The Misconception About Coping Skills

Throughout the years, I’ve heard often from clients and people in general that coping skills don’t work. Or that coping skills don’t “cure” their emotional struggles, solve anything, or necessarily make things better. So the thought process is, what is the point of learning coping skills? They’re unhelpful.

Of course there is truth to that. If we view coping skills as a means to “cure” our anxiety, depression, or stress, or as a means to eliminate these completely, then we will be sorely disappointed. Unfortunately, coping skills aren’t going to always make struggles “go away,” or eliminate them fully in our lives.

I can understand this perspective of coping skills, because they can be framed in this way in our society when we have mental health conversations. In the conversations I’ve seen, they can be talked about as if they are the main solution to our issues. Feel anxious? Use your coping skills. Feel stressed? Use your coping skills. Feel depressed? Well, just use your coping skills.

Coping skills are important. And for some, focusing on coping skills does help to improve their mood. More commonly though, coping skills aren’t the only solution to someone’s specific struggle. And the reason for that is because coping skills aren’t meant to be a solution, but a means of managing the difficult experiences surrounding our issue.

For example, we use deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation to help manage some of the overwhelming physical symptoms of anxiety—the aim therefore, is to learn how to better manage the anxiety symptoms, so we can reduce the debilitating nature of these symptoms. However, it is vital to explore the roots to your anxiety and target them to ultimately reduce anxiety at a deeper level. This can include identifying the negative thoughts that are creating the anxiety experience in our lives, challenging the negative thoughts, expanding our viewpoint to consider more realistic conclusions, and the list goes on.

In other words, there is more to mental health treatment than just building our coping skills. It is an important ingredient, but there are also other necessary ingredients to our treatment and healing.

So it is helpful to shift our perspective on how we see coping skills. They won’t “cure” you or “eliminate” your overall struggle. However, they are an essential piece to learning how to better manage these difficult experiences in our lives.

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