Coping with your coping skills.
It seems to me that in times of crisis, when we’re jerked into survival mode, we often revert to our original coping mechanisms. For those of us who’ve had less than ideal childhoods, these coping patterns may have served us well in our youth, but often in adulthood they become at best annoying, and at worst destructive and debilitating.
At the start of “shelter in place”, being one of the fortunate ones that’s been able to stay at home and collect unemployment, I felt excited for the possibility of so much extra time. I made a list of all the fun and creative things I could do during this time: paint, make a film, try a new recipe, write a song, organize my closet, do yoga every day, etc. The first week I did a little of all of that and I found myself feeling like I was on vacation and I could do whatever I wanted. I cherished getting to sleep in and spend more time cooking and reading and catching up with friends. With the work that I do as a full-time auditioning actor, I’ve never been able to have a stay-cation outside of a long weekend (I usually have to leave town to get a real break) so this was a breath of fresh air. It truly felt like the silver lining of this horrid pandemic and I knew I was extraordinarily lucky to be having such a positive experience during such a difficult time in our world.
But over time, this joy started to dissipate. Old patterns of self-judgement crept back in, scornfully telling me that I needed to be productive and “doing something useful with my life” in order to be worthy of feeling good. Insisting that I really ought to suffer through this because it’s not fair for me to enjoy it while so many others are burdened. Making me feel like somehow having fun and being creative is a bad thing, and if I allow myself do that I will bear the punishment of my “irresponsible” actions.
Next thing I knew I was back to 10-hour work days, getting as busy as I could to make sure I was doing everything in my power to come out of this stronger, better, wiser and ahead of the curve. I was striving to be a responsible adult, planning out how to save money and how to be prepared for every possible future scenario to secure my future in this uncertain world. Meanwhile, my inner child was resentful, staring at me like my dog does when I haven’t played with him in a long time. I wasn’t doing the things I set out to do with my newfound freedom, instead I was squandering my opportunity of leisurely time for the false promise of a “safer” tomorrow. But what about today?
Then, one afternoon sitting on my front balcony, during a moment of fatigue, it dawned on me that this pandemic and all the uncertainty it brings had kicked in old coping skills that have hijacked me many times before. Ways of dealing with stress that I developed in my early life that aren’t especially practical now. As I chatted with other friends about their experience and how they were feeling during this Covid-19 crisis, I silently wondered if a similar thing was happening to them, and if perhaps this reaction is not all that uncommon.
When difficult and unexpected things happen, fear triggers our automatic response to danger and unbeknownst to ourselves, we slide right back into the patterns of our past. Old problem-solving abilities so keenly developed in childhood come rushing back to the rescue. Perhaps you survived highly critical parents by becoming highly critical yourself to prevent them from being able to point out anything you did wrong. Perhaps you survived emotional or physical abandonment by becoming as pleasant to be around as possible to avoid the repeated rejection. Perhaps you survived neglect by learning to need and want less so as not to be a burden. For me it was all of the above. But whatever you survived there’s no denying it played a major role in shaping who you are and how you respond to the world. More specifically, it effectively chiseled neurological pathways in your brain to help you cope with your particular set of problems in early life. And that programing is what I call, your default mode.
For a few lucky ones these well establishes skills still serve them productively today. Perhaps they’ve even shaped their careers and lives around them and their default mode not only uplifts them personally, but it also helps those around them. I certainly think this is the ideal scenario; to make use of your early programing to define your purpose in life. However, for a great many of us our old coping mechanisms just don’t line up with our current reality anymore. The tools we purposed to escape abuse or neglect or enmeshment, or anything that squashed some part our true selves, are now just ancient and heavy armor burrowed into our skin, weighing down our hearts and minds.
And maybe, like I did at first, you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’ve done a lot of work on yourself:
-You’ve been to therapy and you’ve developed a strong awareness of the issues you picked in your family of origin.
-You’ve unraveled and addressed most of your problems through loving relationships with friends, with a partner or through your work/art.
-You practice Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or some other martial art to channel your energy in a healthier way.
-You practice breathing and meditation and you’ve learned that vulnerability won’t kill you (thank you, Brene Brown).
-Or you have a dog (best therapy I’ve ever gotten).
One way or another you’ve gradually released negative patterns from the past and learned to be kinder to yourself, more patient, more in touch with your needs/wants and to breathe before you react. Maybe you’re even at the point where you are grateful for the pain you endured in your past and everything it’s taught you. You know that you are who you are not in spite of your childhood, but because of it. Well, that’s great! And believe me, I commend you. But the sucky thing is that even when you’ve done all of this incredible work, even when you’ve built new neural pathways to better handle adversity, even then, when the ground of change suddenly shakes beneath you, before you even have time to think, your brain resets to default mode.
Default mode can be intricately tied to early trauma, or it can just be negative parental voices replaying like a broken record. For each person it will be a completely unique spider web. Some of us can unstick ourselves better than others, having found good ways to cope with our coping mechanisms. For others, when our default mode has won, depression can follow, and the things that usually bring you joy and comfort now feel soggy and ineffective. Default mode is when some part of you just cannot relax and you can’t reason yourself out of this feeling of unrest or even understand exactly why it showed up. It feels like there’s some a short circuit in your brain and you can’t talk, exercise or sleep your way out of it. Sometimes deep breathing helps, but when it’s really bad, even that doesn’t crack the code. You’re functioning just below the surface, like you know how to swim but even as you go through the motions, you can barely keep yourself from drowning.
And boom. Here came the Covid-19 pandemic and without even realizing it, you’re back to being 5 years old and feeling like you’re going to die. You’re “triggered”, as they say, and your mind starts replaying old dialogue you’ve heard so many times before. “You suck”, “you don’t belong”, “you should should should should”. Negative thoughts playing on loop.
Default mode says:
-Forget kindness, criticism and self-judgement work faster.
-Screw your needs and wants, what about everyone else’s needs and wants? You should be helping them even at the expense of your own health and sanity.
-Fuck being vulnerable, it’s time to brace yourself for the punches and fight back when they come.
Sometimes these default voices are loud and overwhelmingly clear, but other times they whisper. You might not even notice they’re there. Perhaps they’re quietly chattering in the background like high school girls spreading nasty rumors. Or they’re stealthily draining energy to fight demons now long dead and gone. You might not even realize you’re swinging a sword because it feels so familiar. You did it for so many years and it worked, it protected you, so why shouldn’t it work now? Until you realize that though you’re highly skilled at self-defense, right now you need to put out a fire, and no amount of fencing will stop oxygen from feeding the flame.
And suddenly you’re exhausted. Your energy has been depleted while you’ve been grasping at straws, trying to fight off something you’ve never encountered before: this invisible monster of a virus lurking nearby. Fear has awakened your internal army now braced for a fight and even the blasted turncoat soldiers are ready to attack, but you’ve spent more time trying to get them in line than actually fighting a worthy battle.
Does anybody know what I’m talking about?
Maybe it’s just me and my crazy psychological theories about how much our childhood steers our lives. Maybe I’m trying to explain away thoughts and feelings that can’t be named. Maybe I’m just speaking of a natural fear and resistance to change. But for me, I couldn’t help but notice that my early programing got louder as the severity of our world situation sunk in. As I increasingly worried about my family, my career and my future, I found myself falling back into the patterns I’ve been breaking down my whole life, caught by in web tailor-made to protect me, that now just binds me down and keeps me stuck.
I don’t know about you, but I was taught to conform, to draw inside the line and follow the rules, because that’s how “good things happen” in your life. I learned to sit down and be quiet and do my homework, because that’s how “You’ll get rewarded”. Be predictable, controlled and well behaved. Squelch your curiosity and uncontrollable feelings and anything that cannot be contained and labeled or you will bear the consequences. You must subdue your aliveness or you will be rejected from the pack, abandoned, and left to crinkle in your own demise.
With that kind of messaging it’s no wonder that I became highly skilled at repressing all of my natural impulses, stopping them in their tracks and questioning their intention, cutting off their rhythm and flow. A willing servant to my own acquired self-judgement, egging myself on to follow these mental commands, always trying to hit an invisible mark and doing whatever I have to do to satiate those voices that tell me I need to “have a purpose” and be “useful” and have “tangible results”. And needless to say, as a creative person, this can be incredibly stifling.
So there I was, sitting on my balcony, realizing for the thousandth time how often the choices I make reflect my need to appease those “parental voices” in my mind. The voices that get too loud when I step out of line, the ones that insist they know better, telling me they’re only scolding me for my own good. Being free and flowy is too loose and immeasurable to pacify these voices that demand to know the exact “end purpose” of my endeavors. And many times the negative feedback my mind shouts at me feels like too much of a burden to bear for the momentary joy of doing something purposeless. But of course, this leaves me torn because creativity requires you to jump into the abyss. It demands that you enter a space of “not knowing” and it invites you to release expectations and play. But for me, having internalized the lesson that being spontaneous is “bad and dangerous”, I feel obliged to follow the rules and the fun is literally been sucked out of playing, sucked out of life.
It makes me think of a game my nieces like to play, where they pretend there is lava on the floor and the only way to save yourself is to hop from one thing to another; from the rug, to the sofa, to the coffee table, to a chair. Whoever steps on the floor gets burned. I began to imagine how boring this game would be if everyone just followed the rules and never touched the floor. I mean all you have to do is not move, right? Stay on your chair or your piece of rug or sit on the kitchen counter. But the joy is in trying to hop from one thing to another, in the danger of falling and getting burned, in the excitement of survival, and the laughter of someone else trying so hard not to dip their toes, only to slip and fall to their death. That’s where the giggles come from, the belly laughs, and the game.
Beyond my sudden plunge into default mode, it struck me that I’ve learned to predict and control even my own fun and enjoyment, I’ve lost my child-like connection to the “game”. If I keep living my life to please the parental voices in my head, I’m likely to live a fairly miserable existence. And if this is adulthood, then I disagree with the mold. I think there is a way to stay safe and procure survival, while still drawing outside the lines. I think most of us admire people who do exactly that, who think and act outside the box because they follow the beat of their own drum. And I think it’s possible to crack that mold and say, I’m not falling for the lie that I’m better or more deserving when I’m a “good girl” or “good boy”. Instead, I choose to allow space for the parts of myself I learned to deny, connecting to my own feeling and flow, and speaking my truth loud and clear. I’m the adult now, and if I want to roll around on the floor and play like a jackass, ain’t nobody gonna stop me!
It’s true that our default mode may never completely leave us. It will likely be there knocking on our doors offering all kinds of advice at every big turning event or new experience throughout our entire lives. Sometimes it will prove to be useful, and other times, just a pain in the ass. But one way or another it seems to be a part of us, a part we have to learn to live with ideally without letting it control us. To be aware of the parts that still serve us, that we want to bring forth, and to notice the parts that weigh us down, that perhaps we can stop giving power to. The way I see it is if I have to struggle with fear and “negative voices”, it may as well be to untangle them, progressively unblocking my creative freedom and sense of play.
And now, for one piece of good news, your default mode has made you precisely who you are. And that uniqueness informs your art, your one-of-a-kind voice and the very distinct set of gifts you have to offer the world. Default mode is not your enemy, however much it may feel so, it is not something to be cut off or get rid of. It can actually fuel you if you learn how not to let it drain you. The key is to realize that you don’t have to be a victim to your default mode. It will make you think that it’s in the driver’s seat, but really it’s just grabbing the whee and you have to grab it back. Hopefully over time you can learn to befriend your default mode, to laugh at the fear-based suggestions and the critical voice, and the scenarios it likes to posture, and just respond with “thank you but no thank you”, choosing to plug into this moment, and honor yourself fully in a way that only you can.
By Ellie Araiza
Nothing Beats Reality 