Coping Strategies

...and their life cycles...

It can be painful, it can be awe-inspiring, it can be humbling, and it can be a deeply meditative thing to experience our coping strategies as they go through their life cycles, transitions and transformations.

Personally, I’m watching my “perpetual motion” way of dealing with anxiety go through another cycle of “Gosh, it’s working! Look at everything I’m getting done!” to: “Whoa! This is dumb. It’s like I’m chasing dandelion fluff,” to: “Caaan’t moooove. Toooo Sooorrrre…”

When I turned 40 I noticed my body wasn’t going to accommodate this coping strategy like I was used to. I was going to have to find better ways. I called this “The Gift of Forty.” In the years since, turns out aging keeps on offering new gifts like this. I don’t always learn real fast.

True, at any age sometimes change boils down to a single moment: No more drinking, or maybe it’s smoking. Or: no more playing small. Maybe: no more worrying or procrastination. No more settling for abusive relationships or work situations. Whatever the strategy was, we make a new choice and it’s done. Sometimes things seem to change all at once.

But most often, there are precursors. It’s an observable process. At the slowest, gentlest end of this spectrum, for example, a shy child gains in social skills and confidence. The new habit of a more open, friendly posture replaces the old, withdrawn, closed-off coping strategy of hiding behind mom’s skirts. These old strategies sort of worked, but they didn’t work that well, and then as time went on they worked less and less well. But that’s okay because there was something new to take their place. One day you look at the same child who used to be shy, and that shyness is just not there to be seen anymore. It’s been outgrown. Sometimes it’s like that.

Another way things can go is that a given coping strategy will have a lot of vitality to it. It’ll fight for its own survival. To the extent that we confuse our coping strategies with our own identities – and we often do – these strategies tend to rally for a comeback whenever they get knocked down a peg.  We can build an entire personality on a coping strategy. Could be a pattern like overdoing physical exertion, or it could be a form of substance abuse like alcohol or overeating, especially if these things get baked into our biophysical and personality development when we’re young and thus became a fundamental way of dealing with life. From that position the strategy itself can marshal all manner of resources toward its own continuance.  People will pick partners, groups or professions that normalize these strategies, or otherwise find situations that allow for the continuation of these patterns. I mean, why did I choose gardening as a hobby? It’s the perfect cover for my need to walk around in circles while feeling like I’m “doing something”. I even get social kudos for it sometimes. But on one level, it’s also kind of a ruse.

We can also see this in people where patterns of compulsive accomplishment or overwork are an attempt to prove self-worth.

There’s a hierarchy of socially approved and socially disapproved coping strategies. Some might call accomplishment addiction a more effective coping strategy than alcohol consumption, and in fact if it’s not creating problems, it may not an addiction at all. On the other hand, compensatory accomplishment or compulsive overwork tend to be a setup for troubles, whether large or small. If a coping strategy is sitting on top of something like feelings of inadequacy stemming from childhood trauma, my observation is that the trauma we’re carrying will to start to magnetically draw us toward the very circumstances needed for our healing.

And it’s here that things really get interesting. Say a person’s sense of self-worth is tied up with their professional accomplishments.

Maybe it’s the “accomplished person’s” third divorce that finally brings the underlying issues to the surface: “You’re just not showing up for this marriage!”

Maybe it’s a company downsizing effort: “Don’t bother showing up for work tomorrow. We’re letting you go.”

Maybe it’s physical illness.

My observation is that the feelings that emerge from any given situation, including physical illness, tend to be the very ones we have been avoiding in ourselves, often: fear, loneliness, guilt, shame, anger, or depair, typically in layered combinations, and generally arising from unresolved issues from previous experiences.

The situations that show up in life then present an opportunity to either double down on our pre-existing coping strategies or to start to heal the underlying issues and grow out of them.

Doubling down, of course, just like doubling down at the craps table in Las Vegas, has the potential for some real drama and excitement. Our coping strategies are alive: ALIVE!  There can be a beautiful desperation in them, a bravado, a fullness of commitment.

Thing is, in the exact same measure of that coping strategy’s desperation, bravado and commitment, the unhealed trauma will begin once again to plot its revelation in the world with equal desperation, bravado and commitment. It might take time, and it might and often does affect the body through illness or injury if there’s no better option. And while it’s true that ultimately death seems to be inevitable, it’s also true that people would sometimes rather die than change.

But not always. In fact, pretty often we grow and emerge as new versions of ourselves, time and again. However it goes, whether our coping strategy vanishes quietly like a guest slipping out of a party or whether it makes a final stand and goes down in a blaze of glory, the transformation of a coping strategy and the understandings that come with it can lead to the birth of something else. That’s true for us as individuals, and it’s true for the coping strategies we hold in common and think of as normal.