Episode 19. Coping: Learning to Speak the Language of Resilience
We all deal with stress, but how we cope with it can make or break our relationships. In this episode we bring awareness to physical and psychological responses during stress. We discuss the importance of questioning our thoughts and reframing stories that are causing anxiety. Healthy coping includes connecting with others, finding advocacy and validation, educating yourself, and setting future direction. Differentiate healthy coping vs dangerous escaping Set legal, moral and ethical boundaries for activities like media use, eating, work, exercise, and substances. Enlist spousal support and accountability. discuss setting boundaries around coping mechanisms to prevent unhealthy escapes.
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00:00:03
Hola. Mucho gusto. Como esta? Bien. Mi gusto comer.00:00:11
Manzanas. Welcome back, you wonderfully intelligent people. And, yes, that was Spanish. Thanks for joining us for another exciting episode of Marriage IQ. Today we are taking language lessons.00:00:31
That's right, a new language class. I am studying Spanish on Duolingo, and as you can tell, I'm doing really well. Manzanas is apples, right? Yes. Don't they always talk about apples on Duolingo?00:00:46
Yeah, it's always about apples, but that's about as far as I've gotten. So. So last week, we asked, now that you've learned about stress and the meaning attached to it, how do we apply it? How do we apply this to our lives using practical principles and expert advice. Did we ask that?00:01:04
We did. Okay, I'll take that part out. This week, we talk about coping with stress in healthy ways.00:01:15
That's really great, Scott. Just like there's good and bad stress, there's also good and bad coping. We call good coping bone adaptive coping and bad coping maladaptive coping. Okay, so maladaptive coping would include being really emotionally charged and having reactions like yelling and screaming at our spouse or our kids when we're under massive stress, kicking the dog, saying hurtful things that we don't mean. And I'm talking that we do this over and over.00:01:47
We have a pattern of this, right? Yeah. Using the silent treatment, making threats to someone in our family or elsewhere, turning to addictive behaviors such as eating, which, whenever I feel stress, I go straight for the pantry. So this is my natural tendency, and I really have to keep it in check. Some people, on the other hand, don't eat at all when they're really stressed.00:02:11
Some people use dangerous substances. Binge social media or Netflix binge porn. Try cutting. That seems to be kind of common with teenagers, sometimes spending money and lots of other maladaptive ways of coping. But today in this episode, we're going to be focused.00:02:35
Today in this episode, we're going to be focusing on good coping skills that we can use to deal with stress. Okay, so we've been in a whirlwind lately. It seems like life itself is spinning out of control sometimes, doesn't it, my love? I think with starting this new business in addition to our medical practice, it definitely feels that way sometimes. You heard last week about Heidi's version of her trip out to help the kids and the stress she had dealing with all of that.00:03:08
This week we're teaching good coping as an intentional response to stress. And you'll hear my version about that same story. That's great. Then you can see in real time how unique we are in regards to our own perceptions and how we interpret events and the meaning we make from them. Okay, so Heidi was out of town last week.00:03:32
Why? I don't know. But she was following her motherly instincts to fly out to help our daughter, Emily, start graduate school. Not college graduate school. This wasn't.00:03:50
This is not our daughter's first rodeo. She's been out of the house for six years now. She spent the better part of a week helping her daughter get situated with the new campus. Even though she's been to that campus. Our daughter's been to that campus many times before.00:04:09
That's very interesting that that's your perspective. Two days after getting home from helping Emily, she's back on the road with hunter, our youngest. She's helping him drive his own car he just bought to Denver so she can get dropped off just in time to catch a flight back to Dallas and he can continue off to school, where he'll start another year of college. Ah, the circle of life continues. It's precious, actually, to see how much love a person can have toward her own offspring.00:04:50
Does that cause you stressed? And to see her take so much time away from urgent meetings here at home to go out and to drop everything and help her children. It's very inspiring to me. And stressful. No, not necessarily.00:05:06
Well, sometimes, Heidi, you truly embody the ultimate meaning of the word mother. Thank you. And I could tell you different parts of the stories, but I think they'll just have to go back and listen to last week's episode, if they haven't heard it, to understand my perspective better.00:05:29
So this gave me a good opportunity to think about, from an experiential aspect, how we do cope with all the curveballs that are thrown at us in life. And. And what does it mean to cope? To explain this, I would like to use, again, a couple of analogies. I like analogies.00:05:53
Yeah. It helps us view things in a different way. The word coping is used in a couple of different trade fields. First of all, in building swimming pools, they use coping and in woodworking. So I think this will help us better understand coping with stress in our marriages and our family life.00:06:11
Swimming pool coping is the material that is on the. It borders the pool. It's on top of the concrete walls to make a border around the edge of the pool. It provides a transition between the pool and the surrounding deck. It helps to protect the pool structure so water doesn't fall behind the wall.00:06:30
Okay. And it improves the safety by managing water runoff and preventing damage to the pool and to the deck, just as pool coping protects and manages the boundaries around the pool. Coping mechanisms in family life and in marriage help us manage and contain not water, but stress. So coping serves as a protective barrier that helps prevent stress from getting out of control to the point that it damages our family relationships. Barrier, that's a theme.00:07:02
Boundaries and barriers. Right. Both swimming pool coping and coping strategies in marriage and family serve to protect and manage their prospective environments, their respective environments. Okay. Protect and manage their respective environments.00:07:20
Pool coping manages physical transitions and prevents damage, while family coping strategies manage, navigating life's adversity and transitions to prevent stress and causing harm from causing.00:07:36
In woodworking, coping refers to this technique where one end of a piece of wood is shaped to fit around the profile of another piece. This ensures that there will be a precise fit and a seamless. This ensures that it will have a seamless appearance, and it involves a really detailed and careful cutting and shaping to achieve a smooth finish and a functional joint. Coping in stress and family is similar to the woodworking technique. So just as coping in woodworking requires precision and adaptability to fit different pieces together, the same happens in a family.00:08:16
We have to adjust and shape our responses to fit the unique needs of different members of our family, and especially each other. I like that. Yeah. Coping with stress requires adaptability and adjustment. Both enable to handle different stressors and keep our family working well.00:08:41
So, really, Heidi, it's looking, being externally self aware how I, what I say impacts you, and then using that to finally hone future interactions with you or with our children. And I like that. It's very finely tuned. Right. Being responsible for our own thoughts, behaviors, and actions will help us keep stress down within our families.00:09:14
But it does take insight, and we have to adapt and adjust through questioning our thoughts. So, just like Spanish, I've always been a little uncomfortable around this word coping. Okay. It's like another language for me. For me, that word coping, it feels fundamentally like I'm just barely surviving.00:09:38
Yeah, I think that we use the word in that, in that way a lot. I'm trying to cope with this. I'm trying to cope with that. Which does leave us believing we're barely hanging on. Yeah.00:09:53
So it's language lessons, right? The language we use matters. It leaves little room for thriving. Can I thrive without having to cope all the time? Do I need a crutch to fall back on whenever something goes wrong?00:10:13
Perhaps we can think of thrice. Or perhaps we can think of coping more as a way of life that protects, that's a barrier between us and damaging our relationships. Okay. The very first step that we can take to healthy coping is understanding what's happening in us psychologically and physiologically, which really is insight. And it's very fundamental to creating a stable and supportive environment between us when things are very stressful.00:10:50
So just like we discussed in episode twelve on conducting marital autopsies, we have to start with the what. In this case, besides discussing together what's causing so much stress, we have to ask ourselves, what is happening in my body? Yes. Bring awareness to the physical things. Do I feel like I'm having a heart attack?00:11:14
Do I have pressure in my chest? Am I having difficulty breathing? Do I have a headache? Do I have backaches? Where in my body am I holding the stress?00:11:24
Then next, we bring awareness to the psychological responses. Do I feel like I'm going crazy? Having a nervous breakdown? Which, by the way, is not a real thing. Our nerves don't break.00:11:39
But believing that feel like they do, we're feeling like they do, actually enhances our stress and helps instead of helping us cope with it. Do I feel depressed? Do I feel sad? Do I feel out of control? Do I feel.00:11:51
Just bringing awareness and naming, feeling your feelings, naming the feelings that we're experiencing, can actually help them come to our prefrontal cortex rather than other parts of our brain, and then we can start processing through those. I like it. So the second thing is to check our thoughts. According to Doctor David Burns in his book, when panic attacks, our thoughts are actually at the root of a lot of our stress. And being able to question curiously.00:12:25
Huh, I wonder if what I. The thoughts that I'm ruminating on are true. Spending time just thinking, is that true? Is there perhaps another way I could reframe that thought? That would be less stressful to me, so I may think, Scott, you always think that I'm a bad housekeeper or something like that.00:12:50
I don't really have any idea if you think I'm a bad housekeeper, because I've never asked you. And yet I may be shaming and blaming myself, creating stories that you tell yourself. Yeah, exactly. Instead, I can say, to decrease stress, something like, I'm doing the best I can right now. Given starting a new business and for the last few years with grad school, maybe we can make this a discussion in our couples council of how we can navigate responsibilities around the house better.00:13:22
That is far less stressing than assuming making assumptions of things that you're thinking.00:13:31
I also really like the research by Doctor Jill Manning. She's developed a theory that's based on several common factors that help us feel support, which is an important element in coping. And she's used them to develop the acronym called Caved. C A V E D. Caved.00:13:52
Yes. Okay. It stands for connection.00:13:57
We need to make connection with another human being. Advocacy. We need to find someone that can help us advocate and we need to advocate for ourselves. Third, the v is validation. We need to find someone that can validate the experience that we're going through in a healthy way.00:14:21
Fourth, education. We need to learn about whatever it is that we're feeling stress about and educate ourselves on that. Okay? And fifth, direction. We need to look for future direction and where this is going to take us so we don't get caught.00:14:38
Right. Never being able to get out of the stress. I love that. I love being able to simplify. Right.00:14:45
Make things simple. Caved. Connection. Advocacy. Validation.00:14:49
Education. Direction. I suppose we need to start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start. That is, we all have needs like air, water, food, sleep, shelter, money, connection.00:15:07
We need to be needed by someone else. I want you to want me I need you to need me. I'd love you to love me. All right. Cheap trick.00:15:21
Pitter patter heart. Pitter patter heart. Is that who sings that? That's who sings it. 1982.00:15:27
I thought you were saying this is a cheap trick to get people's attention. No, that's who. That was the band. So what is the difference between coping and escape? Good question.00:15:40
And now that we need. Now we know what our needs are, right? We've established our needs.00:15:47
How do we tell the difference between coping and escape? Thanks to Doctor Mark Byrd, we know in his book called in Tandem recovering me, recovering us, he talks about coping with painful emotions and escaping them through the lens of an addiction. I've kind of tweaked these and used these ideas to create my own definitions of coping and escape and my own feeble way of being able to simplify and tell the difference between them. So, coping or soothing is a physiologic release valve in response to increasing pressure caused by perceived persistent psychological pain. In order to regain that feeling of our needs being met, it's confined to legal, moral and ethical boundaries.00:16:45
So coping might be video games, Facebook, eating, listening to music, sports, Internet, browsing. Yeah, that's what we were just talking about. Is maladaptive coping at the beginning? Well, that can be normal, too, right? This can be normal, coping well.00:17:00
Or you could do all of those same things not in response to stress, and it might not be considered coping at all. Right, so now, an escape, in my words, a physiologic release valve in response to increasing pressure caused by perceived persistent psychological pain in order to regain a feeling of our needs being met. However, the difference here is there's a loss of boundaries in regards to legal, moral, or ethical implications. So in this case, this would be like a narcotic drug dependence, or heroin, marijuana, hallucinogens, but also could be video games, Facebook, eating, music, sports, and Internet browsing to such an extreme that now I'm evicted from my house because I didn't pay the rent and my family is on the street. That is not ethical.00:18:04
So because of this, these escapes can lead toward addictions. And escapes can also include disassociating from reality, which is really why narcotics and hallucinogens are so popular. So I have a question for you there. Yeah. Is escape only in your mind used when there's an addiction?00:18:30
It can lead us for it to an addiction. It doesn't necessarily start with that, but because there are no boundaries placed, it can get out of control. So what if you don't know that you have an addiction to those things? I mean, who gets to say? Well, an addiction can be objectively defined if it's adversely affecting your life, your marriage, your family, your work, if you're being fired from your work because of it.00:19:04
What if you don't know, as the user of these things, that it's impacting your life, but your other family members know? Could it still be an escape in that case? Yeah. Well, it's still an addiction even if you're not aware of it. Okay.00:19:22
Because addictions can be defined from a legal. As a legal term, a medical term, it leads to a total breakdown of being able to keep other parts of your life in check and family relationships. And relationships. Yeah, I've heard of gaming and sexual compulsive disorders and things like that is exactly what it's talking about. Yeah, I'm pretty sure escaping is not really healthy, as, like I said, it does lead to addictions.00:19:58
But is coping healthy? I don't know. Again, I'm trying to wrap my head around something that sounds like I'm just trying to survive, which certainly I'm doing. Sometimes I think coping is probably a good middle ground area, like a rest stop on my hike up the mountain. I don't set out to climb to a rest stop.00:20:20
I just use it on my way to get to the top. Maybe that's how I can look more at it, at coping. How do we cope with our stressful lives in a healthy way? I'm glad you asked. From last week's episode on Stress, we learned from Doctor Kelly McGonagall that the very act of reframing that stressful stimulus instead of being unhealthy for me, starting to look at it, and you alluded to earlier from a neutral, objective viewpoint as this feeling right now of the fast breathing, the fast heart rate, this confusion, the sweaty palms, that's my own body's way of helping me become more resilient.00:21:15
Isn't that great? My body is freaking awesome. I love that it's doing what it's supposed to do in my way of coping with hard emotions. If it involves watching tv, okay. I need to sit down with myself and set some boundaries for watching tv.00:21:37
How much tv is too much? How much eating or sleeping or video games is too much? When is crossing over the line? When is it to escaping? I need to set firm boundaries on how much I will allow myself of these coping mechanisms.00:21:58
1 hour, 3 hours. I need to ask myself if that will lead to other problems in my relationships. Will it lead to problems with my relationship with my spouse or a parent or an employee? I get to set those boundaries, but hopefully I will enlist help from those closest to me so they can help me set these healthy boundaries so everyone knows about it and hopefully agrees to now we can start coping in healthier ways. So what I just heard you describing, Scott, is, comes back to some of our foundational cornerstones.00:22:42
We have to be self aware, which is insight, and we have to be intentional. We're not going to just slide through this difficult, stressful time without those two cornerstones. That's really great. And in fact, some of my own research, from my own research, I've seen several of the things that you're talking about, but I just wanted to reiterate what the outcomes of my research were as far as. Yeah, this is part of your dissertation, right?00:23:16
It is. It is. So the first thing, and I was. I was studying a group of women who had a shared, deep, deep adversity. There was the perception of betrayal within their marriage.00:23:31
And that is one of the top two most painful, according to research, most painful kinds of stress that you can experience and it can cause PTSD types of responses. But in their healing, some of the things that they talked about that helped with that was, first of all, gaining the strength to use their voices to receive and ask for support. A lot of times they had to make several attempts at that. They may have asked other people, tried to find therapists, talk to family, and there may have been some elements of shame. There may have been some elements of it's your fault.00:24:12
There may have been some elements of he's been a jerk all along. Lots of different things. They didn't feel like they were getting the support they needed, but if they can keep asking, keep looking for the support they need and then really work, work with the therapists or the religious leaders or the support groups that they need. Being curious. Right, right.00:24:37
And having hope that these support resources are going to help lead to their healing. Because I guess if you're truly curious, when you're asking for support, you can't really stay in a victim type of mentality for very long. If you're always curious, trying to find out, find out. Found out why. Yeah, I like that.00:25:08
Then what happened when they got support is they were able, especially with the help of a therapist, they were able to start creating intentional boundaries earlier when things were massively, massively stressful, chaotic. They were setting chaotic boundaries or not setting them at all. Right. And just things that were not helpful to themselves, but they didn't know what else to do because it had impacted their nervous system so much. You talked a little bit about, and you talked a little bit about creating those intentional boundaries.00:25:44
Yes. Boundaries is a theme for coping. Right. And healthy ones that support our healing, not that divide us from people, not that enmesh us with people, but that help us move forward. Very important boundaries.00:26:02
Another interesting finding that I didn't anticipate was that learning helped as a coping mechanism. Explain that a little bit. The more they learned, and it almost didn't air, it almost didn't matter what area they were learning in, whether it was going back to school, whether it was learning a new hobby, whether it was learning about their own body with mindfulness, meditation, yoga, whether it was learning more about the stress that they were experiencing. In a lot of their cases, they would look for books, podcasts, YouTube videos on not only their own experience with betrayal, trauma, but their husband's experience with addiction, sexual addiction, or whatever kinds of things he was dealing with. And I think this pertains to anything.00:27:00
If you're having a lot of stress because you have a child on the autistic spectrum, learning about autism can help as a big form of coping. That goes back to being curious again. Right. Another very surprising thing. In my study, Washington that those who somehow were able to tap into the arts, that was such a huge coping mechanism for them, when you say the arts.00:27:28
So I had one participant who played classical piano, and she would play really minor key classical piano pieces that helped her get that emotion out and deal with it. I love it in a really hard, heavy way. And we had a few painters, we had a quilter. We had somebody who started into dancing and movement. Lots of different types of arts.00:27:58
Music, listening to music, all of those types of artistic expressions were a form of coping. The next thing that we found was that self care was very, very important when it comes to coping for a lot of people. They mentioned, like we've talked about meditation, mindfulness, yoga, exercise, getting into nature, taking time to just sit and be still healthy, eating, sleeping enough, being in nature. Did I say that? Yeah.00:28:40
Okay, we'll cut that then. All of the things that we can do to care for ourselves, help with our coping with stress. This is particularly important, I believe, for women a lot of times because they're culturally taught to take care of everyone else, to nurture everyone else, and are often the last ones to take care of. I think it's probably more than culture, though. I think you do.00:29:11
Or inherently, yes, you're embedded with that genetically, right? That is absolutely right. So, caring for ourselves. The next thing, and we mentioned this a little bit earlier, but in my study, cognitively restructuring our thought processes to look at are the stories that I've been telling myself true, and can I reframe them in a way that brings my stress level down and that perhaps is more true? Okay.00:29:42
And then lastly, mindfulness and meditation are very, very helpful, not only for stress, but for improving all relationships, whether it's at work with our children, with our spouse, being able to learn to sit in more stillness. So those who listen to this podcast for a period of time will learn that we take mindfulness and meditation very seriously. It's highly important part of learning about yourself, to become emotionally intelligent, the intelligent spouse that you are, and if you can implement these coping strategies, these coping ideas, it leads to healing of a lot of things. I like that. Let's talk about some solutions this week.00:30:38
Personally, what do you need? What are your needs? We got to start with the very beginning. Write them down or at least think about them intentionally. Take time to figure out what your favorite coping activity is so that you feel like that need is being met.00:30:57
Is it moral, legal and ethical? If so, that's a great start. Now let's make some boundaries for yourself surrounding this activity. How much time do you allow yourself and why? And will it affect others adversely?00:31:16
Now for marriage solution action items. This week, talk to your spouse about the boundaries that you set up for yourself with your coping activities. Do they agree? Do they think that's okay? And can you support each other in holding each other responsible for trying out those activities?00:31:40
Yeah. Get their feedback. There's a lot of other things we could have you do this week. We'll start with that and bring it back to identity. Who am I?00:31:52
How did I know something more about myself this week? Intentionality. Did I make time and space for myself and my spouse to make improvements? This week, insight. How did I create new meaning and perspective on what I learned this week in intimacy, the natural, organic outgrowth of all of these things?00:32:18
Spending time. And let me just say on that, I think that spending time with each other in intimate moments is in and of itself helping us cope with stress. Yeah, I like that. They all move together, don't they? One doesn't always cause the other.00:32:37
It's the chicken and the egg thing again, right? They just exist and they help each other. So with that, we're so glad that you joined us today, and everybody have a great weekend.
