Coping Skills

Having good coping skills can help you to ‘tolerate’ problems or difficult situations without them having any significant negative impact on your life, or on your ability to ‘function normally’.

People with effective coping skills may be described as ‘resilient’ to problems.

This does not mean that they do not encounter the same life challenges as everybody else but rather that when they do occur that they have less impact on them.

Resilience is a complex phenomenon and it is determined by a wide range of bio-psycho-social factors but more importantly, anybody can learn to develop better coping skills and become more resilient.

Because our experience of life is completely subjective and individually constructed (known as perceptual constructivism), people will generally develop coping skills or coping mechanisms consistent with their internal beliefs and experiences leading to coping mechanisms that may make things worse rather then better!

These are known as ‘maladaptive coping skills’.

Maladaptive Coping Skills

Maladaptive copings skills are those strategies or mechanisms that people ‘develop’ that work on one level (what we call ‘coherent’) but on another level lead to more significant problems. It is this paradox that gives rise to the definition ‘maladaptive’.

Alcohol abuse and drug abuse are classic examples of a maladaptive coping skills as they almost certainly allow a person to ‘escape’ from uncomfortable feelings (‘it works’) but generally lead to more significant associated problems as a result.

The same is generally true with self-harming strategies (like cutting) as it allows the self-harmer to ‘externalise’ the uncomfortable internal feelings and provides a way of coping. Of course, this invariably leads to more significant problems.

Maladaptive coping skills usually arise due to not knowing about more useful strategies or because there is little choice about what can be done practically.

Maladaptive strategies may also exist because they ‘made sense’ when they were originally ‘created’ (in childhood for example) but are no longer relevant to the life ‘context’ today. In many cases these unhelpful mechanisms continue to be ‘utilised’ as they have become ‘habitual’.

Improving Your Coping Skills

Here at Tranceform Psychology we have been helping people to develop a range of coping skills and strategies using our course of beliefs-based CBT which is a psycho-educational process that helps a person develop self-insight through understanding their core limiting beliefs and how they may be leading to limiting paradigms, unhelpful thinking or thought processes.

It also teaches a person a range of new and better adapted coping skills that build greater resilience to problems and challenges.

Taking place over 10 weeks (one hour per week) and structured around a workbook, our course can help you to make significant and sustainable changes to your perceptual understanding of the world around you.

Common Problems Where Coping Skills Can be Useful

• Coping with Anger
• Coping with Anxiety
• Coping with Depression
• Coping with Divorce
• Coping with Life
• Coping with Stress

Click on any of these pages to read more about coping with specific problems.

Manage Your Thinking & Improve Your Coping Skills

If you’re committed to improving your coping skills then we highly recommend following our Advanced Tranceformental CBT programme with Paul. Tranceformental CBT is available as Online Therapy if required.

The Tranceformental programme is a highly successful & pragmatic psychotherapy course, run over 10 sessions, that will teach you everything you need to know to understand your problem, identify how unhelpful thinking and limiting beliefs might be reinforcing the issue, and then show you how to make any changes to your unhelpful thinking styles or maladaptive safety behaviours that you may have developed as part of your coping strategies.

Our Tranceformental CBT programme is an evidence-based, research supported approach used by mental health practitioners around the World.

Free Initial Consultations to Discuss Your Coping Skills

We offer all prospective clients an initial consultation to discuss your difficulties in coping with mental health problems prior to commencing any counselling.

The consultation is free and lasts around 50 minutes.

During this consultation we will discuss the various types of psychological therapy that are available to you and make a considered recommendation based on your individual personal circumstances.

Initial consultations are also available as part of our online counselling service.

At Tranceform Psychology we emphasise the importance of the therapy relationship in helping people to bring about effective change, so its important to be able to ‘meet’ to discuss our change programmes BEFORE proceeding.

Our policy is to help people make a fully balanced & considered decision about undertaking mental health work with us, including both the financial and personal implications.