When “What I’ve Always Done”
Isn’t Working Anymore
Trigger warning: this section contains examples of experiences that may cause you to feel uncomfortable.
The purpose of this page is to help you connect how experiences in your past may be affecting you today, because many of the experiences that lead to maladaptive coping skills - extreme stress, conflict in the family, financial issues, the loss of loved ones, emotional invalidation, and other types of poor treatment in childhood - get swept under the rug, labeled as “normal,” or are otherwise unattended to.
Research tells us that children who are placed in these kind of situations are less likely to develop healthy skills to deal with emotions and problem solve. Without access to adaptive, healthy behavior, people many continue with using maladaptive coping strategies to manage stress and difficult situations. Avoidance, control, and denial are at the core of these maladaptive coping skills.
Below are some examples of coping skills that may have helped you in the past but are no longer serving you and may even be creating issues in your life.
These are just a few. If any of these resonate with you or you have noticed a pattern in your life that’s causing problems for you in the now, it means that these unhelpful coping skills you learned in order to survive in the past are not working anymore, and you could benefit from EMDR or another form of therapy.
-
…(because, at one point, you HAD to be the one taking care of things).
-
…(because those emotions feel too big, and you’ve never gotten the guidance to learn how to manage feelings and reactions, and shutting down happens when emotions feel too big).
-
…(because when you were a child, an adult or guardian wasn’t there for you, and the only person you could think to blame was yourself).
-
…(because you learned somewhere that if you didn’t do something, no one else would and then bad things would happen).
-
…(because, in the past, something caused you to think that the only way to get love or attention was to do what someone said).
-
…(because there was little to no stability at one point, and they only way to get by now is to know exactly what’s coming).
-
…because relaxing feels weird, and if you stop to relax, you think you’re being lazy or maybe thoughts and feelings come up that you’re not sure what to do about.
-
…(because you came home to an empty home pretty often, and you have a belief that if you keep everyone around you happy, you won’t need to be lonely again)
-
…(because asking for help used to cause problems).
-
…(because there was a time in your life when those times were not very safe).
-
…(because it wasn’t safe for people to get close to you in the past, and you learned that if people did not get close to you, they couldn’t hurt you).
-
…because someone taught you that your emotions were not valid and/or that it was not okay to share thoughts and feelings.
