Quotes About Coping

Unpredictability and the unknown make everyone feel anxious and therefore less able to process information accurately.

This dissociative response is used when there is inescapable, unavoidable distress and pain. Your mind and body protect you. Because you cannot physically flee, and fighting is futile, you psychologically flee to your inner world.

For most people, the unknown is one of the major causes of feeling anxious or overwhelmed.

Dr. Perry: It has the same effect. And other children will discover that pulling out their hair or their eyebrows gives a little bit of an opiate burst.

This is where the work begins—the work to excavate the roots that were put down long before we had the words to articulate what was happening to us.

No one aspires to be the person who handles this kind of situation well. And we don't always handle it well.

You've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It's one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs. Because

but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet…. It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.

I have some anger issues.

who was experiencing a bit of post-traumatic stress.

Sometimes, insanity is not a tragedy. Sometimes, it's a strategy for survival. Sometimes ... it's a triumph.

It is a way I have of driving off the spleen

The will not to believe. It is simple human nature. When the mind cannot grasp or face up to a horrible fact it turns away, as though refusing credence will conjure away the reality.

Have you ever gotten so sad that it actually feels GOOD to do something you know will make you even sadder?

The degree to which a surviving parent copes is the most important indicator of the child's long-term adaptation. Kids whose surviving parents are unable to function effectively in the parenting role show more anxiety and depression, as well as sleep and health problems, than those whose parents have a strong support network and solid inner resources to rely on.

there's no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, "different kinds of hell.

Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.

Across the board... Not junkies or freaks, but people who were just as comfortable with drugs like weed, booze, or coke as we are - and we're not weird, are we? Hell no, we're just overworked professionals who need to relax now and then, have a bit of the whoop and the giggle, right?

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth.

but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!

Thus the engine of self-pity began to turn.

A ghastly attempt at a smile, sure to send any normal person to a therapist.