Maladaptive Coping: Breaking the Cycle

If we’ve found ourselves wrapped up in a cycle of maladaptive coping, it’s time to reconfigure our toolbox. We’ve discussed this before, but it’s helpful to think back to the concept of “rapid state change”—our bodies and minds trying to go from Point A to Point B, and quickly. At the heart of it, that’s really all a coping mechanism is; something that takes us from discomfort to comfort. (Or in some cases, numbness.) One tool for disrupting the cycle of maladaptive coping is to simply replace the habit with something more adaptive.

Say we’re really into wasting hours playing Tetris and thinking about our thoughts. (Who, me? Couldn’t be.) It’s what we turn to when we’re feeling burnt out, fried, or otherwise unable to deal. If we’ve identified that this coping mechanism is not actually solving the problem, we can replace it with something that might help instead. The mystery woman in this situation (again, definitely not me) could plug into a virtual yoga class when she’s feeling this way, instead; the movement, quiet, and dopamine that comes from it would solve the issue much more succinctly. (Instead of just putting a bandaid on it, like Tetris was. Again, all hypothetical.)

Another great tool for disrupting a cycle of maladaptive coping is simply connection. We dove into detail when we discussed shame resilience, but connection with others is one of the quickest ways to disrupt internal feedback loops that are reshaping our reality. When we’ve found ourselves using a coping mechanism that really isn’t serving us, it’s hard to see things clearly—we’re so used to relying on *the thing* that we may not even fully understand how much it’s impacting us.

Or perhaps we do  know how much *the thing* is impacting us, but we’ve developed shame stories around this cognitive dissonance. We may feel that our inability to cope means we’re less than as a person. Any of these kinds of thought processes stand to benefit from an external source validating our worthiness or helping us see what is and isn’t working well in our lives.

As we build our resilience, this presents us an opportunity to take a look at coping mechanisms we’re using that perhaps aren’t serving us as we truly need them to. (Or maybe we swapped one maladaptive coping mechanism—alcohol—for another.) As we often note here at Reframe, usually the alcohol is just the surface-level thing—deciding to change our relationship with it opens us up to so much additional growth