The Why and the How of Coping

If I’m in pain, and it’s for a reason, I can put up with it, I’ll deal with it. But senseless pain — suffering without reason — that’s a different animal.

It’s a very different experience.

Nietzsche once said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”

I like to play around with these words. I think it’s also true that those who have a how to live can bear with almost any why. Sometimes there’s no answer to the questions of why, or we don’t get to see the answer.

But if there’s a pathway to follow footsteps, a map or something to gauge ourselves and to move with, if we have even just a semblance of a how, I think we can help ourselves. I also love this notion that if we’re all going to die, death will happen. Fine.

But once that endpoint that is fixed — we know of this truth — “how” becomes really exciting and interesting. It’s something we get to play with.

It can feel like a guitar solo. Songs have a beginning and an end. But what happens in between? We can go anywhere in our imagination.

And that’s where we can begin to reframe our mindset. We can turn fear into excitement.

Suggestions for Coping

Before we get into it, let me preface by saying this is an absolutely incomplete list. That being said, it does feel useful to me to categorize coping into certain buckets.

Let’s talk about the mechanics of coping: how do we deal with stress?

The first concept I want to mention is being vs. doing. We’re a very doing oriented culture. In many ways, we see ourselves through our accomplishments. Our value and our worth is intertwined with doing. I’ve also been around a lot of people towards the end of life who seem to have found their way to a different playing field. Folks who have found a way to learn how to be. They feel value in their own existence, rather than living on behalf of something else.

Being for its own sake, is a very, very powerful zone. And very useful. So I really like this duality and I don’t think it needs to be one or the other. Be in certain ways, do in others. They’re not opposed. We can do them together. It is how we do things that really matters.

1. Being

If you’re gripped in fear, you have a huge laundry list of tasks to take care of. Getting to treatment, managing your symptoms, and self-care, just to name a few.

This notion of just feeling something can sound exotic, almost pesky. One might say, “Look, I don’t have time to feel. I have to keep rolling.”

I would push back on that.

If you’re sacrificing your being for all the doing, you’re increasing the likelihood of feeling out of sorts, burnout, and feeling removed from your identity.

So it’s really important to consider that one form of coping involves a conscious attention to the good stuff, too.

2. Feel the Good Stuff

I watch myself when I’m gripped with a lot of anxieties or fears.

It’s like I watch myself narrow. When I pay attention to my internal dialogue, I don’t want to feel anything, because I’m afraid I’ll get stuck there. If I start crying, the tears will never end. If I feel the good stuff, well, then I’m going to get seduced into thinking life’s okay.

Then I’m gonna be even more terrified. There’s farther to fall. So if I can stay in this sort of hyper vigilant state, I won’t be surprised. That doesn’t work well for very long.

I think rather, what works pretty darn well is feeling the hard stuff. So as part of a balancing — as a counterpoint, as a buffer–load yourself stuff up with the good stuff, too, when you can.

Don’t blow past that.

It’s really, really important. And there’s so much momentum involved in treatment and taking care of things, that you really do need to pause.

3. Experience gratitude.

If you can find yourself, you’re on your way to feeling grateful.

I suppose there is some true power to just actually start pushing yourself to sit and say thank you. Then, you can let the feeling flow from the word.

But really, you have to find the feeling one way or another. Quite often, finding gratitude has to do with appreciating something. This requires pausing, seeing, and not judging.

So you have to pay attention.

When you’re in pain — when a lot of forces are yanking on you–it’s very hard to pay attention to anything else. So it takes an exercise.

But gratitude, if you could find your way there, is such a powerful force along the lines of love.

4. Accepting and Acceptance

Acceptance is challenging.

One of the most harmful things we can do to each other is to deny our own and each other’s experience. It can be such a vile act.

Acceptance and appreciation is so key here. Again, you acknowledge that you’re here. I am an amputee. Fine. Okay, I’ve accepted it.

That doesn’t mean I have to like it. I just have to acknowledge it. And this builds your capacity to be with the truth.

5. Relating to Others

So much of life is experienced through relationships. Maybe all of life is experienced through relationship.

The more time you spend in relationship, the more we see ourselves in each other, and everything.

6. Just Be

You don’t have to do anything.

Meditation can be very good for this. Just sit and be. Let your thoughts come and go.

It doesn’t need to be on behalf of anything. In fact, one of the hardest things that’s going on around meditation in the West is how it’s being leveraged. Now, it seems that people meditate because a company tells me I will be more productive. But you kind of have to erase that second half of the sentence. Just be in whatever.

“Come what may” is not a strategic meditation.

7. Call a Truce with Fear

Call a truce. The goal here is not to do away with fear, but to navigate it. To keep it in its place. To act from when it comes time to act.

Coping requires that you sit with a lot of things that you can’t change. Much of this is the task. I’ve worked with a lot of patients who have been full of fear around death. Over time, we talk about it.

We work with it, we look at it, and we dance around with it. In the end, fear often doesn’t go away. It’s just in its place.

It’s just another sensation that we deal with. And it can even become like a recognizable, friendly force.

I’ve seen that happen a lot.

8. Set Goals

Set goals to power through once you realize our to time is limited is. Okay, now that I’ve only got X amount of weeks, months, years to live, I have to get really serious about doing all the things I want to do in this life.

Great. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Time is a limited resource, so I’m going to do X, Y, and Z and point myself. It can help pull you through just about anything when you feel like you’re in free-fall and spinning out.

9. Pray

Praying doesn’t require a religion. I don’t think you need to have faith to speak to the universe, to speak to God, to speak to the world outside and inside of yourself, beyond yourself, but including yourself.

Prayer can also be a nice catchment for asking things of the world.

Usually when it’s the tough stuff in prayer, you are happy when you get what you’re asking for. But usually it isn’t expected.

So much of the power is daring to ask. And daring to listen.

10. Love

Your love is this blanket that can pretty much put out just about any fire I’ve never come across.

It’s the big one, if you ask me.

But the trick is that is has to go both ways. A lot of people are very good at giving love, but loving oneself is so much harder in some ways.

I think this is one of the major things that we should get to in life. We should hope to learn, to feel love, and to position ourselves so that we get to feel lovable.

11. Change How You Think

Change your mind.

I don’t think we’re preordained in so many ways. I think we can change how we think. And that affects how we feel. And that allows us to cope with something you know if we can change our perspective on something.

The same situation happened for me. Amputation was a horrible thing. Over time, with support and love, I got to see what I was learning from. I got to see how I could change my perspective.

In this way, I began to change my mind to turn my life into something that I could live.

This is a work in progress.

12. Be Creative

Creativity is a beautiful thing to work with. Anxiety, struggling to cope, and anything that comes out that you can’t deal with can incorporate creativity.

If you can find a way to work with it, play with it. Paint from it. Put all that energy into a garden. It doesn’t even need to be artwork. It can just be creative thinking.

We humans have a major strength in being creative animals. And the raw material from which to create with includes pain and suffering.

Some of the best artwork you’ll find won’t be a simple, happy, superficial smile. It’s got a lot more going on than that.

13. Laugh

It’s so important to note this because this subject can feel so heavy. I really like pointing out that laughter is just really one of the best coping mechanisms you will ever find. Like art, it’s a creative act: you’re making something from your pain. You can move it. You can transcend it.

If you can find your way to the last last laugh in your life, in a way that implies like you’re on it. It didn’t get you as much you as much as you got each other.

I’m very serious about humor.

Coping with Delayed Grief

In my own experience, I often have a delayed response with grief. Emotionally, it takes me a while to figure out what I’m feeling. To describe it to myself.

So very often, especially with heavy duty things, I have a delayed response and many people experience this. It’s very normal.

So I guess one thing to push back on is when you say you should have experienced certain feelings, I would give yourself a little more grace. You did what you needed to do. There’s no time limit on this stuff.

It took me 15 years to get to some of my feelings about my sister’s death. So, I guess, start by unburdening the shame. There’s no concept of “should;” you’re feeling them now, and that’s just fine.

Sometimes, these things are too big to let in, and the body is pretty smart. Often times we’ll only let in what we can deal with. So maybe this was your body being smart. You give yourself a little time for the feelings to fully bubble up.

So I’d say, let them ride and see what you can do to push back on anything any guilt or shame telling you should have done something sooner.

“Fighting” as Coping

If I see myself as a fighter, I may want to choose last ditch chemotherapy efforts, I don’t mind being in the ICU, and I could take pride in going down swinging. I’ve been in that zone. There’s a lot of power in that zone.

The trick is to pay attention so we can watch when that’s no longer serving a person, as with any of these coping mechanisms. Always circle back to ask yourself if this behavior is actually helping.

That’s always the question.

So, fighting. As is often the case with long bouts of chronic illness, the fight is just too exhausting. At some point, the situation is just not curable.

Very often that fighting energy needs to shift to something more relatable. Instead of opposing it, you sort of sidle up next to it.

The trick as a patient or a caregiver is to stay fluid with these things and check in. Is this helping?

If it’s not, let’s try something new.