Coping Skills

Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)

Lets start out with what I believe coping skills are then we’ll work into how that applies to karate and martial arts for self-defense. Coping skills are those defense mechanisms we develop to avoid or lessen psychological pain and coping skills are those skills we learn to deal with various stressors. In a psychological perspective coping is the use of a conscious effort to solve personal and interpersonal problems in order to minimize or tolerate the stresses of conflicts often referred to as coping strategies and coping tactics. 

There are books and web pages and organizations that express definitions of coping skills or strategies/tactics that span volumes of data and information but the above is at least a fundamental explanation of coping skills. 

They go on to explain, basically, the types of coping skills, i.e., appraisal-focused where the individual challenges their own assumptions effecting their perceptions and those distinctions from their experiences, studies and overall understandings, adaptive cognitive. Then there is the problem-focused where the individual works to reduce or eliminate the stresses of live from conflicts, adaptive behavioral. The third one is emotion-focused where the individual works to change their own emotional reaction to those stressors of life with emphasis in the case of violence toward how we emotionally react to conflicts.

We therefore, overall, have to learn and then change the way we think and feel toward those stimuli that create such stressors that can lead to the types of conflicts and possible violence that is not productive or even an acceptable form of communications. We need to learn about our emotions and how to handle and release effects of the emotions, etc., that I tend to call reining in the monkey brain. In the second type of problem-focused adaptive behavior it is about first knowing and understanding those problems that effect our assumptions and how we emotionally react to those stimuli, i.e., if you don’t know about it and how it works, how can you find, learn, create and implement those coping skills that will allow you to handle conflict and violence in an appropriate way? 

Then I tend to ask myself, “If coping skills hold such importance then why is that not a subject of teaching?” Such coping skills are often assumed and addressed in the most effective way by families and societies yet those assumptions can and often are based on inaccurate and incorrect data and facts and knowledge of the subject where many make assumptions from emotions and feelings taught through media sources rather than a focus and conscious effort of the subject itself.  

In karate and martial arts for self-defense most of what we need to know, learn and understand about self-defense is also often left and assumed the individual either already has the appropriate coping skills or that they will find them instinctively. To leave that type of skill to such assumptions is incorrect and will leave each individual exposed to the dangers from conflict and violence because it comes down to what Mr. MacYoung often relates to us, we don’t know what we don’t know effects. If you don’t know of it, how it works and how it effects us both as a target and as an adversary then how can you evade it, escape it, avoid it or deescalate it in yourself and your adversary? 

Ask yourself when you are preparing the next self-defense session, does your training program involve a conscious subject of coping skills regarding conflict and violence along with appropriate actions to handle such situations? Taking an adversary down and choking them into submission may not be the most effective coping skill if that adversary confronts you, do you know that and do you know tactics and strategies that help you avoid that need? 

I can tell you that personally, my upbringing did not teach me the coping skills I needed for every day stressors and no where did they teach me how to cope skillfully with things I encountered as an adult. I can tell you that even today I am still learning about coping skills I felt should have come much earlier in life that are eye opening for me even at the age of sixty-two years (and that is with forty years of karate and martial arts training and practice too).

Bibliography (Click the link)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coping_(psychology)