Grief & The Concept of Coping Strategies

Artist Unknown

What if, instead of using “coping strategies” as a container to experience our emotions inside of, we instead just HAD our emotions?

I know, this doesn’t sound radical. But I assert, in our society, this is a radical act. Let’s dissect it a bit…

From start to finish, I’m finding a cycle of high intensity grief that I just allow myself to have, unmediated, lasts anywhere from 90 seconds to a few minutes.

If I apply coping strategies (which I tried a bit of this in the beginning), I interrupt the expression, and walk around with a weight on my chest the rest of the day. One can imagine how quickly I threw out the strategy to use coping strategies.

Coping strategies feel like society’s way of managing emotions. Perhaps to keep productivity high? What do all these strategies really do for us? Genuine question…

Because to me, it looks like they interrupt the cycle. Not really allowing it to complete.

What is the connotation behind using “coping strategies”? How has it been codified in the collective? What does it actually communicate to us?

I’m not saying we should “act on” the emotion. I’m talking about giving it permission to exist. Fully. From beginning to end. Giving it the right to take up the space it needs too.

This goes back to the post I made the other day… Ever since I began grieving my son, I’ve noticed that I’ve plugged into some kind of innate intelligence from my childhood. Pre-domestication. Before I began to manage myself based on other people’s expectations.

As a child I would cry, or shake, or roar, or get lost, or make sounds, etc. when I had a rupture or upset.

At some point that became unacceptable, first I was banished to have my emotions alone, and unsupported, which only compounded the intensity of the emotions I was having.

As I got older, I was taught “coping strategies” to help me manage my emotions.

Now, everywhere I look, people are selling programs using these strategies.

Utilizing the concept of triggers as some kind of “control measure”, in a kind of passive aggressive grossness. Because someone dared to show their upset. “

“You’re triggered”!!! When in reality, someone else’s trigger likely shows us our level of uncomfortability in regards to emotion.

Never once do I see it suggested that people should allow their emotions to exist, without the need to manage them. Not in the mainstream anyways.

This whole thing makes me curious about the phenomenon of “big” or “scary” emotions.

Are our emotions only big and scary because we’ve been so alienated from them due to conditioning? If we’d been encouraged to just have them when they arose, and never cut off from the Eros they hold, would they be perceived as big and scary to us now, as adults?

I’m always weary of spiritual or psychological advice and practices that are geared towards controlling emotions.

It doesn’t mean I support getting drunk on them. And using them as an excuse to be destructive… but, I do think we can start a revolution with our children by just letting them have their emotions when they arise. And hold space for them when they do.

It’s the most natural thing in the world. We don’t need a study for it.

Emotions need to be had. Humans need support and co-regulation from time to time. Especially children.

I’m all for re-wilding emotions.

And ending domestication and conditioning around them.

*this picture evokes the feeling of being sent packing as a child when I displayed anything but stoicism.

Artist Unknown