Coping Skills Are Not A Solution

It’s fairly universally agreed upon that coping skills are helpful. This is logical and true. Very often the first thing I am asked for as a therapist is to help someone learn or use coping skills more. To be honest, most people don’t need a therapist for this. If you’d like to learn some new coping skills, there are hundreds of books on this for which you will pay about 1/10th of what you typically pay for one session of therapy. Those books are all fine; just pick one that appeals the most to you when you take a look at it. It’s unlikely that any book on coping skills is going to advocate things that are harmful for you. But, none of them contain a miracle or shortcut, which I think is often what we are hoping for when we are asking about coping skills.

So, in this post I am not going to talk about how to learn or use coping skills. I am going to talk about the unspoken and tacitly agreed upon expectations our culture upholds that underlie the use of the term “coping skills”. I think these unsaid things matter a great deal, and these are the problem that is not solved by learning or using coping skills. These are why kids still have meltdowns and struggle when they know how to breath slowly, why adults feel stuck even when we have what we wanted, why relationships falter, etc. These are beliefs and expectations that we often aren’t aware that we are thinking, or that we even believe. They look like the following: 

We should be able to have lives free from anxiety. 

Anxiety is unnatural. 

Depression is unnatural. 

If people use coping skills they won’t feel bad. 

If children use coping skills they won’t become overwhelmed, have tantrums or show other behaviors that adults find problematic. 

Normal people can use coping skills to keep themselves from getting overwhelmed no matter how intense the feeling is. If they can’t there’s something wrong with them. (Even when someone has been judged as having “something wrong with them” they are generally still expected to learn some coping skills and then be able to deal “like a normal person”). 

Coping skills are things people do on their own, they shouldn’t need (or want) help from others to deal with feelings. 

Now reading those statements, they sound patently ridiculous, and dehumanizing. Who would think these things? You, me, our American culture, the American mental health community, etc. We are less subtle when we communicate these to children, so they are easier to see there. "Susie is having tantrums at school, her teacher says she needs to learn coping skills". 

It is particularly distressing to me that psychotherapy, and particularly Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (which has risen to prominence in the US for a host of reason) has been boiled down to teaching coping skills which supposedly allow people to master their thoughts and feelings and not need (or want) therapy anymore; because after all therapy is for people who are messed up right? What are we teaching people about what it is to be a person by suggesting that? What are we teaching people about what therapy is?

I think we are, not very subtly, telling people that life and emotions are simple. If they don’t get that, or can’t figure it out, then that’s a problem with them and they need to see a doctor to get fixed. Well, as far as I can tell life isn’t even remotely simple. Being human is ridiculously complex, hard and baffling a lot of the time. Humans have spent thousands of years try to figure out how to just talk to each other about how complicated being is. 

This thinking style about emotion and coping infects therapists too, myself included. I find myself periodically struggling with bouts of deep self doubt thinking things like “I must be a terrible therapist if client’s don’t feel better quickly/have a recurrent depression/don’t do better in school/don’t have more friends, etc”, or “I should learn more coping skills to teach people and then they will suffer less”. I feel fortunate that I can look at that thinking now without always falling headlong down the hole of it like I did when I was a novice therapist. 

So what to do then? Should we learn coping skills? Sure, but you really only need one or two things you can try in a moment of feeling distressed. Such as, breath slower and look at the real world. Doing something physical and something that brings you back to the present. Those two things are enough a lot of the time. Because the point of these is not to make anxiety disappear. That’s what we want to happen, but it’s not a reasonable expectation. The point of doing coping skills like this is to get through moments of intense emotion without doing things that are harmful to us or others. They can also help us feel a sense of presence and control again when we are coming back down from an overwhelmed state. Sometimes they can help us reduce the chance that we continue to escalate in distress level into an overwhelmed state.

Fine, so we do that, but we still feel anxious! And sad! And lonely, and angry, and overwhelmed…Yes. Because that is the nature of being human and those are the symptoms, not the problems. Coping skills are not the solution to the problems. And in no way will a healthy life ever exclude those feelings, ever exclude problems that spark those feelings or exclude moments of feeling overwhelmed. However, if our needs are met then we could have significantly less moments of those intense states of emotions, less chronic distress and be less stuck.

So let me back up to what I think we should think and ask, when we or our children have a feeling that is difficult to tolerate or overwhelming. Instead of asking what coping skill to use, we should ask things like… when and where did this feeling start? What is it telling me about this situation, memory, or experience? This must be important if I am having such a strong feeling, what am I missing? What do I need?

If we thought of emotions as not things just to tolerate, but as complex experiences that give us insight into our own needs and those of others, I think we would approach it differently. We would respect feelings. We would respect ourselves. We would respect children who are melting down at school. Instead of telling Susie to learn some coping skills we would start asking questions- what was happening when she was melting down? What about right before that? What about earlier in the day? What about in her life outside of school? What is her individual brain like? What does she need? Perhaps we would find out that Susie is a child who often feels intense emotions, but can be good at hiding them for a while and she does so because she knows adult’s don’t like to see it. She experiences a lot of stress at home because of her family situation. She also has a learning disorder. She is already tired and emotionally strained when she gets to school in the morning, and a chunk of her attention isn’t available for learning because of this. She’s trying to pay attention but sometimes she just needs to look at the trees for a minute. So when the teacher tells her in an annoyed voice to pay attention (again), she can’t take it anymore- and has a “meltdown” that is “out of no-where” and “not appropriate to the situation”. She had reached a point where she had no reserves left to try to not show that emotion anymore. She’s also a child, who’s brain is still developing and won’t be able to regulate independently for many years. 

How would it be different if the adult who’s with Susie in the classroom talked to her privately and gently, saying something like “Hey I notice it seems hard to concentrate today. How are you feeling? Is there something you need?”. In order to do that, the adult needs to have their own needs met and have the emotional reserves to be able to help the children.

There are so, so many ways in which our expectations of ourselves and others are not appropriate. Think about how adults exist in the working world. How many hours a week do you work? Under what conditions? What do you actually have choice and control over regarding your work? Do you feel respected by your bosses? Are your bosses respectable? Do you work through lunch? Can you take a break or go home early when you need to without punishment? If you are lucky, and have a lot of privilege, you may be able to have more control, more respect and have room for your own needs. The pandemic has highlighted companies who are doing well at this, those that are learning to do better at this and those who fail miserably. 

How about our school systems? Does your child get enough sleep at night or are they doing homework or trying to socialize or play because they don’t have other times to do it? Are they so burnt out that they just zone out? Are they given work that meets their specific level of learning for each subject? Do they have the supports they need to learn it in the way that their brain works? How are they treated by staff and peers at school? Would they feel safe telling you or school staff when they aren’t ok? Or do they just keep going until they break because they haven’t been told and shown it’s ok to take care of themselves and ask to have their needs met. Do they know what their needs are?

Is it any wonder then that people zone out, play video games for hours and hours, drink too much, abuse each other, become sick physically and mentally? Is it any wonder that suicide rates are so high? That kids and teens are depressed and having panic attacks from early elementary school? Coping skills are not the solution for this. 

The solution is to change our expectations of ourselves and others to be developmentally appropriate, individually appropriate, valuing of rest and relaxation, valuing of socializing and fun, actively supportive when someone is in need and proactively helping others to know what they need. We need a culture overhaul. 

I totally get that this is such a big ask that it feels impossible. You cannot change a massive system by yourself, or even with a team composed of people you know. But you can be loud about inappropriate standards, and about how they affect you or your children. You may be able to opt out of things that are presented as being “just how things are”. The more privilege you have the more options you have here. So, do it not just for you and the ones you love, but also for the people who don’t have as much privilege or options like being loud safely, having people listen to their feelings and reality without negating or denying them, or opting out of situations that are not ok. If enough of us do this, it will begin to creep into the social consciousness and large organizations and groups will have to do things differently if they want business. 

And this is what therapy is really for- to have a place to think about those feelings, your needs, and your wishes. To have a place to hear new ideas about what to do about them, and to talk through your ideas about what you want to do. To grieve past experiences that have left you stuck in a frame of thought and unable to move toward healthier ways of being. To think about how you think about yourself and others, and figure out better ways to think about both of those. 

If this post has left you feeling overwhelmed, or sad or anxious that makes sense and is appropriate to the situation. Perhaps you need a minute to breath or go outside. Once you feel a little better then you can start to think about what these problems really are in your own personal experience, and begin the long and often slow, but important process of figuring out what to do about it.