Interpersonal Skills of the Helper: Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies

Session Aims

  • Examine wellbeing and resilience.
  • Examine adaptive and maladaptive coping.
  • Distinguish between stress, distress, cumulative stress, traumatic stress.
  • Consider the types of significant and/or traumatic life events that may lead to crises and how to respond to these in a clinical setting with a crisis intervention model.
  • Discuss and elaborate on professional and personal boundaries.

Wellbeing Theories

  • Systems science
  • Positive psychology
  • Social Determinants of Health
  • Economics
  • Sociology
  • Political philosophy
  • Education
  • Philosophy

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

  • Transcendence
  • Self-Actualization
  • Aesthetic Needs
  • Need to Know & Understand
  • Esteem Needs
  • Belongingness & Love Needs
  • Safety Needs
  • Physiological Needs

Stress

  • Stress is the body's response to a challenge or demand that requires physical, mental, or emotional adjustment.
  • It can be an acute or chronic response to a specific situation or event.
  • Any external or internal factor that can result in stress is termed a stressor, and these may be positive or negative.
  • Eustress is the experience of a stressor that leads to the experience of positive or ‘good’ stress.
    • This motivates and energizes the individual, resulting in improved function.
    • Examples: starting a new relationship, planning a holiday, or getting a sought-after promotion.

Cumulative Stress and Traumatic Stress

  • Cumulative stress is the result of prolonged exposure to distressing situations or events.
    • It can arise from work-related stress, financial difficulties, or relationship problems.
    • Over time, it can lead to physical health problems such as high blood pressure, heart disease, and chronic pain.
  • Traumatic stress occurs when a person is exposed to an event or situation that threatens their physical or emotional safety or wellbeing.
    • This may include experiences such as assault, natural disasters, torture, or military combat.
    • It can cause long-term physical and psychological harm and may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Resilience

  • Resilience is directly related to wellbeing.
  • It is the ability to cope with and adapt to change.
  • Having resilience and positive wellbeing enables a person to approach others and situations with confidence and optimism.

Wellbeing Capabilities:

  1. Paying attention: Mindfulness
    • The moment-by-moment control of attention, being in and attending to the present moment.
    • Ability to focus on certain stimuli while filtering out others.
    • Mindfulness, meditation, focus, awareness, and attention.
    • From this develops self-awareness, self-management, and the setting of goals.
    • Demonstrated in expressing wonder and interest, curiosity and enthusiasm, investigating, imagining, and exploring.
  2. Understanding our emotions; Emotional Intelligence
    • Understanding our emotions in present moment experiences.
    • Identifying our own emotions and emotional associations.
    • Identifying positive and negative emotions and mood in others, including facial and emotional expression and reactivity.
    • From this, self-awareness and self-regulation or management develop.
    • Demonstrated by an increased ability to understand and self-regulate emotions and to understand the feelings and needs of others, or empathy – which facilitates positive relationships.
  3. Coping with stress/developing resilience
    • The ability/skills to cope with difficult situations or adversity.
    • The characteristics of this capability are resilience, coping, post-traumatic growth, hardiness.
    • Self-management in the form of confidence, resilience, adaptability, and appropriate expression of emotions.
    • Demonstrated in accepting challenges, making choices, managing change, coping with frustrations, dealing with the unexpected.
  4. Setting goals and healthy habits
    • Striving for goals, motivation, and developing healthy habits.
    • The characteristics of this capability are persistence, engagement, flow, perseverance, growth mindset, self-regulation.
    • Self-awareness and self-reflection. Self-management in the ability to develop self-discipline and to set goals.
    • Demonstrated by seeking out and accepting new challenges, celebrating own and others’ achievements, initiating opportunities for new learning, increasing awareness of healthy lifestyle and good nutrition.
  5. Developing social skills
    • Connection to peers, parents, colleagues, a broad range of social interaction with a feeling of connectedness to individuals and community.
    • The characteristics of this capability are social relationships, friendship, gratitude and empathy, attachment, and interpersonal relationships.
    • Reflected in social awareness and social management.
    • Demonstrated in working collaboratively with others, connecting to others, awareness of needs and rights of others, recognizing contributions of others, interacting with care, empathy, and respect.

Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies

  • A coping strategy is a conscious or unconscious technique that a person uses to manage stress, difficult emotions, challenging situations, and crises.
  • Coping strategies help individuals to reduce the impact of stress or help them to resolve a problem.
  • Coping strategies can be healthy (adaptive) or unhealthy (maladaptive).
  • Coping occurs in response to psychological stress, triggered most often by changes, in an effort to maintain mental health and emotional well-being.
  • Coping refers to the thoughts and actions we use in these situations.
  • Life stressors are often described as negative events (e.g., the death of a loved one, unemployment, separation).
  • Positive changes in life (marriage, birth, moving, a new job, etc.) can also be life stressors and require coping skills to adapt.
  • Coping strategies or skills are the behaviors, thoughts, and emotions that we use to adjust to the changes that occur in our life.
  • Using an adaptive coping style may lower the probability of a disease occurrence and may increase the likelihood of achieving and maintaining excellent levels of health and quality of life.
  • Maladaptive strategies usually correlate with emotional distress, including symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as socio-emotional maladjustment.
  • Everyone uses both adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies.

Reflecting on Coping Strategies

  • What happened?
  • What were your coping strategies?
  • What were you thinking and feeling?
  • Evaluation: Was it positive or not?
  • Analysis: What sense can you make of this?
  • Action plan: What would you do differently next time?
  • Self-reflection and re-evaluation: Is learning a lifelong process?

What is a Crisis?

  • In mental health terms, a crisis refers not necessarily to a traumatic situation or event, but to a person’s reaction to an event.
  • One person might be deeply affected by an event while another individual suffers little or no ill effects.
  • A state of personal crisis can be defined as an experience of being faced by an event that appears to be a fundamental and insurmountable obstacle to the person’s capacity to carry on their life as before.
  • The person believes that their usual strategies are not sufficient to allow them to cope.
  • As a result, the person does not know what to do or which direction to turn.
  • This can produce different types of psychological and bodily response: immobilization, dissociation, being frozen, irrationality, fear, panic, shock, grief, anger, or hyperactivity.
  • A crisis is an event during which a person experiences themselves as being confronted by a situation that is threatening, overwhelming, and out of control.

Crisis Intervention

  • Crisis intervention refers to the ways in which we can offer short-term immediate help to those who have experienced an event that may have caused mental, physical, emotional, or behavioral distress.
  • Crisis Intervention involves a temporary, but active and supportive role in the life of an individual during a time of extreme distress.
  • The James and Gilliland Seven Stage Intervention Model will be covered in the next four sessions.
  • Examples of crises:
    • Individual and personal: Relationship breakdown, health-related issues, loss, financial troubles, addiction, experiencing violence, assault or some other crime, being in an accident
    • General or global occurrence: Natural disasters, cybersecurity crises like hacking, data breaches, or malware attacks

Giving and Receiving Feedback

  • Developing feedback skills is vital in clinical practice.
  • Everyone has the capacity for giving useful feedback.
  • Attention should be given to some of the attributes of meaningful feedback and how it can be given in ways that enrich learning.

Professional and Personal Boundaries

  • Client focus: Place the needs of clients at the center of any decisions that you make about them and their lives.
  • Self-disclosure: Information about yourself and your personal life should only be disclosed to clients if it is for the explicit benefit of the client.
  • Dual relationships: More than one type of relationship with a client (e.g., if they work for you, are a family member, or receive extra private support from you) can create issues.
  • Working within your competence: It is vital that you understand the limitations of your role and of your personal capabilities.
  • Reflective practice: This is an essential part of ensuring professional and personal boundaries.
  • Looking after yourself: It is your responsibility to ensure that you are in a fit state to do the job that you are required to do. This covers not only your behavior outside work but also how you manage your stress and emotions within work and caused by your work.

Reflection Questions

  1. What is adaptive and maladaptive coping, and why is it important?
  2. What have you learned about your own coping strategies?
  3. How aware are you of your boundaries? How might you facilitate this exploration further?
  4. In your opinion, what was the most useful idea discussed in today’s class?
  5. During today’s class, what idea(s) struck you as things you could or should put into practice?
  6. What do you think was the most important point or central concept communicated during today’s presentation?