Coping (psychology)

Coping strategy, coping strategy, coping (of English to cope with, " cope, overcome " ) refers to the way of dealing with a perceived as a significant and difficult life event or life stage.

Description

Social work is a coping skills and developed them away by techniques and systemic approaches.

In the medical sense Coping refers to the coping behaviors of people with chronic diseases and disabilities.

Coping strategies are also of Elisabeth Kubler- Ross and others postulated stages of grief.

It is possible to distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies (also known as functional or dysfunctional coping strategies referred to ). Adaptive coping strategies contribute to a long -term and sustainable solution to a problem, while maladaptive coping strategies of distraction character in the foreground. An important theory of coping and stress management was described by Richard Lazarus by the stress model of Lazarus.

A psychological test to measure of coping with stress ( COPE ) was developed in 1989 by Charles S. Carver. It covers 14 different coping strategies and is frequently used for research into the causes of stress and how to cope.

Practice

• Education: objective in the confrontation of the individual with coping tasks is the development of a particular (specific) ability to cope better with future difficult situations. By addressing educators connect also the expectation of a learning effect: In the future difficult situations should be handled better than before. In the long run, a specific competence to develop ( in tackling difficult situations) in this sense.

• Psychotherapy: The patient / client is enabled, the future to deal with difficult situations that are of importance for its further development. Was his problem so far that the patient was not able to, he will in future be able to edit and solve a profit ( difficult ) problems for your own satisfaction and self-employed (ie on their own ).

Difficult or problematic is the methodology of this confrontation of the individual with tasks / difficult situations. Both in education and in therapy, the risk of overburdening the individual could exist that could have may relapse rather than a learning progress result.