Part III: The Many Ways We Cope by Niles Pavley

 

Part III: The Many Ways We Cope

What We Reach for When the World Feels Too Heavy:

There’s always a moment, after failure or in the thick of pressure, when the conscience whispers, “Just make it stop.” It’s not always dramatic flair. Sometimes it’s deafening silence—a numb scroll through your phone after a busy day, a third cup of coffee when staying late at work, a night spent avoiding your thoughts by sleeping just a little bit earlier. In these moments, we are not strategizing how to rise again and defeat failure. To grab it by its horns and slay it matador style. We are simply surviving.

Coping is the body’s and brain's way of saying, “I need space to feel safe again.” And we all seem to cope, whether we realize it or not. Some go for a run. Some people call a friend. Others binge a show or three, clean their apartment obsessively, overwork and stay late, eat in silence in a crowded room, or some simply disappear for a while. These aren’t signs of weakness. They are the rituals of someone trying not to fall apart.

The problem isn’t that we cope. It’s the fact that we rarely ask: “Why do we cope the way we do?”

We like to call some behaviors “healthy” and others “toxic,” but the line isn’t always crystal clear. Most of life is just different shades of gray after all. What looks like productivity at work might be the avoidance of cleaning at home. What seems like laziness might just be exhaustion. The tools we reach for aren’t always wise, but the simplicity is that they are an arm's length away. While usually logical, given the circumstances we’ve lived through, they are almost never perfect. A child who was never taught how to feel safe in the world will grow into an adult who builds elaborate fortresses of distraction and insecurity. A person who learned that much-needed rest equals failure will never sit still without guilt and shame.

So, rather than dividing coping mechanisms into good, bad, the ugly, perhaps we should ponder a different question: Is this coping strategy helping me return to myself, or pulling me further ashore? 

Because the truth is, many of us cope by willfully forgetting who we are. We silence our needs, bury the hurt, and move through life as if being overwhelmed is just the expected part of being alive. But coping is not the same as healing. It's like a temporary bridge; it works in the short term, but over time, is more detrimental than anything. If we build our homes on this broken foundation, we will inevitably see it crumble into destruction. 

Let it be known that there is power in naming your patterns. How you cope.  “I work late because I’m afraid of what silence might tell me.” “I isolate myself because I don’t trust others with my own disappointment.” “I chase achievement because I fear stillness will expose a failure.” These aren’t confessions of guilt—they’re maps with keys to unlock what is hidden within you. They tell you where the fear lives in our mind, where the pressure constricts a little too much, where the heart is still holding its breath.

Perhaps most importantly, coping is just in lieu of failure. It is a form of unspoken wisdom. A message from the body or mind that something inside you needs relief. Even your worst habits at one point, once had good intentions. When you look at them in that way, compassion begins to replace the shame.

So if you find yourself clinging to and repeating patterns you don’t fully understand, you’re not broken. You’re learning. And slowly you will begin to reach for different tools—not out of force, but out of understanding yourself better—you won’t be trying to escape yourself. You’ll be returning your mind to what once was.