Coping: neither good, nor bad, but “it depends”

Coping is a concept we often use in chronic pain management. Our aim as clinicians is to help people with chronic pain cope with their pain so they can do more of what is important to them. Most of us know that coping mediates between the individual and whatever challenge he or she is facing. Coping reduces the impact of the challenge. Most of us also know that there are a range of coping strategies that people can use – and most of us have learned that coping strategies can be “adaptive” or “maladaptive”, “active” or “passive”, “approach” or “avoidant”. Unfortunately, much of the time this dichotomous taxonomy turns into a “do this” and “don’t do that” list of good or bad strategies. What this means is that strategies such as resting and delegating are both considered “passive”, therefore “avoidant” and consequently are “maladaptive” – and as clinicians we tell people “don’t do that” because they feature on our list of bad strategies. I thought this too until I started researching the ways that people who cope well with pain deal with pain in their lives. I thought, when I began my study, that I would find a neat list of strategies that people used, and that these would fall into the “adaptive”, “active” and “approach” categories of coping. They don’t. Nope, people who...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Occupational Therapists Authors: Tags: Chronic pain Clinical reasoning Coping strategies Research disability pain management Source Type: blogs