Coping Skills
Gaining tools for you to feel confident and resilient as you safely navigate the ups and downs of daily life.
Coping Skills
We love a good coping skill. Whether you struggle with all-or-nothing thinking, out-of-control emotions, impulsivity, rigidity, low self-worth or lack of self-trust, there is a coping skill or tool that can help. By introducing you to practical resources like DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) skills and Thought Work, intuition-strengthening practices based in polyvagal theory and somatic experiencing, and resiliency-building resourcing techniques from Attachment-Focused EMDR, you can start to incorporate new and more effective ways of managing painful thoughts and emotions, unhelpful conditioned behaviors, and ineffective ways of relating to yourself and the world around you.
Coping Skills might be for you if:
You grew up in an unstable or chaotic home environment, and have a more difficult time with self-soothing and emotion regulation as an adult.
You’ve learned to rely on self-destructive behaviors or harmful substances to manage current levels of distress in your life.
You’re ready to practice new ways of managing your thoughts and feelings, and ways of showing up in your relationships.
There’s a healthy coping skill for:
anxiety (including relationship anxiety + social anxiety)
intrusive thoughts + overthinking
work stress + burnout
mood swings + self-sabotaging
imposter syndrome + paranoia
self-esteem + learning how to love yourself
letting go + accepting reality
perfectionism + people pleasing
resentment + jealousy
difficulties establishing + maintaining boundaries
tolerating maladaptive behaviors + the urge to shut down
managing high sensitivities + more
“I help clients come to feel the power of imagination as a tool for their own healing when used skillfully. When we choose positive uses for our imagination, we give the brain an alternative pathway — a new way of thinking and feeling.”
- Laurel Parnell
What are Coping Skills?
Coping skills help you better navigate the ups and downs of daily life.
If you’re like me, you didn’t learn many coping skills or tools growing up. You didn’t hear about the connection between thoughts and feelings, and how we can actually influence our mood and behaviors; you didn’t learn how to identify and listen to your intuition, a skill that can literally save your life (and sanity!); and you didn’t learn how to set healthy boundaries, or what an effective boundary even is! Like me it may not have been until you were an adult that you realized there was an easier way to live, and coping skills could help you to do that. Whether you struggle with relationship or social anxiety, extreme up and down emotions, or asking others for help, there is a coping skill that can help you. (In fact that list of possibilities barely scratches the surface!)
Because I have spent much of my adult life learning and practicing various coping skills and resources that can help you to live a life with more ease and peace, in addition to offering you a wide array of tools to learn and work with, I provide real life examples of how to use them and apply them in your daily life. And because learning the coping skills and resources only gets you partway to a more peaceful and powerful life, I also offer a point of accountability for my clients, to ensure the skills are practiced, strengthened, and eventually made into habit.
With special consideration and emphasis on skills that can help survivors of trauma, highly sensitive people, and adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, here is an overview of skills that you can learn in session.
Examples of Coping Skills
DBT Coping Skills
DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) is rich in practical life skills that you can apply in a range of situations. With a special emphasis on the practice of mindfulness, DBT skills are widely considered to be life changing (and even life saving).
Mindfulness skills will help you gain practice in identifying your thoughts, body senses and emotions, as well as the urges and impulses that can result in behaviors you later regret.
Distress Tolerance skills will teach you how to better tolerate painful events, urges, and emotions that may not be immediately solved or treated, including crisis survival skills that can help you to navigate high-stress situations without making them worse.
Emotion Regulation skills help you learn to name and understand what your emotions are communicating to you, change unwanted negative emotional responses, and identify and change ineffective thought and behavioral patterns that keep you stuck in emotional suffering.
Lastly, Interpersonal Effectiveness skills help to increase your skillfulness in relationships(!). These skills provide understanding and direction on how to consider your own self-respect, values, and goals in a relationship. These are super pragmatic skills that you probably haven’t learned anywhere else; they will teach you to get wants and needs met by others, to build quality relationships and end destructive ones, and balance acceptance and change within the relationships you want to nurture and grow.
Thought Work Coping Skills
Introducing Thought Work into your daily life can be a complete game changer. The practice is relatively straightforward, and is based on the understanding that thoughts lead to feelings, because science. Here an overview of the steps:
Become aware of your thoughts.
Write down your thoughts.
Examine your thoughts in order to get clear about what is subjective opinion or belief, that you’re assuming is actually objective fact.
From there, tap into your curiosity as if you were a detective: look for alternate interpretations of the objective facts. Try to identify any default negative opinions or beliefs that are actually projections of your own insecurities and self-judgments.
Create more neutral thoughts that a) help depersonalize other people’s behaviors, and b) lessen your own responsibility for other people’s thoughts and feelings.
Take action based on the new feeling state created by your more neutral thoughts.
With consistent practice thought work can transform your relationship to yourself and your relationship to others, as well as radically decrease the suffering you experience due to taking things personally and relying on others to determine your self-worth and value. With time and practice you will find you’re naturally easier on yourself, better able to regulate your mood, and more skilled in identifying when other people in your life aren’t keeping their side of the metaphorical street clean.
Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing
You know how your brain can sometimes be your own worst enemy? This might be ruminating on a past mistake, or catastrophizing all of the various ways a social event could go wrong, or obsessing about possible threats to your romantic relationship… well that is essentially the power of your brain in action, and just like it can imagine and focus on things that make you feel ashamed or scared, it has the potential to imagine and focus on things that make you feel loved and safe. This is where Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing comes in.
Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing can be a part of your big-picture EMDR treatment plan when you’re working towards targeting traumatic memories, and Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing exists in and of itself to provide you with both strengthening resources as well as a self-soothing resources. There are limitless ways you can leverage Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing to improve your daily life and daily functioning; examples of this are tapping in an Ideal Parent Figure in order to feel a sense of safety, support, and acceptance that you didn’t feel with your own caregiver during your pivotal childhood developmental years; tapping in Comfort Memories to call on in moments when your social anxiety is being prompted; or tapping in a Peaceful Place when you’re having a hard time falling or staying asleep at night.
Because trauma can affect your brain’s circuitry, you may notice that it’s super easy for you to stress and worry, focus on the negative, and catastrophize painful outcomes. Attachment-Focused EMDR Super Resourcing helps to rewire your brain by creating new neural pathways, giving you an opportunity to experience a new default mode centered in peaceful, calming, powerful, and wise automatic thoughts and feelings.
Polyvagal Theory Coping Skills
Learning about your nervous system and how traumatic experiences have affected it is invaluable for survivors of trauma. It can be truly eye-opening and validating to understand how and why your body may feel as if it’s always in fight-or-flight mode, or in a zoned out, distant, and detached dissociative state. The concept of safety, and what it feels like in your body, may be entirely new or foreign to your nervous system.
Learning about and practicing coping skills based in polyvagal theory can introduce you to a sense of calm and stability in your daily life; learning skills like diaphragmatic breathing and becoming more consistent in the practice of recognizing cues for safety and danger in your environment can help to strengthen your intuitive knowing and the ease in which you connect to it.