without working though them); or some version of numbness (where we can’t feel our feelings and experience ourselves as cut off from them).

When we struggle to have a harmonious relationship with our feelings we can get pushed out of our window of tolerance to a place where our thinking world and our emotional world cannot work together. At those times, it is difficult to step back and get to a reflective place where we can notice, make sense of, feel AND think through what may be happening in an integrated manner.

A lot of therapists and self-help books encourage you to “feel your feelings”, which yes! We need to do. But we need to do so constructively and in a manner that helps of make use of them. Our emotional worlds can be chaotic and overwhelming; coping skills are tools that help us manage, navigate, and make use of our emotions in a constructive manner so they don’t overpower us.

There are in the moment coping skills like deep breathing or body scans that help to alleviate the intensity of emotion, or help us get in touch with our emotions. There are also conceptual coping skills that are windows through which we are work to see our lives, relationships, responsibilities and goals. When we use conceptual coping skills we are shifting our mindset so we can respond to the moment with what the moment needs, and what we need to bring about long and short-term success.

Often, once we’ve developed a regular practice with coping skills we actually have an increased tolerance for our capacity to feel our emotions at depth; this is because we know and trust we can feel deeply without being overrun. Our therapies, relationships, capacity for vulnerability and communication are all positively effected because we can fully feel our feelings, think and reflect in an integrated manner.

Comments:

1. *For the mental health professionals out there*: you may recognize this post as talking about the division we so often see between the cognitive / behaviorally oriented treatments and psychodynamically / relationally oriented treatments. I hear time and again how there is this divide in the field, often with skepticism about the validity of the treatment the other party offers. From my perspective, folks who are seeing limited progress from the relationally or psychodynamically based approaches may need some of the coping skills I describe in this account that fall into the behavioral or cognitive category. The coping skills provided by those interventions can create internal safety for our clients, which eventually enable them to lean more fully in to the psychodynamically and relationally oriented treatments which often require a level of collaboration and openness that may not be accessible without having some core distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and cognitive challenging skills. Similarly, clients who have solely done skill building work may eventually benefit from the insight oriented and relationally based work of a more psychodynamic and relational oriented therapy; having the tools to tolerate their inner world may enable them to not just use skills, but to work to begin to relate and connect to others (and them selves) in new and more effective patterns. It is not uncommon for me to work with psychodynamically oriented clinicians and see their “stuck” patients for skill building. Similarly, for my clients who I work with from a more relational or psychodynamic perspective, sometimes our work needs to shift into skill building to tolerate the depth of the insight oriented work. It doesn’t need to be either/or!
2. *For folks in therapy that feel stuck*: Talk to your therapist about the style of therapy they are doing with you! Do you feel like you can’t think / feel / reflect at the same time? You might need something more concrete from your therapist to get you adequate coping skills to handle what arises in your life. Alternately, do you feel you have great coping skills, but haven’t seen the kind of pattern change you would like? Talk to your therapist about looking at patterns and doing insight oriented work to help break old patterns that are no longer serving you.
3. I briefly mention “non-judgmentally” in this post. I have three extensive posts on this. If you (and most of us do) struggle with judgments please read further on how to take a nonjudgmental stance, how to deconstruct judgments, and the problems judgements create for us .
4. More here on a conceptual coping skill on finding balance in relationships, and effectively considering ourselves and others (at the same time).
5. For Communication coping skills to reduce conflict see this post on taking a pause from conflict; this post on patterns to avoid in your relationship and in conflict.
6. For help with the conceptual coping skill of acceptance see, more here.
7. For help with tolerating very difficult times see a collection of coping skills under the acronym IMPROVE.
8. For help with learning how to be in the present (which is useful if you are prone to flooding or disconnecting) see posts on being one-minded; meditation, and for newbies to meditation I’d encourage you to start with introductory meditation for mental health.
9. This post contains a fusion of perspectives from attachment theory (which prioritizes finding safety), DBT (which emphasizes the role of therapist as both supporter and teacher), and mindfulness based therapy. For more reading on any of these topics see Daniel Siegel’s mindsight (which goes into more depth on the impact of leaving the window of tolerance), Marsha Linehan’s textbook on DBT (this book is VERY dense and is a textbook used in graduate level classes), and David Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy which is meant for clinicians but is more accessible to a non-clinician audience than the Linehan book.