Coping Mechanisms: An Addiction or a Survival Technique?
No matter how you look at it, life all the way around can be hard. It is full of ups and downs, hurts and joys, disappointments and celebrations that we attach ourselves to emotionally. When the downs, hurts and disappointments seem to outnumber the ups, joys and celebrations, the individual can struggle and seek out different methods for coping with pain.
For too many individuals, that method of coping is through substance use, abuse and addiction. A desire to feel good can be powerful, pushing a person to try different things to achieve that goal. If the substance makes the person feel good, they associate that with feeling safe.
Unconsciously, the individual begins to associate the consumption of the substance with feeling better. As a result, the next time he or she does not feel safe, the substance is consumed once again. Before long, this becomes a habit, creating an addiction to the substance. While this is a common occurrence and often referred to as a coping mechanism, it is not the only action an individual may take to push away pain.
Believe it or not, addictions come in many forms and an individual does not have to begin consuming a substance like drugs or alcohol to develop a coping mechanism or an addiction. A number of individuals have been known to develop an addiction to television, walking, eating, exercising, reading, smoking, the Internet, coffee and even celebrities.
Individuals in all walks of life have implemented coping strategies. Whenever a person understands what things need to happen to feel better, they will quickly navigate to those things. The problem in coping mechanisms arises when the individual relies on these things to feel better or cannot achieve a positive frame of mind without them.
The difficulty in breaking this cycle is that many people do not understand why they take a certain action. While it may be clear to the individual that he or she is taking a drug or consuming alcohol to escape pain, it is not always clear that another individual spends hours exercising to try and accomplish the same thing. Coping mechanisms come in many forms and while they can be important in certain situations, they can also be debilitating when they become a way of life.
In some cases, this way of life becomes mental illness. As a coping mechanism, many individuals have learned to manipulate the mind in order to survive certain situations. In extreme situations, disassociation, multiple personalities and amnesia are all ingenious and remarkable coping mechanisms that individuals of all ages have been known to learn in order to survive intolerable situations.
When this behavior is “learned”, this opens up a whole new area of debate over whether or not mental illness is a disease or only a coping mechanism. Effectively identifying the proper association is the first step to treatment. We all need ways to cope with certain situations, but when coping mechanisms become all-consuming and we cannot function without them, an addiction is born.