Coping Mechanisms

A coping skill is a behavioral tool that may be used by individuals to offset or overcome hardship, disadvantage, or disability without correcting or removing the underlying condition. Coping skills are also sometimes called workarounds.

Virtually all living beings routinely utilize coping skills in everyday life. These are perhaps most obvious in response to physical disabilities. An easy example of the use of coping skills in the animal kingdom are three-legged dogs, which typically learn to overcome the obvious disability to become as agile and mobile as their four-legged counterparts, whether born with the impairment or having received it due to an injury.

When helping humans deal with particular problems, trained counselors have found that a focus of attention on coping skills (with or without remedial action) often helps individuals.
The range of successful coping skills varies widely with the problems to be overcome.

However, the learning and practice of coping skills are generally regarded as very helpful to most individuals. Even the sharing of learned coping skills with others is often beneficial.

When coping methods are overused, they may actually worsen one’s condition. Alcohol and cocaine, for example, may provide temporary escape from one’s problems, but, with excess use, ultimately result in greater hardship.

One group of coping skills are coping mechanisms, defined as the skills used to reduce stress. In psychological terms these are consciously used skills, and defense mechanisms are their unconscious counterpart. Overuse of coping mechanisms (such as avoiding problems or working obsessively) and defense mechanisms (such as denial and projection) may aggravate one’s problem rather than remedy it.

In psychology, coping is the process of successfully managing difficult circumstances, expending effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems, and seeking to master, minimize, reduce or tolerate stress or conflict.

In dealing with disease, people tend to use one of the two main coping strategies: either problem focused or emotion focused coping.

People using problem focused strategies try to deal with the cause of the problem. They do this by finding out information on the disease, learning new skills to manage it and rearranging their lives around the disease.

Coping Mechanisms
After the Autism diagnosis
Autism Checklist
Autism Guide: The Essential Guide To Autism