Coping Mechanisms
I’m pretty resilient, as a person. I tend towards being self-motivated, and have been described as having “the willpower and internal motivation of a war machine”. I’m not even making that up. That was a real quote from someone used to describe me.
As a result of falling heavily on the side of ‘action’ when the going gets tough, I tend to want to solve my way out of it. That works for me, it always has but it also has some pretty aggressive downsides.
I tend towards letting things completely consume me until they’re extinguished, or I am. I approach tasks with what can only be described as unrelenting obsession. If I’m in one of these states, I am generally only about 46% present in real life while the rest of my brain noodles on a problem.
Ideally, long before I’m extinguished I ask for help. I am getting good at verbalizing that I a) am overwhelmed; and b) need somebody’s help to help get me back to just regular whelmed. Not asking for help was a big problem for me as a kid and as an adult. Not asking questions to clarify or just to get more information has caused me no end of stress and over the last 6 or so years that I’ve been a professional, I’ve learned to make question-asking part of my stress-relief routine. A lot of stress can be avoided simply by asking questions. Frequently, a lot of stress can be communicated to the other party by asking questions. The other party frequently tends to recognize stress when their subordinate is firing questions at them 10,000 at a time. They can’t recognize stress when you go back to your office and say nothing and hope to work your way out of a hole.
This coping mechanism works for me because I am a verbal person. I’m not afraid to share how I’m feeling and what I think and given the fact that I’m pretty much constantly self-analyzing, I’m really good at recognizing and assigning words to what I’m feeling. It helps me understand my stress and it helps me cope with it. Sometimes, friends, husbands, families, coworkers, innocent by-standers, the air next to me while I am muttering under my breath, might get treated to a one sided lament while I describe in great detail not only my stressor but also all of my reactions to it and what they mean. Trust me when I tell you that this is more exhausting for me than it is for the listener. Because most of the time the thing has been eating at me for a week before it gets to be the subject of its own meandering tirade.
But what happens when you’re not good at understanding your feelings and really understanding what they mean in a context? What happens when you don’t discuss the stressors, or you try to work your way through them but the work is still piling? What happens when you don’t understand why you feel the way you do and your work-til-its-done method isn’t working anymore and you try to force it? You basically create a pressure cooker of emotions. And the problem with pressure cookers is when you leave them unattended for too long, and they get too hot, they have a tendency to explode. Which, of course, is problematic. Because then their insides are unexpectedly outside, and it’s very embarrassing for the pressure cooker, and the poor pressure cooker doesn’t know how they got to this place and doesn’t understand why their insides are on the outside and why they are so broken and how this even happened.
It gets to be a mess. But, to a certain extent, the mess was preventable.
Knowing yourself, knowing your own heart, doesn’t happen by accident. Self-reflection is important. Understanding your own behaviour and patterns is important and it isn’t inherent. It takes time, and it might take late nights spinning your wheels. It might take asking someone to lay some truth on you. But you should do it. It’s painful sometimes, realizing you were wrong, or that you might be an asshole. If you’re not comfortable talking about your feelings, write them down. If you think you’re a bad writer, who cares? Nobody is going to read it anyways. Maybe you’ll get better! Maybe you’ll have an epiphany! Maybe you’ll realize earlier that the heat is up too high and you have to turn it down.
I don’t know how to get someone who isn’t great at saying what they feel to say it out loud, I don’t know how to bridge the gap between understanding your feelings and asking for help, but I can tell you that it gets easier to ask for help once you’ve done it the first time. And maybe it’ll go awful. And if it does, ask for help from someone else. Your support system is there to catch you. Your support system is there to support you. So leverage them! Use them! You’d do it for your friends/family/coworkers, why shouldn’t they do it for you?
