Articles

Coping: A Strategy to Avoid Living Fully

By Terryann Nikides

In BreakThrough’s 7 steps we explore how we cope with life rather than living fully into our lvies.  BreakThrough takes us on an adventure from a moment in time where one of our buttons is pushed to the beliefs that keep fueling the button. Through detective work, or deductive reasoning, we the find a host of should’s, should not’s, and false identities that make up our rules and recipes for living life in a limited way. Once we see the faulty beliefs that we have been carrying around for a whole lifetime we are freed like slaves from bondage. The impact of this 7 step process  is life transforming, every step of the way, BreakThrough’s out of the box thinking frees up the tension in the body, like a snake unwinding our body, mind, and emotions to stop becoming and just BE!

When we are in conflict, more often than not, we look for ways to cope instead of finding ways to respond and take practical steps. A cope is the vestment worn by a priest in this way, coping, is a way to avoid responding to conflict. We say things like “that does not bother me anymore” or “I just take a deep breath and the feeling goes away!” Once we have succeeded in finding such ways to cope we say things like “I am coping better now”, “I used to over-react”  and “as I get older things don’t bother me as much anymore”.  The latter comments just serve to underscore that there is a problem! We know on some level we are over-reacting to the situation otherwise we could not point out that “This no longer affects me like it used to”!We superimpose one cope on top of another till we no longer feel or experience what is actually happening to us. We wear several copes as we try and cloak our feelings, emotions, and the actual experiences we are having.

We cope by suppressing, blaming, justifying, victimizing ourselves and others. We convince ourselves that we should or should not feel a certain way, or even through our hands up in the air and say “well what am I supposed to do?”  In effect, we are saying: I recognize there is a problem, I can do nothing about the problem, so I manage the problem by coping and resigning myself to the belief that nothing will change.

To resign ourselves to believing that things will never change means that we see life as static and unchanging. Basically, that we are doomed to experiencing the same old same old over and over again. It also means that we are not going to do anything about it except hide behind our copes, all the while manipulating our emotions, feelings, and experiences. Problematic is that manipulating ourselves is paramount to self-abuse and self deception. Imagine a child expressing an emotion and a parent slapping the child across the face for expressing that emotion.  To please the parent the child may suppress the emotion. The child no longer spontaneously responds to life but reacts according to a preconditioning. Manipulating how we feel is the metaphorical slap across the face and based on what we learned in childhood. We manipulate and abuse ourselves seeking out validation and love through people-pleasing. We deceive ourselves into believing that we have effectively dealt with the situation by coping. This only serves to continue the cycle of suffering we are trying to get out of!

When we believe that something cannot change it is inevitable that resignation results. Resignation means that we no longer see a world of possibilities and adventure but limited and static. Though, we know one thing, life changes! Hence resignation is evidence that we are anti-life. Coping only serves to find ways to dull our experience and move against the flow of life to avoid experiencing fully. In coping we seek ways to escape the adventure because we perceive it as something dangerous or painful. Like rats in a cage we live our lives avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, a limitation in itself.

We say we want to live life fully, we want to let go, we want to really feel everything life has to offer and in the same breath we talk about how “we are coping with our daily lives as best as we can”. We have an unlimited number of excuses, justifications, defenses, things or people to blame, should’s, should not’s, and rules to keep us defensively living life. When we live defensively then we cannot possibly be living fully. If we perpetually need to justify our actions, blame life, death, job, being unemployed, money, our wives or husbands, mothers, fathers our emotions, our bodies, our culture, our education, our intelligence, being ill, being healthy, being young, being old, not having kids, having kids, being single, being married, being ugly, being beautiful, the list is endless of whom and what we blame that keeps us victims of our own rigidity and limitation. Consequently we live in perpetual over-reaction our buttons constantly being pushed. BreakThrough is a system that examines our over-reactions and diffuses the beliefs that cause them.

If you are ready to live life rather than resigning and coping then BreakThrough is for you.

For a listing of courses in your area click on the following links www.bodytalksystem.com or Terryann’s Schedule of Courses

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