Quotes About Coping

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including "everything happens for a reason," "the show must go on," "accept the things you cannot change," and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up.

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Marryin's good, keeps a body on his toes. Me, once I lost Clem, I never cared to wed again.

There is no defense against adverse fortune which is so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

Strength, beti. Be strong. Bibi turns tearfully toward her. "How, mausi?" she asks. "How? He was my rock. How do I learn to see the world through my own eyes?" Bhima falls silent, feeling acutely her own inadequacy. By breathing one breath at a time, she wants to say. By waking up one morning after another. By putting one foot ahead of the next, until your feet recall how to walk again.

Those who can mentally cope should also do the following

Women are expected to absorb traumas both subtle and loud and move on. Shoulder the weight of the world. But when the world fucks with us, the worst thing we can do is bury it. Embracing it makes us strong enough to fuck the world right back.

She remembered that they were never sober. Shane drank to seek oblivion; she stayed high to outrun pain. They did it together—but she cut herself in private.

You're a sane person reacting to an insane situation.

even though the false self is meant to protect the more vulnerable self, it actually has the effect of weakening it. When people who have become dependent on false-self functioning go into therapy or enter a 12-step program, they can go through a period of feeling very vulnerable and shaky because they are removing their coping strategy and exposing the pain underneath it. But over time, new healthy emotional habits get created, and new ways of healthy coping get practiced and adopted.

Change comes when we have sat in the pain long enough and fully enough so that we can feel it, can open our mouths and talk about it, see it for what it is, reorder and understand it, and then walk out of it. This does not mean that we won't feel bad, hurt, angry, or triggered about our past again. It just means that if and when we are triggered, we won't catapult into an unconscious place from which we can only act out, shut down, or dive straight into self-medicating behaviors.

In working through the pain of a traumatic past, it is important to help clients to identify not only what hurt them, but what sustained them.

Reenactment patterns. It is a natural phenomenon of unresolved and unconscious pain that gets recreated over and over again in what psychologists call an attempt to "master pain." Memory is state dependent, so we tend to re-create familiar patterns when confronted with like circumstances.

When we can use our thinking mind to make sense and meaning of our limbic mind, we develop a feeling of mastery and self-confidence, knowing that we can find a way to deal with what life throws in our direction. We feel we have the skills necessary to cope with our lives, and at those moments when we can't, we know how to ask for help.

No, but it's your reality now. Put on your big-boy pants and deal with it.

I have one rule about trouble. When it comes, I get out of the way.

He already knew that, "[i]f we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

You never get over something like that. You just try to keep it in a box on an out-of-the-way shelf in your brain. But then you open the closet to look for an old sousaphone—

And here's how I rationalize my rationalizing. God gave us the ability to rationalize so we can stomach all the horrible things we're required to do every day just to survive the concrete jungle.

When someone was hitting me, or like sexually molesting me, it just seemed normal to continue to do that to myself.

You have moments when you sulk, when you crib and cry and feel that, 'why me and why all these things are happening with me.' We are only human. It's about facing your fear and not giving up because you are the only person who will support yourself at the end of the day and if you dont do that than nobody else will.

As a novelist, I have always been interested in how people come to terms with difficult, life-altering events.

If people can't deal with their problems, they numb themselves a little bit.