Coping Skills in San Diego

An inability to cope with life stressors can impede your ability to function in your daily life, disrupt relationships, and prevent you from pursuing your goals. Feeling overwhelmed by life is particularly frustrating when you have work, school, or family responsibilities and obligations you still need to maintain. At Sober Life, we know how difficult it can be to find flexible support to live your life while building a healthier you. Thus, we believe in providing customizable treatment plans to help you build tools like healthy coping skills to live your best life.

Addressing Challenges With Unhealthy Coping Skills

Feeling stress or experiencing stressful situations cannot be avoided. Thus, as Algorani and Gupta state, everyone experiences reactive and proactive responses to stress, which can be categorized as:

• Problem-focused: Address the problem causing the distress
  • Planning
• Emotion-focused: Focus on reducing negative emotions associated with the stressor
  • Acceptance
  • Positive reframing
• Meaning-focused: Utilizing cognitive strategies to obtain and manage the meaning of the stressor
• Social coping: Seeking support from your community
  • Emotional support
  • Instrumental support

Each coping skill can be effective or ineffective based on how you use each style. When coping skills become warped, they can lead to poor coping mechanisms like disengagement, avoidance, and emotional suppression. Thus, unhealthy coping skills can lead to challenges like:

• Substance use disorder (SUD)
• Anger and irritability
• Sleeping issues
• Excessive spending
• Self-harm

It can be difficult to recognize the negative impact unhealthy coping skills can have on your life. Moreover, recognizing your coping skills are unhealthy can be challenging if you did not grow up with healthy examples. However, seeking support can help you learn how to dismantle maladaptive coping strategies for your long-term well-being.

Learning Healthy Coping Skills at Sober Life

Stress is not inherently negative or guaranteed to cause you harm. Negative stress is overwhelming and exhausting distress that increases health risks and impairs daily functioning. For example, distress happens in work burnout, job loss, loss of a loved one, chronic illness, or abuse and neglect.

Positive stress is short-lived, feels exciting, and motivates you to try, learn, or discover new things. For example, positive stress happens on first dates, when buying a house, at weddings, or during pregnancy. Therefore, an important aspect of building healthy coping skills is understanding how you experience positive and negative stress.

Everyone experiences and responds to stress in different ways. However, life stressors should not prevent you from living a fulfilling life. You deserve a treatment plan that addresses the specific coping skills you need to build a healthier you. At Sober Life, we are committed to providing flexible and comprehensive treatment plans that match your life and needs. With our HealthyU program, you can find psychological and addiction support that meets you where you are on your journey.

Discovering Your Path to Healing

Stress is a part of life, and even those with healthy coping skills have moments where they feel overwhelmed by their stress. However, healthy coping skills give you a foundation to bounce back from those moments of distress without self-destructive patterns. Looking at how different experiences in your life have contributed to your stress response can help you understand your challenges with coping skills. As noted in the Child Development Perspective, maladaptive coping skills often stem from adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).

In early childhood, children often seek comfort from their caregivers in times of stress. Yet, as children become more independent, they start to build a set of healthy coping skills to manage difficult situations and soothe themselves. A healthy repertoire of coping skills contains a range of strategies and flexibility for you to adapt to different situations. However, a repertoire of unhealthy and undeveloped coping skills follow a single strategy and is inflexible.

The presence of unhealthy coping skills happens when children do not have access to healthy and adaptive development. Moreover, maladaptive coping in early childhood is a reflection of constant overwhelming stress like maltreatment and invalidating interactions with caregivers. Thus, unhealthy coping skills in adulthood often stem from the repeated use of undeveloped coping, lack of healthy coping examples, and repeated exposure to overwhelming stress.

You deserve flexible and customizable support for the roots of your unhealthy coping skills and specific experiences. At Sober Life, we are committed to providing holistic care for mental health and substance use services to support whole-person healing.

Mental Health Recovery Approach

As noted in Plos One, more frequent use of negative coping strategies like self-blame, avoidance, and denial increases your risk for mental health disorders. An unhealthy bidirectional relationship is created as unhealthy coping skills increase depressive symptoms, and depressive symptoms increase the use of unhealthy coping skills. Moreover, maladaptive coping also increases the risk of suicidal ideation.

Unhealthy coping skills disrupt your ability to problem-solve through stress, which increases feelings of hopelessness. In addition, the rigidity of maladaptive coping makes it more challenging to access multiple productive coping skills. Difficulty managing stress can impair functioning, relationships, and ability to pursue career and academic goals. Listed below are some of the treatment options we offer:

• Intensive outpatient program (IOP)
• Hybrid IOP
  • Virtual group IOP
• Partial hospitalization program (PHP)
• Veteran IOP
• Holistic activities
  • Yoga

Through our HealthyU program, we are dedicated to providing holistic and resilience-focused coping skills to address the roots of your maladaptive coping.

Addiction Recovery Approach

At Sober Life, we know the root of self-destructive behaviors like SUD often stems from unaddressed ACEs and mental health disorders. The co-occurrence of SUD and mental health disorders often creates a bidirectional relationship in which they impede each other. Therefore, we believe it is important to offer paths to healing that address your specific needs for a healthier you. When you can address the roots of your coping difficulties, you can learn how to deepen your resilience to harmful behavior patterns.

Listed below are some of our addiction services available to support long-term healing:

• Outpatient detoxification
• PHP
• IOP
• Virtual IOP
• Adolescent IOP
• Veteran IOP

At Sober Life, we believe long-term recovery is about more than offering rehab to treat addiction. Through our holistic approach to care, we are committed to providing a rehab where whole-person care is at the core of healing.

Benefits of Learning Healthy Coping Skills in a Healing Space

Trying to make time for your health and well-being, along with your relationships and work or school commitments, can feel like a juggling act. It is easy to convince yourself that everything else in your life is more important than you. At Sober Life, we know you will always have stressors, whether it is work, school, relationships, or everyday life. Therefore, we have built a recovery community in Downtown San Diego, where service-oriented and resilience-focused care is at the core of our work.

Through a casual and community-driven environment in the Little Italy district, you can find connection and community to build coping skills to thrive in the real world. At Sober Life, we believe everyone deserves access to a flexible and holistic treatment plan that teaches you healthy coping skills you can use throughout your life in long-term recovery.

Addressing the Importance of Healthy Coping Skills

When you have used the same unhealthy coping skills your entire life, it can be easy to believe that stress management is not worthwhile. Listed below are some myths and misconceptions about building healthy coping skills:

• You cannot do anything about stress
• No symptoms mean no stress
• Coping skills will eliminate stress

Building adaptive coping skills will not eliminate stress from your life. However, healthy coping skills give you the foundation to manage stress throughout your life. Without healthy coping skills, you increase your risk for health issues, emotional distress, and mental health issues that impair your long-term well-being. Although taking that first step toward dismantling unhealthy coping skills can feel daunting, you deserve the opportunity to live a fulfilling life unfettered by stress.