Dr. Faith G. Harper PhD - Coping Skills: Tools & Techniques for Every Stressful Situation

Introduction: Shits Fucked

W e are all cursed with living in interesting times. Even when shit is rocking along and our lives are generally positive, we are not fucking likely to focus on calmness or give ourselves space to think and chill. Remember when vacations were meant to be a time to have fun adventures? Now its a time to go away and sit somewhere and be as quiet, non-thinky, and non-doey as possible. I work with so many people who just need more time in their lives to chill. They arent crazy, they are just fucking exhausted.

We are all seeking better ways to live with all this shit, right? When I say all this shit I am talking about what it means to be human in the 21 st century. We are living in a time of huge uncertainty. Political upheaval, community violence, environmental distress. We are hyper-wired and overstimulated. And undernourished in all the ways that matter: authentic connection, stillness, healthy nourishment, joyful movement. We are seeking relief even more desperately than Aidan Quinn was seeking Susan.

Lets look at whats gotten super popular in recent years. Pokemon Go. Fidget spinners. Coloring. My older (and therefore more middle aged than I am) brother succumbed to the planking craze a few years ago. These are all things that help soothe our minds when life is a dumpster fire. And there will likely be at least three more viral coping skill activities sweeping Insta between now and when this book is published. We need shit to help manage life stress. These are all coping skills activities. We are all actively seeking ways to manage things that feel unmanageable.

So before we talk about specific types of coping skills and how they work and all that therapist-y bullshit, I want to say a few things as clearly as possible and as loudly as possible for those of yall hovering around in the back. Needing coping skills is not a sign of weakness or mental illness. It means you are a normal human being navigating a truly abnormal culture. Lily Tomlin once said, Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.

There are a few things that are complete and fundamental truths about yourself and why you sometimes are struggling and need coping skills:

There are no such things as wrong responses, only adaptive ones.

What you have survived has wired your body to proceed with extreme caution, on an unconscious level at all times. This is called staying fucking alive and safe.

You are not choosing to shut down.

This is not a mental illness; it is a physiological state of the human body.

You are not crazy; you have adapted to the environment around you with the only information you had at the timeyour previous circumstances.

You may be thinking, Bitch, stop being overly nice and letting me off the hook. Im just fucking crazy and I dont need an apologist right now.

Yeah, heres the thing. Im not nice. Empathic? Definitely. But nice and letting people off the hook? Never been accused of that in the history of ever. You are absolutely accountable for your actions, no matter what bullshit has been foisted upon you. You may not have been the one who bought the ticket, but it is now officially both your circus and your monkey.

The best weapon you have in managing your own reactions is a real understanding of where they come from. So when I am saying these things, its not in a nice, letting you off the hook way, but in a this is the best understanding we have of brain science way. Im going to delve into the brain science a lot more in a bit. Because choosing the right coping skills for you in whatever particular circumstance you are facing means understanding whats really going on and why you need them.

What Exactly Do You Mean By Coping?

W ords change in meaning over time and across situations. Sometimes words become so vaguely all-encompassing that we lose a common understanding of their meaning. And if our job here is to figure out how to use coping skills to get better, we need to start with a common understanding of meaning. Defining coping skills relies on a good working understanding of A Bunch of Other Shit.

So I am going to define certain terms psychologicallywhat they mean in mental health speak, which can be a far different thing than how words are used in popular culture. And if we are talking about our understanding of the psychological need for coping, then we had better be framing everything at that angle. Otherwise? This would be a useless hot mess of a book. And I aim to write a useful hot mess of a book, dammit.

Stress and Distress

The term stress has lost all logical meaning, hasnt it? Everything is considered stressful nowadays. And its entirely probable that everything is fucking stressful nowadays. But in a clinical sense, stress refers to any event that requires an output of resources .

Stress can be good (output of resources to create art or run a race or finish school) or it can be bad (coping with a car accident or an illness or being terminated from a job). Whether the situation is good or bad, we can hit a point where we run out of the resources that we need to cope with the situation.