What are Coping Mechanisms?
Coping mechanisms are ways to manage or adapt to a situation that’s causing you stress. They basically help you cope with the situation.
Sounds generally good, right? I mean who doesn’t want to feel instantly better in a situation that is causing distress? It is a natural thing to want that, because being under stress is not healthy for our body and mind.
Well, the problem with coping mechanism is that they are just a short term solution (instant gratification) and often keep us stuck in wanting to achieve long term goals, happiness and fulfillment. They give us a temporary relief, yet never address the root cause and thus keep us stuck in a loop of distress and coping. We never resolve the distress long term if we’re not able to get to the root cause.
We try to avoid pain by instant gratification, not knowing that it’s only short lived and this endless cycle causes us more pain in the end than if we just had dealt with the situation from a more empowered state.
A few examples of what coping mechanisms can be: deflection, eating disorders, perfectionism, video games, binge watching TV shows, social media addiction, daydreaming, meditation (more on that later), positive focus, denial, dissociation, overcompensation, humor, self-blaming, avoidance, self-hate, dissociation, escaping into books or movies, intellectualization, sleeping, exercising, any form of addiction (alcohol, drugs, foods, gambling, sex, porn,…),…etc.
…basically anything that causes you to escape the pain the stressful situation is causing you instead of addressing the situation (and the pain) directly.
In our childhood we were not able to change the situation that is stressful for us because our caregivers or other authority figures were in charge and we had no way of get out of or away from what is causing us distress. Somehow we had to manage and cope with it - which is how we develop coping mechanisms in the first place.
Coping mechanisms helped us survive when we were children and we had no other way to deal with distress other than by simply coping.
Here’s some examples:
Let’s say you’re a child and your parent always criticizes you harshly whenever do do something wrong. You feel that the only way to get approval and love and through that ensuring your connection and survival is by becoming the perfect child. High achieving and doing everything you can to please your parent. You end up a high achieving perfectionist who people pleases everyone, but falls short on your own needs and eventually getting sick and/or burn out. The coping mechanism here helped you get connection and safety when you were a child, but now it is the very thing that is destroying you and your life.
Or let’s say you have been abused as a child by a family member and the only way to cope with it is through dissociation. That was the only way to manage the painful situation. It’s a survival mechanism. Though later in life this might lead into harmful life decisions, feeling of disconnection from self and others, addiction, feeling numb, personality disorders, day dreaming, etc. Depending on the severity and symptoms of the dissociation there are many ways it can take form.
Again, the problem is that the coping mechanism that helped us survive and deal with distress in the past, now often becomes the very thing keeping us stuck. Holding us back from growth, expansion, happiness and fulfillment and from creating the life we want.
Here’s an analogy: A baby elephant is tied up to a trunk that it cannot move away from, but when it’s grown up and actually strong enough to pull the trunk out and just leave, it still believes it’s powerless and doesn’t even try to remove the trunk and free itself. It has learned that it is powerless, when in fact it would now be strong enough to change its own situation.
Same goes for coping mechanisms - most of the times the situations we are in we’re now actually able to resolve as adults compared to when we are children. But we keep on believing that we are small and powerless, like the elephant tied up to the tree trunk. So we keep on engaging into this avoidant behavior, not changing our situation but instead keep on „coping“ with it.
Now, there are high level and low level coping mechanisms!
High level coping mechanisms are „healthier“ coping mechanisms. Instead of grabbing the wine bottle in order to numb out the pain, we might instead chant a mantra or meditate. Especially in the spiritual field you can find high level coping mechanisms, like affirmations, meditations to raise your vibration, positive focus etc. that can be abused as high level coping mechanism to escape and not take action on the actual thing that causes distress. It is simply avoidance and denial. Are you using them as a way to avoid and deny the way you truly feel about something or a situation? What are you going to do after engaging in those practices? Is it making you empowered or feel safe enough to take action and change the situation or are you afterwards just going back to how it was before, just a little more relieved (which would mean you only coped with it)?
Remember, our emotions are very important tools to see into our own unique truth. What feels good? Where is danger? Where do I feel triggered indicating a trauma, that needs resolve? If we try to make our emotions/feelings feel any different or try to change them, we are basically messing with our internal guidance system.
If we make pain our enemy, we will try to get out of that feeling and cope. To deal with coping mechanisms is to befriend pain. There are many ways to escape pain, which means there are many ways to cope! And the most direct way of stopping this coping behavior is through stop running away from pain.
When we couldn’t deal with the actual threat as children, we started dealing with the secondary threat, the pain, instead. We made that our primary threat. We don’t want to feel the pain anymore. But pain isn’t the threat. Emotional pain won’t kill you. The very thing that caused you pain, is the thing that needs to change, not the pain itself. Pain actually serves us as a feedback mechanism, so we can take appropriate action to what feels good and safe for us.
Just like when you burn yourself on the stove - you won’t blame the pain and then go on and deliberately keep on touching the stove and then each time take pain killers to cope with the pain of the burn. That would be ridiculous, right?
Whatever we resist, persists. If we resist pain, it will stay. But if we turn towards it with curiosity and compassion and without it needing to be any different, we can gain valuable insights from it. Like I said before, emotions (and pain) are messengers. They don’t want you to suffer. All they do is giving you feedback in the situation at hand. If you engage into coping mechanisms you will never find out what it has to tell you and you will never find resolve but instead get stuck in a loop that gets more and more painful over time.
Here are some ways on how to deal with and get rid of coping mechanisms:
Ask yourself: What do you do when you are in a state of distress? What makes you feel better instantly? How could they be detrimental to you? How could they be coping mechanisms and in what way are they actually keeping you stuck or even hurting others? And how are they actually not working for you?
It’s not about getting rid of what makes us feel good, but instead becoming more aware of its shadow side. This puts us into a place of power where the tools aren’t using us, but instead we can now consciously choose to use them when we feel it’s right (and not to cope) - that way they don’t have control over us.
Undo/heal the coping mechanism where it began - which is in your past. By going back to the original trauma and teaching ourselves a different way of coping, we can start healing our emotional wounds and through that also our coping mechanisms. I offer shadow work meditation sessions, which will do precisely that.
Practice softening into discomfort. Surrender to it. Coping mechanisms come as a result of tensing up and resisting discomfort. Soften into it with some deep breaths, imagine your muscles softening and just relax your entire body. Let go and feel the discomfort, holding space for it with loving compassion.
Remember, pain isn’t our enemy. It is safe to feel it. And if it is too challenging or it feels unsafe to do it alone, reach out to me or a trusted person or professional to help you with the process and to hold space for you.
Much love and support,
Sarah