The ECS approach to coping involves understanding and identifying mechanisms triggered by distressing experiences. Coping mechanisms manifest at various levels, such as behavior and emotional structure, and are essential during crises.
An artistic illustration of how a child might find ways to escape a distressing situation by shunning the voices/sounds from the experience, and leave the place of the experience to BE a child.
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The ECS Approach to Coping
Reducing Coping Mechanisms
Identifying coping mechanisms
Key Points
Coping Mechanisms can have direct undesireable effects
examples
Examples for Coping Mechanisms
Cynicism
Coping and Empathy are inversely connected
Coping is useful/functional in situations of distress and crisis, however, the persistence and continuation of coping beyond the distressing event will cause issues.
Coping mechanisms who were once useful become dysfunctional after the end of the distressing event.
Quotes
“It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.”
— Rudolf Virchow From the original German, Es ist ein Fluch des Menschengeschlechtes, dass es durch Gewöhnung auch das Schrecklichste ertragen lernt, in 'Mittheilungen über die in Oberschlesien herrschende Typhus-Epidemie', R. Virchow and B. Reinhardt, Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin (1848), 2, No. 2, 156. As translated in Rudolf Virchow and L.J. Rather (ed.), 'Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia', Collected Essays in Public Health and Epidemiology, (1985), 213, as reprinted in Social Medicine (2006), 1, No. 1, 16.
Red: “These walls are funny. At first you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes and you start depending on them.” (The Shawshank Redemption, 1994)
Definition
Differentiate from:
Defense Mechanisms
Habituation
Gewöhnung
Coping can manifest on different levels (which usually interact and are not completely separate):
...
emotional structure
behavior
A mechanism or behavior that was triggered by distressing experiences.