Your Coping Skills Don't Work: How to Break Free from Habits That Once Helped You but Now Hold You Back

How often in moments of intense stress have you found yourself reaching for sweets or chips? Or, for example, after having a fight with a friend or experiencing an unpleasant incident at work, you spend hours watching short videos on social media to escape and not think about what happened? Or maybe you are one of those who, when a problem arises in a relationship, tries to avoid direct conversation and ignores their partner? According to schema therapist Richard Bruyette, all these destructive self-help skills we mastered in early childhood. Once, they truly helped us cope with pain, to avoid it, but now, in adulthood, they only exacerbate our problems. The book "Your Coping Skills Don't Work" will help you realize how to break out of the vicious cycle of established habits, acknowledge that you have problems that need to be solved here and now. The author offers a large number of techniques that will help you heal your inner child, as well as cope with the stresses of modern life. You will learn to experience your feelings using writing practices, breathing exercises, as well as rescripting - that is, replaying a painful situation in your imagination in such a way that it loses its intensity and becomes neutral. "Established methods of coping with stress, useful when we were little, are not so easy to change in adult life. Over time, they can become a cause of self-sabotage. In other words, habitual ways of coping with stress create a problem, leading to frustrating outcomes. This book will help you notice unconsciously ingrained behavioral reactions, rethink them, and create a new emotional experience. It is a very difficult task to abandon the familiar ways of coping with stress. But by solving it, you will gain the opportunity to develop healthy relationships with the world and effectively interact with others." Richard Bruyette