Coping Skills (and When to Abandon Them)

In my role as an EAP assessor, my task was often to determine whether someone was suitable for the short-term counselling their employer offered. Typically, this meant six to twelve sessions. Because of the limited timeframe, I was expected to define a clear therapeutic focus. Without one, the work could easily meander — a discussion about a client’s sister one week, work stress the next — with no opportunity to connect the strands meaningfully. In longer-term therapy, this is not a problem; over months or years you can explore multiple themes and link them together. But in brief-focused therapy, opening many distressing “boxes” without reaching closure risks leaving someone worse off: full of unresolved questions and no sense of direction.

When asked to identify a focus, clients would often propose a goal like developing “coping skills” or “coping strategies.” In fact, I would estimate that nearly half of the thousands of people I assessed named this as their desired outcome. In hindsight, I suspect the phrase circulated through organisational settings almost like a meme — a shorthand within HR departments, where therapy was framed as a way to help employees “cope” with the pressures of work and life so they could remain productive. Many clients, unfamiliar with therapeutic language, simply repeated this phrase when asked what they wanted from their sessions.

That said, I don’t wish to dismiss coping skills as a therapeutic aim. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is instructive here: if our most basic needs are unmet — food, shelter, financial security — we cannot easily devote attention to higher pursuits like self-actualisation. Many people do not have the luxury of quitting an ill-fitting job, finding more meaningful work, or stepping out of caregiving responsibilities. They must live within the constraints of their current reality. For these individuals, coping skills are not a superficial solution; they are often essential tools for managing ongoing stress.

So what are coping skills? I would distinguish three broad forms:

1. Proactive strategies. These are habits woven into daily life that build resilience and wellbeing over time, such as regular exercise, journaling, or mindfulness. Research has shown that exercise, for instance, can be as effective as antidepressants in some cases (Recchia et al., 2022). Crucially, these practices are not meant to be picked up only in crisis, but sustained as part of a lifestyle, thereby reducing the likelihood of reaching crisis in the first place.

2. Reactive strategies. These are immediate tools for handling acute stress. Take panic attacks: box breathing, for example, helps regulate breathing and calm the body. Naming and describing nearby objects, using strong scents to re-anchor attention, or engaging the sense of touch with a small object have all been proposed as rapid grounding strategies, with supportive evidence from trauma-informed guidelines, mindfulness/DBT trials, aromatherapy RCTs, and sensory-modulation studies (SAMHSA, 2014; Boyd, Lanius & McKinnon, 2018; Voutchkova et al., 2025; Başer & Buchbauer, 2022; Ackerley et al., 2021; Sivaratnam et al., 2023). These interventions don’t solve the underlying issue but can short circuit an accelerating negative feedback loop in moments of panic. 

3. Adverse strategies. These are coping attempts that ultimately worsen the problem. Substances like alcohol or cocaine may offer temporary escape but disrupt sleep, heighten anxiety, and damage health, creating a vicious cycle. Less spoken-about but sometimes equally harmful patterns include compulsive scrolling, obsessive cleaning or checking behaviours, or cathartic but destructive outbursts of rage.

To these three, I would add a fourth:

4. Toxic coping strategies. These are not behaviours chosen by individuals, but rather dynamics imposed more or less directly by organisations. In many cases, HR referrals to therapy were made with the genuine intention of helping employees. But at times, the motive was less benevolent: making a struggling employee functional enough to remain productive, while ignoring — or even perpetuating — the systemic causes of their distress.  Worse still, counselling referrals could be used as a shield: evidence that the company had “supported” the employee before moving to push them out. “You see”, they seem to say, “we even referred this person for therapeutic help, so how can they now be accusing a company as evidently compassionate as ours of creating a toxic work culture?” If the person refuses the referral, their position is even weaker for obvious reasons, so spawning a classic double bind scenario.

In these contexts, therapy risks collusion with a kind of organisational narcissism. Teaching someone coping strategies that enable them to endure toxic environments is intrinsically anti-therapeutic. If you transpose this situation into a family, you see the problem. For, one would never suggest therapy to help a woman cope better with an abusive partner. Enduring the unendurable is not healing. 

References:

Ackerley, R., Badre, G., Liljencrantz, J., Björnsdotter, M., Wessberg, J. & Olausson, H., 2021. Widespread pressure stimulation via a weighted blanket reduces chronic pain and anxiety: a randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Pain, 22(9), pp.1033–1046. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.145

Başer, K.H.C. & Buchbauer, G., 2022. Lavender oil and anxiety: a systematic review of recent evidence. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 13, 860043. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.860043

Boyd, J.E., Lanius, R.A. & McKinnon, M.C., 2018. Mindfulness-based treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder: a review of the treatment literature and neurobiological evidence. Current Psychiatry Reports, 20(8), p.76. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-018-0924-9

Recchia, F., Leung, C.K., Chin, E.C., Fong, D.Y., Montero, D., Cheng, C.P., Yau, S.Y. and Siu, P.M., 2022. Comparative effectiveness of exercise, antidepressants and their combination in treating non-severe depression: a systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 56(23), pp.1375–1380. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjsports-2022-105964

SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), 2014. Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Series, No. 57. Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Sivaratnam, C., Dodd, H.F., Cox, A.D., Schubert, E., Whitehouse, A.J.O. & Uljarević, M., 2023. Sensory modulation interventions for adults with mental illness: a scoping review. BMC Psychiatry, 23, 853. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-023-05384-8

Voutchkova, D.D., Boyer, C.E., McQuaid, R.J., Levitan, R.D., Seedat, S. & Lanius, R.A., 2025. Mindfulness-based interventions for psychological trauma: an update. Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-025-00310-7