Coping & emotional wellbeing

Is there a difference between poor mental health and coping?

I think a lot of the time we pathologise coping. We develop a lot of really intelligent ways to cope with the hard and complicated things that happen in our lives. That can look like lots of different things: 

• Shutting down
• Disassociation
• Self-harm
• So called “acting out” or misbehaving, missing school because there’s so much else going on at home that you can’t concentrate and you need to be at home in case something changes dramatically. 

All these things that are often identified as “problem behaviours” in children and young people are ways for them to cope with the unpredictability of their lives.  The trouble is that these coping strategies often don’t work when encountering different situations, such as when you’re in school.  

A lot of the things that we will use to categorise and diagnose as a mental illness are ways of coping.  Often these behaviours, strategies and ways of coping are a totally reasonable response to a totally unreasonable situation. 

For example, it’s easy to think that things like disassociation and social isolation are bad, but that might just be an example of one of those things that was really helpful to us at some point to do, disassociation is actually a really helpful coping strategy because sometimes you cannot escape the situation and so you need to escape internally, and that is a thing that has preserved you.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to work to shift some of them once the danger is past, or if we need to negotiate a different relationship and for that new relationship to be successful and meaningful. For example, it’s difficult to learn when you’re dissociating all day in class, and so we need to think about how we can start to bring the other side of affective coping in by feeling our emotions. 

We relegate a lot of behaviours into mental illness without honouring, recognising and understanding where they come from.

What are some of the ways that we cope?

The psychologist called Mooli Lahad has done a lot of research across populations, ages, genders, and countries, to think about the way that people cope. He ascertained that there are:

Six basic ways that people will cope in the world. 

1. Beliefs based coping. This could be to do with our spirituality, religion, or the beliefs that we have about ourselves and the world, like what kind of world it is, who we are, and what our values are etc.  
2. Affective or emotional coping. This is when we need space to process and feel our emotions. This might be coping with a situation by letting our emotions out and having a big cry or a scream. Or by shutting down from our emotions and disassociating because it feels too overwhelming.
3. Social coping. Coping together and with others. This can be through engagement with friends, families and the community. The inverse of that is that we might isolate and need time away.  
4. Imaginative coping. This can be around this idea of a magical solution. Sometimes this can be in things like escapism, reading a book or playing a game, where we just get to imagine differently for a little while.  
5. Cognitive coping. This is much more like problem solving, it’s action-orientated, logic-driven and rational. It’s looking at the situation asking what’s the logical explanation? What can we do? Sometimes that’s really helpful for us.  
6. Physical coping. Body-based ways of coping. Do we need to move our bodies? Do we need to go for a walk or run? Do we need to curl up and rest for a little while? 

In the case of these six coping strategies none is better or worse than the other, and it’s not about having all the coping strategies. It can be helpful to have some flexibility because not every strategy is going to help in every situation. It’s important, particularly in a counselling perspective, to have a think with kids and young people about what strategies they’re already using and how we can build on them.  

Sometimes the term “meeting challenges” is more accurate than coping, because ‘coping’ can lead to the assumption that we have resolved or ‘fixed’ the ‘problem’, when, in reality, some hard things that happen in our lives are out of our control to change and we can only, survive, endure and then try to make sense of them. 

What are some of the things we can do for ourselves when hard things happen in our lives?

We can think about what kinds of supports we might need. This can come from our families, peers, kinship networks or community groups. For some people, having someone outside of their family network, like a counsellor, can be helpful. In our team, many of our counsellors are creative therapists (music/art/drama/play etc). We find that having a creative medium to process challenges can be really useful.  

Many of the hard things that happen in our lives can be difficult to make sense of if we only have words. The experiences themselves are often happening to or within our bodies and this can be bigger than what language lets us express. So often we have young people, when faced with questions about how they feel, say “I don’t know” or “I don’t care“. Sometimes this can actually be masking the experiences of “I don’t have the words to describe how complicated this it. I care enormously, and I wish I didn’t“.  

The arts can give us a safe enough medium for us to express some of what might be unspeakable and show it to another person. It can be a way of putting outside what is tangled up inside of us, making visible what has before been intangible. Once it is externalised we can start to look at it from different angles, integrate new information and make sense of it. The arts can also provide us with felt experiences of mastery, problem solving, joy, release and relief which are important in our reclamation of our own bodies and sense of agency in the world.  

What’s the importance of recognising and responding to our emotions?

Telling the truth to young people teaches them to trust their own body sensations and their perceptions about what’s going on. That can be a really helpful place to start because they’re going to start being able to find some correspondence in what’s happening versus what they’re feeling. 

Emotional literacy and vocabulary is something that many adults don’t have access to, or practice with. It can be very hard recognise all of these body sensations and then articulate how that corresponds to how we’re feeling in the moment, like “okay, I’m feeling this, and I recognise that that anger, and that’s coming from a place of grief.” That is really sophisticated thinking and feeling. 

We all need a lot of help to get to a place where we can name, recognise, understand, articulate and then act on our emotions.

We’re quick to label emotions as good or bad: 

• Happy, content, joyful – Those are labelled as good emotions that we want, and if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong.  
• Sad, angry, fearful – They’re all labelled as bad emotions, they’re uncomfortable and they should be avoided at all costs.  

We often associate discomfort as negative but most of the time discomfort is a sign of doing something new, not doing something wrong. A lot of these so-called negative and uncomfortable emotions are totally reasonable responses to what is happening.  

It’s okay to feel sad, feel grief and to feel angry, especially when you’ve had experiences that have been sad, frustrating, and unfair. Feeling emotions is a good thing, and you don’t need to force yourself into a place of being happy. Even just feeling neutral is fine.  

We’re not supposed to be happy all the time, it’s exhausting! There’s this big spectrum that we get to feel and some of them feel better than others, but none of them are wrong.

There’s this lovely metaphor from Sharon Salzburg, which is this idea that our body can be like a house, and our emotions are visitors to that home, and we have three options when an emotion comes to visit, particularly in an emotion that we find uncomfortable to feel. 

1. We can hide and pretend we never heard them knock, but inevitably, the emotion will find some way in, it will come down the chimney or find an unlatched window, it will get into the house despite us pretending that we’re not home.  
2. We can fling the door wide-open. Let the emotion stampede in and take over the house and forget who really lives here.  
3. Or we can open the door and welcome the emotion in as a visitor. Offer it a cup of tea, listen to why it’s here and what it has to say, but not let it overstay its welcome. 

Your emotions are a part of you, but no single one of them can be bigger than you are because they are inside of you. Sometimes they feel like they’re massive, but they are happening inside you and you are the owner of the house. 

How can talking to a counsellor help you?

Counselling is a space to reflect and recognise and work through processes in lots of different creative ways.  

• What is the story of my life?  
• What are my emotions?  
• How do I cope with them?  
• How do I cope with the situation at hand?  
• How do I hold the truth of the story and make it bearable? 

A counsellor is somebody who’s hopefully practiced at doing that. Holding life with you and giving you space to work through it at your own pace, and to listen deeply to the story of your life and help you figure out how it is that you have coped with it, and how you have resisted in that story and how you have found joy in it.  

It can sometimes be helpful to share with somebody outside of the situation that you’re in, they can help you notice patterns and trends and be curious about the other people in your life as well as yourself. Because it can be really hard to do that work from the inside your family.  

The important thing to remember is that while the counsellor’s job is to hold a lot of data, we’re not experts in your own life.

You are the expert in your own life and you know best the intricacies of the things that have happened to you, we are here to walk with you while you work to figure things out. We don’t have the answers any more than anybody else does, but we can listen and come with you. 

Read more:

• Michelle on having hard conversations