I remember the first time a therapist said the words “coping skills” to me— I hated it.
I was a junior in high school. I had become the “identified patient” in m family after having a panic attack at school.
(Do you know how f*ckng disorienting a panic attack is, when you have no idea “panic attacks” even exist? Very disorienting, is the answer.)
My parents had gotten me in to see a counselor, a family friend who would become one of my first role models in the psychotherapy field.
(He would actually be present, along with my mother and me, at my dad’s death. But that’s a different story.)
Anyway. Yeah, I hated the words “coping skills.”
To me, those words spoke of just getting by.
The word “coping,” specifically, to me had some sort of…stench of desperation to it.
I did not want to just “cope.” I wanted to succeed. I wanted to thrive.
If this “therapy” thing was only going to equip me to “cope,” I can’t say I was very interested in it at all.
Fast forward to now— I’m a therapist, and I spend a fair amount of my time supporting survivors in developing, you guessed it, coping skills.
It took me years to realize that “coping” is not a bad word.
The truth is, we have to cope BEFORE we can succeed. Before we can thrive.
I know that now, with years of trauma and addiction recovery. But I empathize with the teenage-Glenn’s reaction.
He couldn’t imagine a life of “just getting by” being anything he wanted to live.
I’ve often discussed how my immersion in self-help books as a teenager helped me to not kill myself. Something I think about a lot is the fact that one of the main reasons why that worked was, self-help books usually don’t advertise themselves as “coping tools.”
Rather, they present themselves as tools of success and thriving.
Had those self-help books been focused on “coping,” I doubt they would have been effective, or at least as effective, for me.
As a depressed, suicidal teenager, I didn’t yet have an appreciation for how miraculous it is to f*ckin’ cope.
I eventually learned— but I still get why teenage-me wasn’t into “coping.”
To be honest, while I’ve developed a powerful appreciation for the miracle of coping, I still don’t believe in trauma or addiction recovery the overarching goal of which is to just get by. To just cope.
I don’t think you, or anyone, should be in recovery to “just get by” or “just cope.”
To me, the promise of recovery isn’t coping. That’s just a starting point.
To me, the promise of recovery is joy.
It’s meaningful connection.
It’s feeling f*cking awesome— consistently and predictably.
Don’t get me wrong: coping is a necessary first step. But I have never, ever believed it to be the only step, or the ultimate step.
I DO believe that if we’re serious about joy, we have to make our peace with going through the stage of just getting by. It’s kind of like how, in Twelve Step recovery, it’s not an option to jump right to Step Twelve— you have to experience and master the progressive increments of recovery, literally one step at a time.
But don’t forget: while learning and using coping skills can be a pain in the ass, they are a necessary pain in the ass if our goal is to get PAST the “just getting by” stage.
Recovery is not just about keeping our head above water— though it is assuredly about that.
Recovery is about learning how to f*ckn’ waterski.
Use Your Damn Skills 