Wellspring Wednesday|Week 21: Unnecessary

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I speak a lot about coping skills on these episodes. It’s really important to acknowledge and honor your coping skills. Whatever regulation methods your body has been using, mechanisms of safety and comfort, and everything that brought you even a bit of peace while you endured what you endured — those are coping skills. The cool thing about the brain is that when something works, it can stop looking for ways to accomplish the end result. For instance, it wouldn’t need to spend energy keeping you calm in stressful situations if it found that food or medication temporarily did that for you throughout your teen years enduring an abusive foster home.

The saying that “neurons that fire together, wire together” is true. Now when the brain picks up the cue of overwhelm like it did during your teenage span, it can just temporarily pacify your nervous system with binge eating because that was working then. The brain thinks “problem solved” and can file that tool in the “use again next time that ‘overwhelm’ starts to spike”. This doesn’t matter to the brain if the overwhelm came from a perceived fear, stress of prepping for a college exam, a sighting of a look-alike to your abuser at the grocery store, or your boss asking you to work overtime. The feeling is the same, so the firing sets off to go wire that emotion to binge eating to dull the sense of the overwhelm. This is true for every coping skill. It started out as a high-functioning, adaptive mechanism for your traumatic situation. It was helpful, useable, and had a well-intended purpose.

Now, you are in the place in your healing where you are recognizing not only the aftereffects of the original trauma(s) but also the aftereffects of the coping skills. This is where the journey gets a little intense, and I’m speaking from experience. Taking a further step back looking at your trauma, you can now recognize that the coping skills you’ve adapted are no longer helpful. In fact, they have become unnecessary in reality, even if your brain still stamps them as “works just fine”. Some of these coping tools, you’ll begin to see, have become unhealthy along with being unnecessary. This is where you start examining the aftereffects of the coping tools themselves. Binge eating may have started to cause GI or other biological issues. A substance misuse tool to numb might have now led to dangerous drugs with dangerous consequences. Self-harm may have kept you grounded during your trauma, but now may just be an obsession anytime you feel triggered that is causing scarring or infection. Overworking kept you away from the house from your narcissistic spouse, but now is keeping you from finding a new relationship or enjoying time that you have with your children. Keeping you away from potential abuse using strong trust issues may now cause social isolation problems and lack of healthy intimacy. On and on and on the list can go.

See, your brain wasn’t caring about future effects of your coping skills back when it was just trying to keep you alive. Its concern wasn’t specific to the quality of your life, just making sure you could survive beyond the trauma. That was the goal then. Now, outside of the trauma, these are exactly the types of discoveries that are available for you to work on and through. Sussing out unnecessary coping skills, the mechanisms of survival that no longer serve you, is a great way to explore where they stem from, the origin of the tool, and why your brain still feels it needs to use this under duress.

It’s imperative that we don’t confuse the brain by using the word “unnecessary” in a hurtful way, though. I find it very important to the intrapersonal bridge and your self-trust building for your brain to know that you aren’t saying the skill itself was always unnecessary. Part of the internal healing is to find gratitude for your adaptive coping during the trauma and to really be thankful that you had that comfort, safety, protector, or numbing tool available. If you spend some time really thanking that once-useful tool and your brain for creating it, you will find that this part of you can relax when it’s time to tell it that you no longer need it. This is where you want to gently find ways of exploring the now-unnecessary mechanisms — really rooting around to let it help you with your deep healing, asking it what it wants you to know and why it’s there, and making peace with its once-important job in your life. From there, it’s much easier to call it unnecessary and to de-throne its role in your life now. Once you’ve built a relationship with this coping skill (“Protector” — if you are following IFS language), you can now let it know some of the consequences it is creating in your life, some of the negative after effects, and how and why it is no longer serving you — why it’s no longer needed.

Sometimes this looks like it truly not being needed because the part of you that it was trying to protect you from (severe pain, suffering, potential harm, shame, fear, being hurt by family, etc) is no longer a threat. Yet sometimes it means that that threat is still sometimes there but that you’d rather not use this particular tool anymore because it’s unhealthy to your overall wellbeing. This is where we supplant maladaptive tools for new, healthy ones — like exercise, emotional release, a coaching relationship, singing, breathwork, travel, boundaries, work/life balance, writing, etc.

Each person will be different as to how to handle these old coping skills. Many clients need to continue using their coping mechanisms during the first part of coaching while they are unpacking all the bitter turmoil of the past. If you still need it, then listen to your body and use it if you feel you must. However, there will come a time in your journey where it will be time to put down a burdening pack of stuff and leave it on the trail as you march forward. That’s where support from a coach or a therapist is really helpful — to know when, know how, and to follow through.

If you have questions about this episode, any of the IFS language used here, or want to learn more about unburdening and deep inner healing — feel free to reach out with a message. I’ll resource you and help advocate for you as you find your footing on the trauma recovery road.