Read Time: 8 minutes

There are two buzzwords in the media that really grind my gears: 1) Self-Care and 2) Coping Skills. Lots of therapists, healthcare providers, and wellness people love to use these two words interchangeably, like they’re synonymous. It’s easy, if we’re being honest, to tell a client to take a few baths per week or to take a couple of deep breaths when we’re stressed or in pain. But that isn’t very helpful and it doesn’t really solve anything.

So…what is self-care? What are coping skills? And more importantly, when do we need them or something more?

Coping skills are what you do to survive. To talk about coping skills, we have to talk about self-harm, because while people do not like to interchange them, coping skills and self-harm are the same thing. I say this because both coping skills and self-harm behaviors do one thing - they help us survive. The thing about surviving and thus survival behaviors is that they can be appropriate or inappropriate, negative or positive, and when they are inappropriate or negative, that is when it becomes a form of self-harm. 

The challenge of coping skills is that typically therapists and healthcare professionals want to tell people to “just learn some coping skills,” when in actuality, you or your loved ones have challenges that need more support than what a survival behavior or coping skill can offer. Coping skills can therefore lead to what I like to think of as metaphorical scars. 

Positive coping skills, or survival behaviors can absolutely make your day-to-day life better, and that is usually where the benefits stop. Like anything else, coping skills have a time and a place. Everyone needs to just survive sometimes, especially in a world where basic needs like food and shelter are not always easily met.

Having said that, coping skills are not always so useful. While they can be appropriate, such as requiring us to always have straight A’s or being 100% attached to our schedules, they can also be inappropriate: cutting, burning, working out too much.

Your subconscious brain’s only goal is for you to survive and it is your conscious brain’s goal for you to thrive. But here’s the thing - it is impossible for you to always be in thriving mode. Yet...you can’t always be in survival mode either. And while all of this is true, being in survival mode more often than not means that your self-worth doesn’t get a chance to grow, which is just as important as the more self-worth we have, the less likely we need inappropriate or negative coping skills. See the dilemma?

Psst...by the way…

WE’VE LAUNCHED ANOTHER TEEN CHAT GROUP FOR HIGH SCHOOL AGED TEENS. TEEN CHAT IS AN ONLINE, WEEKLY GROUP FOR TEENS WHO WANT TO MANAGE THEIR ANXIETY AND BUILD A LIFELONG COMMUNITY OF FRIENDS.

Let’s think of it this way: Imagine you have a wound, let’s say you fell down the stairs. Now you need stitches. Sure, you can definitely use a Band-Aid, and that would help for a bit. But if the wound is large enough the Band-Aid just isn’t going to cut it. You need to address the wound, address the problem. The same is true for coping skills - they aren’t always enough. For this, we need what I like to call preventative self-care.

Preventative self-care is what we do to develop a long-term plan to thrive, as opposed to just surviving. It involves creating action plans, rituals and routines so that over time we can think larger than just “how do I survive today,” and more of “how can I make moves so that this will not happen again” or at least, “how can I make moves so that if this happens again, the effect is not as bad.” After all, we want to heal our unwanted patterns, not achieve perfection.

I want to pause for a moment. If you work with me, you already know that I am not a coping skills therapist. As I’ve already said, coping skills do not help us solve long-term problems. Having said that, I also do not believe that we can use only coping skills or preventative self-care. We need both. But what I hear time and again is that clients are introduced to some healthy coping skills through a therapist or healthcare professional, but they’re introduced without being taught the difference between coping skills and preventative self-care, and when you might need to use the latter. This leads to people who need to use something larger to treat that wound, to try to use a Band-Aid.

Let’s dive into the specifics of what this could look like for teens and adults. You have a task you need to do, such as homework (or an administrative task). When you think of doing this task, you might get anxious or stressed out, and because of this, you shut down and procrastinate.

The important part of this is that you understand why you are shutting down and procrastinating. It is likely that this happens to you because you have low self-efficacy. Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as the heaviness of the term makes it seem! Basically, if you have a high self-efficacy, you are more likely to believe in yourself and thus your ability to rise up to tasks, challenges, and goals increases.

If you have lower self-efficacy, this belief in yourself is just not as strong. You might not believe you are worthy of being successful because of past things that have happened to you. Whether it is in your job, your schoolwork, or just regular tasks around the house, the result is similar: a spike in anxiety and a lack of actually getting things done. 

Sometimes what can happen is, like the previous example of a Band-Aid for far too large of a wound, we can try to solve a long-term problem with short-term coping skills. If you have a long-term problem with self-efficacy, while taking a bath might feel great and soothe your muscles, it will most likely not suddenly make you feel you are worthy of success.

But here is where the difference and the need to do more exploration comes in. We need to examine the reason why you find difficulty starting your homework. It could very well be that you, like me, are a perfectionist. If you haven’t perfected something and can still find flaws in it, you don’t want to turn it in, therefore you shut down and don’t actually work on the task at all. So a planner, while maybe helping figure out what you have to do and when you have to do it, isn’t really going to address the larger issue. 

So...what could address the larger issue? Preventative self-care. You might try to understand your perfectionism, where it came from, and why it is controlling you instead of the other way around.

By definition, preventative self-care is slower and steadier than simply trying to use coping skills. This can be frustrating, kind of like how the Tortoise must have felt in the Tale of the Tortoise and the Hare. After all, unlike coping skills, there are no short-term benefits to preventative self-care. You won’t find instant results here and this isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme. In fact, if I’m being honest, it can actually be infuriating and anxiety-inducing when we first start to use preventative self-care.

If I am a perfectionist who always gets straight A’s with a very busy schedule, and there is simply no feasible and healthy way to get it all done, to practice preventative self-care I might look at what homework assignments actually aren’t that big of a deal and… not do them. I might even do them, but only do them a quarter of the way before turning them in. If I am a parent, I might let the expectations that my child gets straight A’s go a bit, and lower that expectation to C’s and B’s. If I’m just an adult living in the world, maybe I mindfully let my dishwasher run twice because I did not want to rinse my dishes, and remind myself it’s nothing to feel shameful about.

Preventative self-care is what we do to avoid crashing and burning. What is the long-term problem we are trying to solve? If you feel anxious when you don’t do something perfect, then coping mechanisms will not solve that problem. Preventative self-care will address these long-term problems, and coping skills will help you survive while you address those problems and craft rituals and routines that help you thrive.

Until next time.

About Our Author | Lena McCain MA, LPC. 0017723

Lena McCain is our Founder here at Interfaith Bridge Counseling, where she continues her support as our Clinical Director. She also holds a Master of Arts degree in Clinical Mental Health: Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling Psychology from Naropa University.

Lena’s drive and passions lie in the realm of community building and youth collaboration, which she has spent the last 12 years studying with an emphasis on one’s exploration of personal growth, community healing, and multicultural values. Lena’s expertise in these areas and the therapeutic field acts as a reminder to our community, teens, and young adults that they are not alone in their experience of life.