Coping Mechanisms Quotes

“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

“She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“Many of us learned that keeping busy…kept us at a distance from our feelings...Some of us took the ways we busied ourselves—becoming overachievers & workaholics—as self esteem…But whenever our inner feeling did not match our outer surface, we were doing ourselves a disservice…If stopping to rest meant being barraged with this discrepancy, no wonder we were reluctant to cease our obsessive activity.”
― Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse

“Complaining about nothing doesn't seem like coping to you, but okay.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“I was seized by doubt. Should I have come here? But going back was impossible. I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this unknown terror that lay ahead.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“The idea made Mahlia’s chest tighten. It was her own fantasy, the secret one she sometimes curled up to when she went to bed, knowing that it was stupid, but still wanting it, wanting it to somehow all make sense.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities

“I’m invisible. You can’t harass a ghost.”
― Amelinda Bérubé, The Dark Beneath the Ice

“When entering a room full of soldiers who fear hearts
you put your heart in your back pocket.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga

“In one sense the cause of suicide is simple: overwhelming pain. This overwhelming pain, however, is the aggregate of thousands of pains. Any hurt that we have ever suffered, if it remains consciously or unconsciously lodged within us, can contribute to suicide. This may range from being an incest victim 50 years ago, to losing a job 10 years ago, to having a car battery stolen yesterday. The pains come from everywhere: ill-health, family, peers, school, work, community, caregivers. For each suicide there was a finite point at which this aggregate became too much. Although "The straw that broke the back," is frequently an accurate metaphor, no one pain is ever the cause of suicide. Suicidal pain is decomposable into thousands of pains, and nearly all of these pains are decomposable into painful constituents. Sexual abuse, job loss, and personal theft each have numerous painful constituents. The search for the single cause is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the understanding and prevention of suicide.
It is inaccurate to say simply that pain causes suicide, since a level of pain that is lethal for one person may not be lethal for someone with greater resources. Similarly, deficiency in resources cannot be regarded as the cause of suicide, since two people may have equal resources and unequal pain. Our resources may also come from everywhere; even such trivial distractions as going to a movie can contribute to coping with suicidal pain.”
― David L. Conroy, Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain

“People have an amazing ability to cope with the madness of life. It's called denial. It'll take you a good mile, but only if life's horrors stay on the page of the newspaper where they belong.”
― Darwyn Cooke, Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre

“And what about this. When we’re thrust into it, we anxious folk can often deal with the present really rather well. It’s worth remembering this. As real, present-moment disasters occur, we invariably cope, and often better than others. The day after no sleep, I get on with things. At funerals, or when I’ve fallen off my bike, or the time I had to attend to my grandmother when she stopped breathing, or whenever a major work disaster plays out leaving my team in a panic, I’m a picture of calm. Dad used to call me “the tower of strength” in such moments. I also don’t tend to have a lot of bog-standard fear (as opposed to anxiety). In fact, I relish real, present-moment fear and actively seek it out.”
― Sarah Wilson, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

“It's like I got drunk all the time not because I'm a total addict but because it was a coping mechanism to deal with being unhappy”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“I fake being normal better than most normal people fake being sane.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis

“Jim looks out the car window with his nose pressed to the glass. Sometimes he pretends to be asleep. Not because he is tired, but because he needs to be quiet.”
― Rachel Joyce, Perfect

“I slammed out of the Priest Hole and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“The soup of contentment lulls the senses to mush; while the piping hot tea of misery is the seething cauldron required for creative expression.
Revel in the highs but embrace also in earnest the eventual lows”
― Renee A. Lee

“Many of us are in a place where we know the bottom is falling out, but we can't put a name on it. We don't know how much we can take before the bottom falls out, so we just find coping mechanisms. Instead of speaking clearly about my emotions, what I found was a collection of coping mechanisms to numb myself from the need to express what I was feeling. This is where I found myself in the middle of this cycle of depression.

Most of us don't know that we're coping. We can't recognize that our obsessive behaviors are actually addictions that empower us to avoid our deeper issues. Then we ignore how serious they are to justify ourselves. We make it through our hardships by any means necessary.”
― Lecrae Moore, I Am Restored: How I Lost My Religion but Found My Faith

“Internalized parental voices probably originate in the left hemisphere of the brain, where language and logic rule. When the left brain is allowed to run the show, it puts perfectionism and efficiency before feeling, and judgment before compassion”
― Lindsay Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

“What would his fear smell like if he learned she'd used him, slept with him, to keep herself at bay? To settle that writhing darkness that had simmered inside her from the moment she'd emerged from the Cauldron? Sex, music, and drink, she'd learned this past year- all of it helped. Not entirely, but it kept the power from boiling over. Even if she could still feel it streaming through her blood, coiled tight around her bones.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“She didn't want to be in her head, didn't want to be in her body. Wanted the beating of drums and the riotous song of a fiddle to fill her with sound, to silence any thoughts. Wanted to find a bottle of wine and drink deep, let the wine pull her out of herself, set her mind drifting and numb.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“Humanity wears the cloak of being rational and civilized. It is a sneering veneer developed, built and used to cope with the brutality of others’ agendas. But this is the cycle that destroys. It is a wheel that never stops turning once you get on it. To break this type of wheel—good intention, follow through and deep pauses are the tools of the crucibles in which we must testify against the norms created in this world. The first step is to speak up in the language or the voice that is your given right.”
― Reena Doss

“I was grieved that my life had come to this point; it had all happened so quickly. I just found myself running from one thing to the next and the things I was using to cope started more problems in and of themselves. The cycle spiraled out of control when one coping mechanism created consequences that led to the next coping mechanism, which created consequences, and on and on, without ever addressing the hurt and confusion inside.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“Often, what we call 'anxiety' is a coping mechanism we lean on, a disguise for the deeper, unexplored fears that truly drive our emotions.”
― Manal El-Ramly, Transcending Anxiety: From Fear to Freedom: Transforming Unacknowledged Fears Into a Life of Freedom and Happiness Book

“The release that tears offered sat out of reach when I yearned to howl with grief, but I’d turned off that spigot at thirteen, causing it to rust shut with disuse.”
― Corrine Jackson, Touched

“You can bring the blanket and your emotional support vodka.”
― Onley James, Unhinged

“They'll probably say I'm crazy or even mad, and maybe they're right—I should have kept my distance. There were so many things I wanted to say, truths I wanted to share, but I knew they would only cause pain. So instead, I buried those thoughts deep inside and let the pain consume me. No matter how much I tried to explain, it wouldn't have made a difference. I couldn't even understand the turmoil within myself, so how could I possibly make them understand? As time passes, I find myself growing weaker, but with that weakness comes a strange relief. The less I remember, the less I can be hurt. The fading memories bring a certain numbness, and with it, the suffering begins to fade too.”
― Rolf van der Wind

“All parts need to be honoured for their role in survival and re-framed as helpful before new coping strategies can be developed. The ability to internalise the relationship with the therapist as a caregiver is key to the individuals ability to provide for self-care and management.”
― Sue Richardson, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“There are things in this world that have no explanation. When you come across these things, you have two options. Option one is to try to make things make sense. This is what most people do. They experience something and they try to mold the event to their experiences, to understand what happened using the filter of what they already know. This never works. It only leads to confusion and frustration, yes? The second option is to accept that strange things happen, that the impossible sometimes is real. When you accept it, you can move on with your life. Our ancestors invented gods for this reason and they were happier because of it.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“Anyhow, tired to the point of collapse was a default state. The expectation was simply that, through some combination of strong coffee and Lembas Bread, one pushed through until all deadlines were met and one could collapse into an indefinite coma without consequence. Alice had spent most of graduate school in this state, and it was not so bad.”
― R.F. Kuang, Katabasis