Category: Coping

Spaghetti and Hurt Feelings

I am a pretty clumsy person. Like a keep-an-eye-on-me-around-closed-sliding-glass-doors, probably-should-never-eat-spaghetti-without-a-full-apron-on kind of person. Suffice it to say, my childhood nickname lauded my propensity to accumulate minor bumps and scrapes through incredible feats of un-coordination. I won’t tell you how old I was when I nearly broke my glasses walking into the corner of a doorway instead of through the doorway - although, to be perfectly clear, it was part of the transparent wall of a racquetball court…and that was the problem: it was perfectly clear.

 

Anyway, as my luck would have it, I’m also a pretty relationally-clumsy person. At times I completely miss that I have caused emotional discomfort or harm. I put my foot in my mouth routinely enough that I< ...

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Everyone deals with challenges to their mental health. 

At this moment you may not feel lost in a cloud of depression or ready to jump out of your skin with anxiety, but you may be in the middle of a really hard day, or a series of hard days.

Sometimes we are blindsided by a crisis. At other times, the little things just add up. 

Imagine your alarm didn’t go off, you woke up late for work and your kids were crying through the night so you only slept a few hours. On your drive to work, you suddenly notice a large pothole ahead of you. Someone is tailgating you so you can’t slow down, and someone is next to you in the adjacent lane, so you can’t move over.

You make it to work with a flat tire, but at least you’re there, and thankfully nothing stressful can happen at work. 

Within a very short time, your typical daily stress-load has been amplified, and you feel that it’s bey ...

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            Whether we realize it or not, we use coping strategies everyday.  Some maybe as subtle as sleeping in to avoid the traffic or procrastinating on a project or term paper due (guilty) hoping it will just do it itself.  It is when our unhealthy habits become a problem with our normal daily routine is when we need a change.  Our skills, routine, or what we think is working needs to be looked at.  Is this beneficial for me, is this getting me where I want to be, am I seeing bad consequences from these decisions?  These are just some of the questions we need to ask ourselves if we aren’t where we want to be.  

            Coping skills, strategies, or techniques have a couple of common threads that can be applied to just about any disorder: anxiety, anger, alcohol abuse, or any other ...

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