Chapter 5: Coping Mechanisms

Discovering Healthy Coping Mechanisms for C-PTSD

There are a lot of unhealthy coping mechanisms while dealing with your condition.

Self-medication is big in my family. step dad has been smoking pot since he was twelve. He doesn’t know he is medicating, but he is. My uncle drinks to get through the problems he is dealing with. He was hit by a car thirty years ago, diagnosed with cancer while in the hospital and has been drinking booze and smoking weed to manage the depression and pain that came with that. My brother I am borrowing the car from, he drinks and smokes. My other brother does the same. My uncle in Hawai’i has been drinking heavily for as long as I have known him, and once I had days of long talks with him, I learned a lot more about where my step dad came from.

Through the stories from my uncle while I was in Hawai’i I was informed that my grandfather had been severely physically abusive. The children would be chased through the yard and surrounding area with large sticks and beaten. He was an angry drunk. He was also in the military for a time and likely was raised by a violent man himself.

I saw a meme a few days ago that sums this up well;

“All of our parents really wantin’ credit for not abusing

us as much as their parents abused them.”

Hawai’i uncle also had told me about how he was drafted for Vietnam. He was terrified of going. He had heard stories from friends about what it was like and what kind of danger awaits him if he is drafted. When he went to his dad about it, the man told him that it was his duty and he was going. That was it, there wasn’t anything else that he could do about it. When he confided his fear to his father, the man berated him for cowardice.

Imagine that as your guardian, a person who is meant to protect you and keep you safe. It isn’t any wonder why my step dad was screwed up and abusive as part of that result. When it came down to it, my uncle have gotten a date to ship out and about a week before it was due, the conflict ended.

I had read an opinion piece about humanity as a whole is currently traumatized by the wars that have happened, the stress of the cold war, the stress of the draft and the possibility of drafts for over a century. There is pretty objective truth to that.

“There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shellshock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables: shellshock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was seventy years ago.”

- George Carlin, Doin' It Again, 1990

Each time one of our forefathers went to war, rich people made out like bandits and the poor were traumatized. That trauma then transferred to their children through abuse, that likely had roots in anxiety from PTSD. Those who returned would drink or worse to self-medicate. With the self-medication abuse grew, as the abuse grew, the more it impacted the next generation in ways that would put them on path to impact the next generation… so it goes.

This country has demonized therapy so much that even attempting to talk to some of these people about all of this at all, is met with hostility. After all, why would our government just damage all of us? Right? It’s not like a line of generational trauma is somehow profitable to those who influence our leadership, right? … Right?

It's crazy how much people hate each other; that the possibility of benefitting you, if outweighed by the desire to watch others suffer.

An example: While I stayed a short time with my uncle in valley California, I had mentioned that, “Repeated watching of the same shows and movies is an anxiety self-soothing technique,”

I was met with the statement, “I don’t know about any of that nonsense, but I like to watch them.”

It was just a little thing I saw that we shared and an explanation of why therapists acknowledge the action as a way to make us feel better.

There aren’t any scenes we are unprepared for there are no surprises. It is comfortable to watch over and over because we already know what is going to take place, it helps keep us calm. You would think that is something positive to take away from the discussion, but no. It’s nonsense to him. There is no understanding of the mental health issues many are dealing with, because it has been called weakness, it has been called pseudoscience, the condition itself was seen as a moral failing in some way.

It is not a healthy technique to overindulge, but it is a commonplace one that can be healthy from time to time. I have taken to reviewing in a different fashion over the last few months. My goto mellow and calm show for that time at least is Frasier. There are things that I will catch and have a better understanding of while I am watching, which is fine. The biggest factor for me though is the white noise. I don’t need to actually watch the show to follow it. I can sit writing and plotting things to write while it is on in the background. I can make calls with it on mute and have it running in the background if I need to find an anchor to return to the moment or disassociate from the call’s hold music until the operator returns to the call.

My therapist says that this is fine, but not to do only that. It is the same with videogames. I feel horrible when I play a game for hours, but sometimes that is all that I can do to pull myself away from dark thoughts, reenacted memories that will not go away, woes of my past, the times when I should have done something else that would have been a better choice, the hostility of my family and my mother in particular.

Writing, like this here, also is healthy, as I spoke about a little before. These are healthy coping actions when done in moderation.

My therapist has also helped me with more breathing exercises that help. I have been taught about binaural tapping, which you do quickly to move on from an unpleasant feeling and slow when you are having a good experience. This is all remapping your neural pathways from the dark and locked in memories of the trauma and pain, to the pleasing, calm, and constructive experience that you want to lock in the place of those traumatic memories. You have to make your brain reduce the importance of the trauma by speeding past the negative past and slowing down the positive by letting those memories dig in deeper. For me it has been a game changer.

We have discussed Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, or EMDR. I have talked to friends about it and I have been given a mixed bag of results in reply. Some people tell me that, like binaural tapping, for them it was a game changer others tell me it had dug up things they weren’t prepared for.

I am not ready for that yet. I want to do everything that I can to get myself better, but I am terrified that EMDR might make things worse. I do not want to be in a triggered state, and discussing my trigger is likely to put me there. I will eventually do it, I know this, but at the moment, I feel like I am too fragile to handle it.

I no longer have a car. When I left for New Jersey I dropped both of the cars that I had owned at my step dad's house and gave them to him. This was my last interaction I allowed myself to have with my step dad. He is a mechanic, the cars were not an easy overnight sale, and I needed to get on a plane. It was my final gift to my step dad and it was the closing action between us.

Because the cars were no longer mine, I had to buy a bike to get around the rural city that I currently live in. This has been a really good coping mechanism or at least it has been a much healthier way to get around and shed some of my depression weight. The exercise is healthy and gets me out of the house and active outside. I have now been riding about fifty miles a month. This isn’t for everyone, some are going to have a harder time with this than others.

Taking your condition inventory objectively also helps with coping. Your troubles can look overwhelming on paper, but it also addresses the issues in a list that is broken up piece by piece. My daily activity report has been a part of that for me. Each check mark that I make has an objective substance. A line is an action. Each action has a value of difficulty. Each day has a reminder of things that I want done and I follow that guide as much as I can each day. I have a tangible record of my successful activity during each day that I can find a statistical median and average of actions that I can expect to achieve that day, and that record is a fact. If it’s not for others, that number still is a fact for me. I know what I can do. I know sometimes I cannot meet my expectation of what I want to do, but I will know, in my heart and mind, that I did everything that I could do that day and each day I try to meet and exceed the total of the day before, for me.

Upon the top of my DAR are three statements.

“It’s my job to take care of myself.”

“Who am I?”

“What do I want?”

Each day I read those words and I focus on my answers for each. People-pleasing is not taking care of myself, even if attempting to please my mother to bring peace to my stay here, it is not taking care of myself directly.

Who am I? I am struggling with this one each day. I don’t see any value in myself. People tell me that I am a kind, intelligent, and talented person, but my trauma tells me that I don’t matter, that everyone is just pretending to care about me, that those I trust are going to leave, abuse, or take advantage of me. My imposter syndrome makes me feel like everything that I do is a deception that eventually someone is going to figure out and then walk away from me.

But, who am I? Each day I attempt to embrace the kind things that people tell me about myself. Am I smart? I suppose to some degree I am and that can be enough for now. Am I kind? Whether or not I know why I am being kind, I generally am now. I hate injustice, bigotry, abuse, and bullies, so I do everything in my power to challenge all of that in the world, each and every day. Talented? I suppose so. I have built a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world that has been able to keep friends entertained for twenty-nine years now, almost thirty. I have written one book to completion, I am writing this book, I am slowly writing two books within a publishing house through Amazon. I may not have a deluge of fans yet, but I might be able to get to the point that I can live off the income of my work.

What do I want? This one is so sad that it is heart-breaking. I haven't achieved it yet, but I will. I want to feel safe. I want to feel secure. I want to be able to help those I care about. I do not want to live feeling a constant want and need. I want to feel happy. I don’t think I have ever really had a moment of true happiness and I want to change that. I want to feel loved and love someone in return. I want to have my anxiety under control so that I can feel like I am safe enough to have a person in my life that I won’t yell at when I am having an anxiety attack. I don’t want to feel like I have to scan my environment constantly when I leave the house.

That really isn’t that much when it comes down to it, right?

Grounding Techniques, Self-care, and Self-compassion Practices

My first grounding technique came across my feed as a meme with a upheld hand with each of the five senses displayed at the end of each digit.

Find five things with each of your senses.

* What do you see?

* Look for five distinct things within the room to focus on. Breathe steadily.

* What do you hear?

* Listen for five things that you can focus on. Keep breathing.

* What can you touch?

* Feel five things that you have immediately around you. Keep breathing.

* What can you taste?

* Think of five tastes that you enjoy. Keep breathing.

Take one big breath and exhale.

This was my first actual grounding technique and I still use it today. My therapist has helped me enhance it. When you breathe, breathe from your stomach. Let it get nice and big, then slowly exhale. It apparently stimulates something different around your stomach, this markedly increased the effectiveness of the breathing exercise.

Self-hugging. For me, this is a little enhanced binaural tapping. I work my tapping up to my shoulders or upper arm and softly tap with full hands. I draw in as tight as I can and just enjoy the stimulation. If you are like me and touch starved, this helps. It isn’t a replacement for physical contact with others, but it can hold you over.

Speak kindly to yourself. You likely have a lot of love to give. You may want to help everyone in the world. You might just go to the limits with your family. If you are the type who rescues. You need to rescue yourself too. You need to learn to do that first. You wouldn’t scream at someone for a little mistake. You shouldn’t chastise yourself either. You are only human. You have limits.

Mantras. One of my favorite mantras, and the most helpful for me is;

“I am not responsible for the expectations that others have placed upon me.”

We all have things to work on. Perfectionism is another hangup. It must be right 100% or it’s overwhelming. I like to say to myself. “Just a piece at a time counts.” You might not be able to do everything that you want to do. You can’t let that just be a nonstarter. All progress is progress. You can’t cook a meal tonight? Can you use the crock-pot? Can you use a rice cooker? Do you have anything in the freezer?

When I was in New Jersey, I had spotty energy. I might sit on the couch all day long without moving more than a dozen steps the whole day. Everything just felt crushing. Existing was too exhausting. There were a lot of days like that. During that time I learned to make things that were freezer friendly. I would make empanadas with a little set of clamshell molds. Those can be filled with a lot of different things. I used to make steak, bell pepper, onion and mushroom empanadas that were always fantastic to warm up. I could open up a bag of them I left in the freezer and toss them in the oven for about 20 minutes and I was set.

On good energy days I would do as much as I could. It was all about a piece at a time.

There are days you want to do something and you can’t even move. I have executive dysfunction from time to time. It is horrific. You want to stand and you cannot get your body to cooperate. I wanted to get to the laundry machine and move the load. Go body! Wait.

The most humiliating episode was crapping my pants because I couldn’t make myself get moving. I shared it openly on my social media and my inbox alerts started going off shortly after. People telling me their episodes of executive dysfunction. Only a handful were something like I shared, but for the most part the episodes that others had gone through were simple but extremely upsetting. I wanted to share because I knew that someone out there went through something like this and they are not going to feel good about it. They are going to think they are alone. I feel alone. I know that I’m not.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

I don’t hide my issues because I am trying my best not to feel ashamed of them. If telling people about my experience helps them, I’ve done something good despite going through this humiliating experience.

I try to talk to people about the issues I am going through, because the more people I speak to about my experiences, the more I learn about what healthy is and how much of what I went through was toxic and not normal. I was raised by broken people, who were broken by broken people. I need to learn what a healthy family is like. I need to know what is and is not acceptable with your loved ones.

I have to forgive myself the damage I had done because that is how I am going to be able to take care of myself. I can’t keep my mind in the past. I was a shitty dude to a fair amount of people and that was not okay. The thing is, that is also the damage of a damaged person. I am on a journey to be a better person. I can let that go. I can forgive the person I used to be.

Once you start to love you, you are going to want to love yourself more.

I am a creative, intelligent man. I have overcome a lot of things that I should be really proud of. I am good at an amazing number of things with just intuition. I am a kind person that people want to help. I am loved, even if it is not my family that shows me the greatest portion of that love. The people who don’t like me are missing out. I stand up and advocate for what is right. I overcame the pressure of those around me to conform to toxic behavior and I still do what I think is right, openly.

When I stand up for those who are being bullied, when I stand up for what is right, I am using my middle-aged, white male privilege to help others. When I moved to this rural conservative area, I wore a mask to show anyone else in the area who is being pressured to take theirs off, that it is okay to ignore those people. When a man purposefully ignored a trans woman's name and repeatedly called her by her dead name, I stood up to the rude person and told them to address the woman correctly. I chose to be sure I would be a good parent and wait for children rather than risking putting a child through a trauma that I lived through.

I take time to explain what I know about a subject and I try to consider things from the perspective of others, when the subject is rational. I volunteered at polling places. I have done the best that I can at everything I could do, with the limitations I had at the time. I apologize. I make the effort to try new things and I report back what I think might interest others.

If you are being considerate to me, I am considerate to you. I try not to judge. I give the respect that is earned. I am learning to do better everyday. I am starting to like waking up again.

It is okay that my progress is slow. Eventually everything will work out. I have always been able to face a challenge and work my way through it. I won't give up, because I never give up. There are people that tell me they love having me in their lives and many of them I know have nothing to gain from lying to me. I am holding to the boundaries I have created and like them or not, people are learning to respect them.

I am enough.

I hate the thought that everything has a reason. It makes me think that God is a vindictive asshole. I’m not a religious person so the thought that shit pops up in my life for a reason upsets me. Because that implies what happened to me had a purpose. That implies that the cruelty in the word has a purpose.

You see how that can upset you?

Today I am having a horrible day. I opened up too much to my prescriber (yes, after I just wrote about not doing that) and I was getting things said to me that at the moment seemed reasonable, but when I reflected with a friend, it was really out of line and now I’m having to process my own failure at maintaining boundaries that I advise others to strictly maintain.

Me: I talked to my psychologist and they hit me with hard truths.

* My mom is going to die from overdose or COPD and likely much sooner than later.

* My appeal can be denied and I should think about what to do next if it is. This is also more likely now that I don't have a lawyer.

* My mom hates me for existing as I changed her life path and options.

* My brothers and I are being manipulated by mom and I need to talk to them about that in detail and tell them when she messages them about something she wants done, that they should check with me whether I was asked to do it.

* I need to leave this house or it's going to kill me.

He also increased one of my meds. (Wellbutrin)

Friend: Well, I think him increasing one of your meds is good. The meds should be helping and they are not. I think everything else he said is boundary trespassing and not helpful. Say for instance he was dealing with a homeless person in a very dire situation that lived with a drug addict. It would be poor ethics to say that the drug addict is going to die from OD sooner rather than later and that the homeless person needs to think of what to do and get out of this arrangement or else it's going to kill them. It's better posture and ethics to point the person toward resources they can use, like social workers, job agencies, shelters, and psychological help, or working on survival skills. Shaming or despairing a person and not giving them actual help is unethical and a bit of an abuse of power.

I'm not dismissing your situation, please don't get me wrong. It sucks, it's not in any way shape or form a nurturing environment and it does put you at risk repeatedly. If you can do something to change it, you definitely should, it's urgent. But what your psychologist did was not proper care, it was deflecting.

In any case, I am trying to keep myself together at the moment and it is not going well. I realized the backroom that is falling to the elements is flooded and because I was having other priority needs, I did not address the damage yesterday, the day after the storm passed. That was a mistake. I only have so many spell slots, you know? I really needed to prioritize a possibility of joy as I ran my Zoom D&D game, but the preparation before the game, the energy I have to put together during the day to allow that time away from the rest of life in this house, can drain me of my spell slots.

I just checked on the damage as I let the dog out. The potty mat is soaked. The blanket on the floor is soaked, the towel, the wooden drawers and crap my mom collects as a hoarder, is all wet. I didn’t get to this until three thirty. I have smoked two bowls today, when by this point in my day I was still okay without it, for weeks now. My ability to hold my shit together felt like it was coming under control, then shit just started getting heavy.

I am sitting here with these thoughts and I am having a hard time finding a calm, I have for hours now. I turned on Hulu and switched on M*A*S*H. The episode playing is Mad Dog and Servicemen in season three from 1974. As I watch it there is a serviceman, ‎Corporal Richard Travis, who is brought in paralyzed after combat. There is nothing physically wrong with him, he was “shell-shocked” as Frank Burns says in a callous and unfeeling way. Hawkeye and Trapper are not at all okay with Frank’s take on the subject and defy his order to send the serviceman back to the front.

In order to treat Travis, Hawkeye calls on the therapist Dr. Sidney Freedman and is told that Hawkeye is going to have to take Travis’ care on himself, because Dr. Freedman is unavailable. The moment that Hawkeye hears this, you can see his discomfort in the news. When Hawkeye gets back to the hospital we see why. He is verbally abusing the ‎corporal in an attempt to snap Travis out of it. You cannot miss the pain Hawkeye is in when he is forced to do this.

Travis is paralyzed after he is the lone survivor of a tank attack.

Travis wants to move. He doesn’t want to be laying in that bed with Hawkeye telling him that he is faking it, that he will get fed when he can walk to the mess tent himself, that he needs to stop his faking so the nurses can do better things with their time. It is horrifying.

Throughout the episode you see Hawkeye distressed by this “duty.” He is being shadowed this whole time by Trapper, watching from a distance. Trap tries to give Hawkeye a shoulder throughout, you can see that Trapper knows how much this is hurting his friend, but also how much it is upsetting Travis because Hawkeye is berating him. Near the end of the episode, Trapper moves from the sidelines to Travis’ bed and starts talking to him gently about what happened to bring him to this state. Travis tells him about the tanks and about everyone having died around him and as he is releasing this experience his arm moves to his head to wipe away tears.

It was hysterical paralysis or "bug-nutty," if you listen to Frank. The man’s mind locked him up and he had no choice but to play out what it required to release him from it.

Later on during the M*A*S*H final episode Hawkeye sits with Dr. Freedman while working through an experience in which he and a busload of people are hiding from the enemy. During the conversation he talks about a chicken being on the bus and how they are all trying to be as quiet as possible to keep from being discovered and killed by the patrol.

As the patrol gets closer the chicken begins making a fuss. Hawkeye sternly tells the woman who is holding the bird to keep it quiet or they might all die. Dr. Freedman keeps talking to Hawkeye leading him to the truth of the event. There was no chicken, it was a baby.

Hawk breaks down in tears and starts sobbing. He then says, “It was-It was a baby! She-She smothered her own baby! You son of bitch, why did you make me remember that?!”

In my mind Hawkeye’s words to Travis ring out, “We all have our breaking point,” and how he survives by “screaming into [his] pillow every night.”

We all have our breaking point. All of us.

Avoiding Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms and Behaviors

I smoke marijuana at a rate that the day demands. Sometimes this is more, sometimes this is less. I have a minimum use for the day. I smoke a little before I go to sleep. I never want those dreams again. I do not want to wake up in cold sweats. I do not want to wake up exhausted. I do not want to feel like I am living in two worlds.

There are days wherein I just want to be stoned. I will not deny that. The world is too real. Life is so bleak, being stoned from time to time is making this disgustingly divisive time in history go down. Please forgive me.

I mentioned back a bit that I had my gallbladder removed. During that removal I, once more, was having a problem with the anesthetic. As they were rolling me in, I was 100% aware and not comfortable that he already gave me a full dose. I tried not to freak out as the blades started getting picked up after my table came to the stop. The second dose knocked me out nicely. I was really happy we had a discussion on that earlier.

When I came to again I was inside a little curtained area and I was naked with a nurse blushing. My uncle took me home after I dressed and I got into bed. The surgery wasn’t all that bad. Way better than the appendix thing. They had given me these fantastic little pills called Percocet. That day I took my first dose.

Over the following three days I would take my medicine as instructed, each time I felt much better. On the fourth day I felt a little uncomfortable and my hand went to the bottle that held another 38 pills. I stopped myself. My mouth was salivating. My body did not like that I was taking this moment to think about what is happening at this moment. I could feel the two wolves inside me fighting it out.

I got the pills out of the house that day.

For the next year or two my mouth would water at the word Percocet. Seeing my mom today, I am so thankful that I did. My mother is a great example of unhealthy coping. She is a pain patient and a victim of the opioid epidemic. Her medicine was recently cut in half and she is furious. Of course she is “not an addict, she is in pain.” I have no doubt she is in pain, but I also have no doubt she is addicted.

She is in an opioid haze until she runs out. She has run out early each month that I have been here. Each month when she gets her medicine again, she has a sudden manic state, wherein she runs around beginning a dozen tasks, makes a big mess, and then stops dead.

She is in a self-sabotaging cycle. Over-work your body. Get flustered and have your pain spike. Say that you will just take a rest until you feel better. Take a little more of your medicine, for the increased pain, and feel better. The next thing you know, you have done nothing to address the dozen projects that you just left all over the place in the days you laid down to feel better, and now, for some reason, you have run out of pain meds and your refill isn’t for another week, now you are starting to get cold easier. Everything in the house smells worse. You have cold sweats. You’re hurt but it's not just your body. Your mind is screaming at you, demanding you make it feel better, but you are out of the feel good pills. You begin getting snappy at anyone around you. When anyone will listen, you tell everyone how terrible you feel and how much you hate having to deal with the people around you. Your pain is their fault.

There are others in my family that turn to alcohol as their medication. There are others that turn to religion to fill the void. There are a lot of places that you can turn to find your temporary peace, but eventually, you have to come back to the real world and when you do, everything hits harder than the last time that you were here.

When the buzz of religion is challenged. You have made it such a major part of your identity that questioning anything that you feel are the foundations of that identity, is going to be jarring.

When you wake up hungover after you drank yourself numb. The drink slowly changes everything about who you are. You gain weight. Your skin starts to look older. Your breath is repellant, and you can’t wait to go back.

I talked at length about pills. You probably already know my feelings there.

Let’s also address sex as a coping mechanism.

As a product of a distorted and perverse sense of masculinity, sleeping with someone seemed like a way to feel greater in some way. This caused me to make a lot of shitty moves in regards to sex. I was at once looking for someone to comfort me and someone that I could feel empowered over. This is a recipe for chauvinist, sexist, and perverse relationships.

I made a lot of mistakes in that part of my life. None of which I don’t regret every day, but none that I can adequately make up for. I had many partners. I did not value the relationships I had. I did not know how to treat a woman. I was a very bad boyfriend to have in your life.

I can forgive myself for that, but I will never be able to make up for it.

My origins are between an eighteen year old girl and a man in his thirties. The last person I was seeing was in their early twenties. That was the last time I will ever have such a relationship with that much of an age difference.

06/02/2021, 08:06

This is gonna sound crazy but 23 and me says that you are my half brother and that we share 21% DNA. My maiden name is RH and I was born in Redwood City California in 19–. My biological father is JCH deceased in 1986. If you’d like to explore this further feel free to message me.

I was forty-two when I learned who my father was. It felt like a season ending cliffhanger or a jump the shark moment.

It is a little removed but this is all a product of unhealthy coping. I am a man and as far as I know, I have no children. This is something that, as a person that cannot get pregnant, has different consequences. If the child is mine and brought to my attention, this would be the first that I know about it, from no desire of mine to avoid it.

JCH had the freedom to walk away after he did his part in the coping of a broken girl who was searching for someone to make her feel loved, seen, appreciated, or whatever her reasons were. My mom didn’t really have the same option to walk away. She was coping with her trauma with promiscuity, like I did. I was the result of bad coping. I could have easily fathered a child at any point in my early sexual life, but I didn’t. She had a similar practice and motherhood was a consequence.

Please understand this, I am not slut shaming anyone. I see nothing wrong with sex. I think it is an amazing thing in our lives. I am only talking about the consequences of using it as a coping mechanism. It can lead to things you do not intend. It can lead to greater hardship in the days to come after.

This is the same with almost any bad coping behavior. Alcohol, drugs, sex, needless aggression, making other people uncomfortable and pushing into their boundaries just to make them uncomfortable, pretty much everything.

When I was a young man, my step dad found himself embroiled in a relationship with this terrible woman. When I say terrible here, after you have read above that I try to be kind to everyone, after I have asked you to reserve your judgment of those who have caused me pain, you can know in your heart that this woman has earned that place in my vocabulary.

This is bad coping.

My step dad was the son of a clannish family. Outsiders can’t be fully trusted and you keep all issues with family, within the family. When my mom and he divorced, my step dad started seeing a string of women. There was an older gal, the biker chick who walked around topless, and then there was this woman. When he met her she was living in her truck. step dad had a trailer after the separation so it wasn’t all that big of a difference and why judge, right?

While they were first dating she sat down berating him on video about how his marriage fell apart, making sure to demonize my mom as much as possible. On video. I discovered that when I was digitizing the family home movies as a neutral party that didn’t favor either enough to steal either cache of tapes.

When they started living together, his family pictures with his children were regularly turned over and her children and pictures of he and she were put in their place. She makes sex transactional for a high. She chases off his children when they visit by making them as uncomfortable as possible. She attempts to portray this “stepmom” visage of caring, but the moment you leave the room she talks about you negatively.

When the SWAT raided step dad’s home she was screaming about divorcing him and taking everything he has before he gets out. She does not cook, clean, or have a loving or kind relationship in any way that I’ve ever witnessed. She holds the master bedroom in their home and he sleeps in another room completely. She has put it into step dad’s head that the house is going to be left to his kids, with the condition that they continue to allow her to live there, alone, for the rest of her life while paying all the bills of the home until she dies.

The man does this for sex and so he isn’t alone. He has very poor self-esteem, bad anxiety, an inferiority complex that he disguises with aggression and hyper masculinity. All of that is bad coping. Had he understood what was going on with his mental health, I would not have been abused. Had he not been self-medicating, I likely would not have been abused. If my mother wasn’t talking negatively about me constantly throughout my life, I would not have been abused.

From both of these parents, there was bad coping and generational trauma that neither of them wanted to address and so, they self-medicated and then fell into bad coping.

There are times to allow yourself to cut loose. I am not saying there is nothing good about having a drink, a smoke, a one-nighter, a night of exploration, or telling some rude dick to “fuck off!”

What I am saying is that, in excess, these things will negatively impact your life.

I am only forty-three as I write this and in the last few years I have had news of more than a few friends that have died. There were suicides, there were a couple from Covid-19 (and I am counting medical complications because of the plague preventing proper care for one reason or another) having caused their death, a heart-attack, and a car crash. You shouldn’t be losing people this fast.

The one that hurt the most at the moment I found out was my friend Tom. Tom is another great example of bad coping. I met Tom when he came to work for me as a security guard. This was many years ago. Tom had some mental health issues which made some of his coping habits harder to control. He was bi-polar. He would freely say this when I first met him and in 2019 he and I reconnected and he would reaffirm that pretty regularly. He was living in a kind of halfway house with in-home help, Tom was much older than I am. He had a lot of great stories about his parents and the life of being the son of a Hollywood actress and director.

Back when we were working together, we were sitting most of the day. For me this meant I knew what I was eating was important. With Tom, this meant a two-pound bag of M&Ms that he would graze from. He was diabetic in later life. I told him when he told me that with that diet, why was he surprised?

Tom ate to cope with what he was dealing with. He would make needless purchases that were cluttering up his small room in the halfway house, because spending money gave him a little joy. How can you fault the man for that, for either of the activities? It is bad coping. He was sick and the people around him weren’t caring for him well. He had a nasty infection that had damaged his legs decades before, so they throb constantly and it made it hard for him to get around. In the end, my friend Tom died of sepsis in a hospice alone, scared, in agony.

His bad coping could have been manageable and if addressed productively decades ago, Tom likely would have had a much more fulfilling life. In the end, before he went into hospital, where he had not had his cellphone, I think that my friend Tom died from something that could have been easily prevented at many points in his life. I miss my friend. When lockdown hit, and my college classmate had flown home to be with her family and I was alone in New Jersey without anyone near enough to visit and with a three hour time difference to the majority of my friends, Tom is what helped me cope with everything that was happening in 2020. He only outlived his mother by about six-months, she was 101 when she passed and he didn’t last a full year after she went.

Bad coping can allow you to escape your situation as long as you are able to get your stimulant. Much like a lab rat pushing the drugged water button until they die, bad coping can steal away the time you have to turn things around and enjoy the rest of your life after a bit of work.

I used to say that about college to my younger siblings. It’s an investment in a better future. It is a few years that can make decades easier later.