Coping…how do you cope?

Coping…How Do You Cope?

Coping…how do you cope?  Coping with life simply means how you deal with what comes your way in life.  We all cope.  We learn to cope as children within the milieu we find ourselves in (called family or our origins) and through no choice of our own are thrown into this world in a rather vulnerable state.  We attempt to figure out how to survive this milieu. We learn many ways of coping.  We leave this milieu and have our survival plan in place.  What we learned may or may not serve us well.  We do not always have the best models in life but we have learned our coping skills from our first school called family.  Can we change them? Certainly we can if they do not serve us well because they are all learned behaviors. But will we stop and examine our coping to determine if it is serving us well?  Not always.  

There are two kinds of coping…positive and negative.  Do you know what your coping is like?  Negative coping is dealing with life in ways that do not really solve the problem, but rather escape it or keep you numb from the pain of the problem and by utilizing this negative coping, create another problem.  For instance, you drink or use drugs to escape and numb out painful feelings or you shop beyond your financial budget, but you do not solve the problem or address it, just escape it and by keeping up this behavior to cope, create a problem for yourself…too much drinking that could lead to abuse, addiction or in the case of shopping, lead you to debt beyond your ability to pay. Do you have any negative coping skills? They become the crutches we walk through in life and remain crippled and disempowered.

Then there is positive coping…the kind that does not hurt the problem or make it worse, it helps you to stay in a centered place to solve your problem in the best way. What positive coping skills do you have?

Some positive coping is simple…just breathe through anything, or talk to someone to process your thoughts and feelings and come up with an action plan, creative expressions of music, dance, poetry, writing, journaling, singing, praying, exercising, meditating, maintaining hope and many more you will undoubtedly identify in yourself or others.  Positive coping is the higher option, less destructive to our health of all kinds (mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual) and the one that will heal and evolve us. 

Have you taken a look at your coping style and whether it is serving your higher purpose?  If it is not in the realm of positive, remain hopeful for all behaviors were initially learned and can be unlearned.  And if perchance you have an addiction of some kind and it can be traced back to genetics(nature), beyond the learning( nurturing ) then this too has a positive outlook as far as change for the better and our healed and evolved selves for there is help to manage our addictions with professional help.

Coping with life is what we all do, some better than others, some because of better modeling, some because of better genetics, some because there is more opportunity, and still others because of greater intelligence and still others because of maturity.  Wherever, you are in life now, realize that only you can make the choice to cope in better, more positive and healthier ways. It is a matter of awareness and choice.

Coping…how do you cope?

Maria Hilda Pinon, author of The Willows of Corona, a novel, and Candles in the Dark…poems to grieve, hope and love again.

 www.mariahildapinon.com