This article covers coping mechanisms and what escape from pain can look like. Some of these are shameful, riddled with guilt, and might have hurt people you cared about in the process of surviving. Situations like this can bring shame into the healing process.
Coping As a Part of Your Identity
First, one of the most loving responses you can tell yourself when dealing with shame is, “You did what you had to to survive.” People who survive trauma often have a lot of coping skills. These coping skills can often be unhealthy. This means healing often includes a lot of shame and guilt.
Especially if you are coping with suicidal thoughts, overcoming these extreme feelings can sometimes mean extreme ways of coping and escaping. These more extreme or benign survival methods are not always the healthiest and most accepted forms of behavior. As a result of not being accepted, the survivor can feel shame and guilt from behaviors that are coping mechanisms.
People Care They Don’t Know What to Say
People will tell you you are so strong, you’ve got this. Just be happy like you always are. They are all well-intended but fall short. The reality is you have already done all those things, and they are no longer working, and you shouldn’t have to keep doing them.
Life was unfair and probably unusually cruel. It is not so much that people don’t care, but that they don’t know what to say or do. This is usually out of fear of making things worse. So they decide to go with what they have heard before, and it’s just not enough.
You Did What You Had to to Survive
Take it from someone who has been through all of that, you did what you had to, to survive. You can change. You can change to a molecular level that develops new thought patterns and can create a new life for yourself. The best part is that science has proven neuroplasticity, and you can do it. You can read more about an example of how to use neuroplasticity to start creating supportive habits.
Below are descriptions of coping and escape strategies, both healthy and unhealthy.
Q1) How is coping or escaping showing up for you in your daily activities?
Coping strategies sometimes do look and seem healthy and can keep “driven” people attached to their trauma for a long time. One of these healthy strategies is hyperactivity.
Out of Balance Healthy Coping Mechanism
Proactive procrastination or avoidance, especially in the form of workaholism, is a coping mechanism that friends and family often don’t challenge you on. The fact is that these overactive traits are out of balance are keeping you from healing. This level of proactivity is really not sustainable. Being obsessively busy throughout the days and weeks becomes coping in several ways. It means you do not have or make time for things like socializing and building close relationships. Typically, professionalism keeps relationships at a distance at work and can be a gratifying way of feeling social and connected. These professional relationships don’t have the same level of trust or risk as a personal relationship.
Proactive Procrastination
Proactive procrastination on a smaller scale can also manifest as procrastination to avoid a particular task. Did you want to do some journaling but then go one to avoid it for four hours? Did you go about the house fixing obscure things like the current rod that had pulled out of the plaster, sweep and mop the floors, and do the laundry? Then, look up four hours later and realize you still haven’t sat down to do that journal entry. You are procrastinating, not because you are lazy but out of avoidance and coping.
A proactive procrastinator is a high achiever. You are driven and motivated, and you have a lot of skills, but you are still human and have developed an elite style of procrastination, proactive procrastination.
Example
You have a topic that you know would be good for you, and it is something journaling would get off your chest. As you started writing, you also started crying. You’d been avoiding this journaling task all day because, “deep down”/subconsciously, you knew this would be painful. You knew this wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience, maybe even relating it to the feeling of throwing up. So you avoid it by staying busy and doing other things that need to get done.
You have learned to spin your proactiveness into a validated procrastination. It took you years to talk about your abuse, or maybe you haven’t gotten there yet. It took you even longer to talk about situations without becoming emotional and breaking down. So, sitting to process your feelings and owning your healing is good progress. In trying to make this a habit you uncover another, behavior, a coping strategy: always being busy and productively busy.
If you haven’t noticed this behavior yet, it will sound like “I don’t know why that took me so long to do,” “No, I didn’t get to that yet.” You can catch yourself, pause, and ask, am I avoiding anything?
Asking the question makes you aware of times when you are subconsciously avoiding putting your healing first.
Unhealthy Coping Mechanism – Substances
Mind-altering substances are some of the best coping and escape mechanisms. They can support the healing process. However, any tool can be used as a weapon and too much of anything (even carrots) can be a bad thing.
The most popular and socially accepted coping mechanism is drinking alcohol with the added dangers of uncontrolled behavior. Alcohol is a depressant and slows the brain function down. It actually does damage to the brain, and the brain will reduce in size over time with heavy amounts of continued drinking.
But for now, to cope with drinking slows the thoughts and numbs the worries. For someone who has deep trauma and finds socializing hard, they can find relief in drinking and making friends that way. The excuse of being drunk protects you from anything people find odd about you. There’s a nice built-in excuse that protects you from people hurting you for being who you are.
As the alcohol wears off, the shame can start creeping in, and here comes the hangxiety and, with it, the great escape-shame cycle of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
If you’re coping and get to this level, understand that you did what you had to do to survive. No one else knows your life and what you survived. It is okay to have had unhealthy coping habits and regret that they happened. Your previous actions and life do not define who you are. In quite a real way, they define how human you are, how resilient you are, and that in the case of escaping, coping mechanisms provide a break.
Coping is a Part of Your Identity – Healing as an adult
Healing after decades of trauma and the coping or survival tactics holding you back is the reason behind this blog: when you know better, you can do better. It is all too popular of an unwritten law that once we are adults, we have to hold onto the beliefs and statements that we have previously made.
You are allowed to change and should.
This is a pretty out-of-date method of thinking and is not true. The amount of information and access to information has expanded in the last twenty years, and it has accelerated the understanding of many different areas within science.
Technological advancements are happening fast, and changes to how people socialize occur more in a lifetime than twenty years ago. It makes more sense for us to change as we age more than ever. The truth is we are supposed to change and evolve. Imagine if you still acted like you were 5 or 18 years old or dressed the same way when you were younger. Spoiler alert: at some level, you still are. Beliefs determine your actions, and if you are not taking the time to update the younger beliefs you made, you are acting like you did at 5 or 18.
You should be changing your opinions and behaviors to be someone happier. It might take a few years or decades to change completely, but that is ok.
You are doing what you must to survive, and you can continue to grow when you are ready or when there is enough information to justify letting go of those coping mechanisms.
Healing for the More Mature Audience
People seem to become pretty judgmental about their success in their mid-twenties, and I have heard people in their 60s and 90s struggling with healing. First of all, for a lot of us, the internet was still not around when we were in high school. It would have taken specific action and magazine subscriptions to get the information now available at our fingertips.
The resources and technologies developed in the last five years were not ideas when some people were in their twenties. You are not ignorant because you are pursuing healing later in life, you did not miss something when you were young. The information and resources had not been invented yet, and conversations were not the normal publications they are today.
Please be kind to yourself. Realize that your healing is occurring at a different stage in your life because you have continued to adapt to these new technologies. The ability to adapt is a sign of intelligence. Be proud and take comfort in how smart you are to continue to adapt and evolve. As you heal, others heal with you.
Neuroplasticity
Coping mechanisms can be healthy or unhealthy habits, but taken to extremes, they hold you back from healing. The first step is cognitive awareness. Does that dish need to be washed right this second? Or is it helping you avoid a task you really want to get done.
Breaking these behaviors comes with understanding the root of trauma and reprogramming the behaviors in the mind. The brain processes the thoughts that the mind has and you can update both of these to heal for good.
Anyone healing and navigating mental health issues, please check out the article on neuroplasticity. Your brain can physically change, and you can direct and control it.
For any older generations fighting mental health stigmas, this knowledge did not exist when you were younger. The complete opposite was true, that the brain was stagnant. That old belief is ok. When we know better, we do better.
Resources
Here is some information on coping mechanisms and when they are specifically defensive mechanisms.
Leave a Reply