Learning How to Cope: Finding Our Centers Through Patience and Emotional Management
Learning how to cope with our emotions is hard work. It’s draining work. It’s work that makes us feel like, maybe, wallowing isn’t that bad. Even now, as a freshly turned twenty-two year old who's been in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for nearly eight years, I still struggle to manage my emotions when I can feel myself falling down the rabbit hole of depression that I know too well. For years, I have tortured myself by refusing to do anything but wallow in what appeared to be “the brokenness of my brain.” I have several mental health diagnoses and plenty of trauma that I have been trying to cope with for years, and simply being taught to apply a coping skill when I need to is easier said than done. In addition to CBT, I’ve been in a couple of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) groups where I’ve learned some really great coping skills: mindfulness (“is about being aware of and accepting what’s happening in the present moment”); distress tolerance (“help[s] you get through rough patches without turning to potentially destructive coping techniques”); interpersonal effectiveness (aids in “knowing how you feel and what you want” when you’re trying to relate to others but your emotions are running high); and emotional regulation (“help[s] you learn to deal with primary emotional reactions before they lead to a chain of distressing secondary reactions”) (Raypole, 2019). These four major skills are jam-packed with methods we can use to manage our emotions, or what I like to consider, as working to get back to our centers.
Over the summer, I read Getting to Center: Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown by Marlee Grace—an incredibly insightful self-help book that felt more like a really good friend patiently holding my hand while describing to me in the softest voice that I am a multi-dimensional, complicated being that is capable of flourishing and committing myself to healing. In describing what “getting to center” means to Grace, she says, “Instead of finding balance, I like the language of ‘getting back on the beam.’ As if to say, we will always get knocked off, and we may get knocked off when we least expect it...So I’ve built tools into my life that help me get back on the beam faster” (Grace, 2020, pp. 1). This is the message I have carried with me since, knowing I will fall, but learning the skills to get back up with more ease.
When I used to fall away from my center, I would stay there because it always felt too hard to actively attempt getting back up; it was easier, in an ironic way, to sit there and suffer until I got tired of it. But as I’ve grown over the years, working through therapy and learning through experience, what I call, my mental muscles, have strengthened. When I imagine my high school or early college brain, I don’t think of my mental muscles as having been too weak to help me, in fact, I had to be incredibly strong to come out the other end of a full-blown depressive episode; I’m just using that strength in a different way now. A way that I feel is more productive, healthier, and effective in bringing me back to my center. Despite being in CBT for years, where we also discussed DBT skills, it wasn’t until this past year that I learned how to escape my bed when I felt an oncoming depressive episode. Most of the time, when I’ve been too preoccupied with my phone and I haven’t moved from my bed, a depressive episode starts to lurk in my hindsight. With practice, I’ve learned how to identify it’s gradual arrival by identifying how it feels in my body. My thoughts slowly become more cynical. My anxiety builds in my nerves. I feel like I do not want to move from my bed for the life of me. This is how I end up trapped. But now, when I see it coming, my first thought is that I need to get out of my bed as fast as possible. Don’t get me wrong, my bed is one of my favorite places, and a lot of the time, it allows me the space to regenerate and process my emotions, but it’s how I use my bed that lands me in a position where I have to run from it. This isn’t to be confused with running from my emotions, no, those are vastly different methods. For example, recently I felt myself sinking into a depressive episode, and although I wanted to stay in my bed, I used a distress tolerance skill known as opposite action, and instead of lying there, waiting for the darkness to overtake me, I put on my running shoes, my mask, grabbed my sanitation wipes, and walked down to my building’s one-person gym. Did I want to do this? Absolutely not. Did it feel good after? Hell yes.
While I was running on the treadmill, listening to my favorite songs, I let my body physically move through my emotions, which was quite a funny sight to see when I looked up at the wall-length mirror. While I ran and sweated and moved my body, I also cried. And yes, I did let myself laugh, because I don’t have to take myself so seriously in order to cope. You are allowed to laugh at your own sadness if that’s what it takes to make you feel more whole. Everyone’s coping skills are going to look different, and our individual journeys to using them are going to be unique in their own ways, but we can both agree that by refusing to help ourselves, we are only hurting ourselves. Rather, allowing ourselves to process our emotions in a safe and healthy manner should be the true objective we reach for, no matter how long it takes. No one (at least I hope) actively sits in their severely depressive states and wants to stay there. When I struggled with suicidal ideation, even then, I did not want to stay there, and that was the whole point. We just want the ability to feel safe, to feel heard, and loved, and empowered. We just want the madness to stop.
The reality of learning how to get back to our centers starts with ourselves and the choices we make in looking for methods that provide us with relief. Getting back to our centers takes painful work, but it’s beautiful work. Every non-linear moment of growth is worth the struggle. Don’t expect that once you’ve learned coping skills, that your brain will automatically know how to use them. Be patient with yourself. Imagine you are teaching a small child how to deal with their emotions. You deserve that amount of kindness and patience. Sometimes, I still don’t know how to get out of bed when I feel a depressive episode coming on, and that’s okay. Just because your growth doesn’t look like a linear line, doesn’t mean you are failing in any capacity; in fact, you are doing exactly what you need to—you are living, trying, falling down and getting back up again, and that’s how you should view that non-linear line. A person on their ever-growing mission to center.
Grace, M. (2020). Getting to Center: Pathways to Finding Yourself Within the Great Unknown. William Morrow Paperbacks.
Raypole, C. (2019, January 25). Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/dbt