You Can Change Your Mood Without Drugs: Understanding and Choosing Better Coping Skills

You Can Change Your Mood Without Drugs: Understanding and Choosing Better Coping Skills
When it comes to better understanding and treating addiction, we can learn a lot by looking at a person’s coping mechanisms. Conventional wisdom tells us that a certain number of negative experiences are just part of life. Things don’t always turn out like we hope they will; we are sometimes disappointed in ourselves and others. The question is not if you will go through hardship at one time or another in your life, but rather, how you will handle it.
Coping mechanisms are skills we all have that allow us to make sense of our negative experiences and integrate them into a healthy, sustainable perspective of the world. When life gives us lemons, our coping skills help us see this as an opportunity to make lemonade. Without effective coping mechanisms, we can feel like a ‘lemon’ ourselves, misinterpreting accidents or other people’s bad intentions to be a reflection of our own inadequacy.
Feeling bad about who you are and the world we live in is an especially difficult way to go through life. Anxiety over the future and our own well-being can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We go to an important job interview, but are convinced there’s no way a future employer could want to hire us. When we don’t get the job, this confirms our negative perspective of the world and ourselves. Without the coping skills to convert disappointment over one missed opportunity into increased resolv...

Source: Cliffside Malibu - September 16, 2016 Category: Addiction Authors: Constance Scharff, PhD Tags: Abuse Addiction Recovery Addiction to Pharmaceuticals Addiction Treatment and Program Resources Alcoholism Behavioral Addictions Current Events Drug Rehab Information Drug Treatment Mental Health addiction treatment center drug treat Source Type: blogs