Trauma recovery is not about eternal “coping.”

Your mileage may vary— but for my money, trauma recovery isn’t about eternal “coping.” 

I remember the first time a therapist said the word “coping” to me, as an adolescent. I hated it. 

I still kind of hate it. Not as much as I did then, and not for the same reasons— but still. 

“Coping,” to me, sounded like just keeping your head above water. The word had this sense of desperation about it. 

I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life desperately trying to keep my head above water. I didn’t want to “just get by.” 

I wanted to live. To thrive. 

So— for a long time I rejected “coping skills.” Didn’t want to learn about them. Didn’t want to hear about them. 

Fast forward to now— I still don’t envision trauma recovery as just desperately keeping our head above water or just barely getting by. 

But I’ve learned to appreciate coping skills for what they are. 

Coping is important. Getting through a long, dark night is necessary if we’re going to build a live we love in the morning. 

If we neglect coping skills— as I did, for so long— we are setting ourselves up to be way more miserable than we have to be, for way longer than we have to be. 

Coping skills, grounding skills (the skillset that helps us stay here when Trauma Brain is trying to snd us on a spontaneous trip to Neptune), containment skills (the skillset of being able to gently, respectfully compartmentalize feelings and memories so we can function in the moment, with the commitment to return to them later)…these are the backbone of early recovery. 

Coping skills are not optional. Not by a long shot. 

That said— I still think there’s more to recovery than “coping.” 

Coping is about keeping us safe and stable while we process our memories and feelings. 

To “process” feelings and memories means to take them out, examine them, their meaning, their impact on us, our relationship with them. It’s how we integrate and eventually resolve trauma— and it requires a different skillset than just “coping” 

I don’t want to “cope” indefinitely. I want to move on. 

There is a subset of people who get turned off of trauma recovery because they think it’s just about enduring memories and feelings that suck. And sure, in trauma recovery there is plenty of endurance training. 

But the only reason we bother with any of that is because we want our life back. 

We want ourselves back. Our personalty, our values, our priorities. 

We do trauma recovery because we want our life to be about things OTHER than trauma OR recovery. 

The myth is that trauma recovery is mostly, or entirely, about coping. That’s not true. Coping just gets us in the door. 

The real work of trauma recovery is in reconditioning our nervous system. 

All survivors of trauma have been subjected to a form of brainwashing. In order to take our lives back, we essentially have to “brainwash” ourselves. 

All that trauma conditioning is gonna stick— until we recondition ourselves. 

We think, feel, and behave the ways we do because we were conditioned. We were susceptible to conditioning because our nervous system is malleable— a phenomenon was call “neural plasticity.” 

Our brains are still malleable. Still plastic. It doesn’t matter how old we are— we can still change how we think, feel, and behave. 

That’s the end goal of trauma recovery. A life that gives us way more ways to feel good, than to feel bad. 

We have to cope if we’re gonna stay alive long enough to do any of this cool trauma processing and reconditioning work. But coping is only the price of admission. 

The real show starts once we’re in.