Quotes About Coping

I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.

What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.

She understood that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.

And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.

The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that's just the deal.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.

People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.

One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...

People had to manage terrible truths.

Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else.

And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment with the equivalent of chemotherapy, what did that say about the others? How many of the nondivorced had just learned to live with the illness because the cure seemed even worse than the disease?

But denial . . . well, you know what they say about denial." Ben nodded, seeing where this was going now, not wanting to show what he really thought of it. "It has no survival value.

The best you can do is keep yourself from brooding about it.

And what do you do when you can't use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes—maybe even often—it's the solution.

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

And maybe there had been enough tears, anyway. Which is not to say there wouldn't be more.

For all of us there is an approach to the seemingly unapproachable. This is the life-affirming work of learning to stay present even under difficult circumstances, to embrace mental, physical, and spiritual pain using techniques suitable for each particular level of discomfort.

Our personal environment is also changing at an ever-increasing pace. Such rapid change burns out a large number of people who feel they can hardly handle it, can hardly cope with life. They become reactive and essentially give up, hoping that the things that happen to them will be good.

the four areas where stress most significantly affected the brain: attention control, emotion regulation, healthy coping, and empathy.

When we've adopted behavior because we think it helps us avoid emotional pain, whether we're aware of that thinking or not, change is challenging.

Psychological rigidity is at its core an attempt to avoid negative thoughts and feelings caused by difficult experiences, both when they occur and in our memory of them.

To get around these things, Maus lived at the back of a closet. The door was