Difference between “coping” and “resolving” for stress and emotional problems
Most of the time, when people are faced with stress or emotional problem of some kind, they’ll try to cope with it. After all, this is what we’ve been taught to do. We often hear “stress is inevitable, learn to cope with it”. Or “learn to be resilient”. Or “create a good coping strategy”…
Isn’t this putting a problem in a wrong way? When you have a small rock in your shoe and you have a few kilometers to walk — would you try to “cope with it”? You’ll end up with bloody blisters by the end of the road… So, why do you take this approach to your emotions? You have to live with them for the rest of your life…
So why not resolve the problem instead? Throw out this rock out of your shoe. Prevent this painful emotion from ever affecting you.
You might think, “if that would’ve been possible, I would have done that long ago”. In fact, it is possible. But before saying how to do that, I want to clarify what I mean by difference between coping and resolving.
Coping
Imagine that you have a keyboard, where every time you press “space”, a message pops up on your computer screen. It interrupts your work. Sometimes it even breaks important processes. But you are continuing to work that way. You are finding ways to achieve what you need without ever using “space” key. After a few years of practice, this feels natural to you. You got used to it. But to anyone from outside your way of work seems awkward.
This is exactly “coping”.
I know how it works (even in the technical sense), because at one stage of my life I spent a year working with a screen, which was only able to maintain sharpness when I used dark red letters on a dark green background. Otherwise it was impossible to read anything. I got used to it. And was proud of that! (Totally ridiculous).
Resolving
So how would be “resolving” different from the solution above? Simple: you look for the source of this message on screen. And it turns out to be a half-broken key logger, which your parents have installed on your computer when you was a child. It was installed for a purpose of keeping an eye on you, but since then a lot of upgrades and updates happened to your system and it stopped working…
You wipe that keylogger out of your system, and suddenly not only your keybord starts to work fine, but a bunch of other “weird” problems mysteriously disappear.
Difference
In the end difference is related to whether you need to watch out for a problem or totally forget about it, because it does not affect you anymore.
Emotions
You might be surprised, but the story with emotions is exactly the same. Most of our emotional issues related to the “who knows when” installed programs, which act weird and trigger emotional “message boxes” at the wrong times.
And the way to deal with them is very similar — you find the source: a trigger, which starts up emotion and “remove” it. I should make a small correction here. Technically, you are not “removing” it, but “accepting” it instead.
I written a long story about this, but to make it short:
- Triggers are our perceptions. They trigger emotions when what we perceive doesn’t match our mental model. For example, you perceive “hopelessness” (of situation) and it makes you upset.
- The way to “deal” with them is to accept them into our mental model. This is surprisingly simple: You focus on your perception and say to yourself a few times “I accept <perception>”. Or, if this is difficult, you say “I accept the link between <feeling> and <perception>”.
This perception gets integrated into your mental model, and instead of getting “emotion message box” you transition directly to the action of reacting to it in a conscious and calm manner.
That it! (Now you might think: if that would be that easy, I wouldn’t have to suffer this long. And you are right — you don’t have to suffer).
Certainly, with all simplicity of the process there should be a catch. And we have one: it takes effort to 1. Find your perception. 2. Put it into words.
I’m going to write more on this topic, and will be soon releasing a few solutions based on this. I would be glad to answer questions you have, but obviously I will not be disclosing a lot of technical details… ;-P
P.S. If you would like to try it out — head to my blog, there is a short demo article.