“
Neither will sitting around, reading a book to escape my reality. We all have coping strategies,
”
”
Lauren Asher (Final Offer (Dreamland Billionaires, #3))
“
Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple realization that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It's absolutely true that, "Wherever you go, there you are.
”
”
Richard Carlson (Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and It's All Small Stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things From Taking Over Your Life)
“
Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.
”
”
Kevin Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead)
“
Pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy.
”
”
Martha Wells (Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3))
“
Everyone needs fudge, Hildy. It's how God helps us cope.
”
”
Joan Bauer (Peeled)
“
Reading is often viewed as a solitary act; that’s one of the reasons I love it, and it’s certainly my favorite escape and introvert coping strategy of choice.
”
”
Anne Bogel (I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life)
“
Females with ASDs often develop ‘coping mechanisms’ that can cover up the intrinsic difficulties they experience. They may mimic their peers, watch from the sidelines, use their intellect to figure out the best ways to remain undetected, and they will study, practice, and learn appropriate approaches to social situations. Sounds easy enough, but in fact these strategies take a lot of work and can more often than not lead to exhaustion, withdrawal, anxiety, selective mutism, and depression. -Dr. Shana Nichols
”
”
Liane Holliday Willey (Safety Skills for Asperger Women: How to Save a Perfectly Good Female Life)
“
One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.
”
”
Robert Fulghum (Uh-oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door)
“
I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.
”
”
Saul Bellow
“
When a person is in emotional pain, it’s hard to be rational and to think of a good solution. Nevertheless, many of the coping strategies used by people with overwhelming emotions only serve to make their problems worse.
”
”
Matthew McKay (The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook: Practical DBT Exercises for Learning Mindfulness, Interpersonal Effectiveness, Emotion Regulation, And Distress Tolerance)
“
Our therapeutic goal must be to teach the person how to bear their difficulties. Not to eliminate them for him, but to train the person to cope with special challenges with special strategies; to make the person aware not that they are ill, but that they are responsible for their lives.
”
”
Steve Silberman (NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity)
“
Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity--precisely the time when
you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for ii -- to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather.
Here are some obvious things about the weather:
It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.
BUT
it will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.
It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL.
Not one's fault.
BUT
They will pass: really they will.
In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.
”
”
Stephen Fry
“
You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.
”
”
Jonathan Harnisch (Freak)
“
Unhealthy realities can be constructed out of imaginary occurrences as a coping strategy disguised as wish fulfillment,
”
”
Jen Frederick (Undeclared (Woodlands, #1))
“
Girls are genius at getting through sexual abuse. Often the only way to get through is not to feel. And that is exactly what these fantasy worlds allow: They give girls a place to go so they don't have to be present in their violated bodies. Brilliant.
”
”
Patti Feuereisen (Invisible Girls: The Truth About Sexual Abuse--A Book for Teen Girls, Young Women, and Everyone Who Cares About Them)
“
Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
”
”
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
“
The best reason to take your time is that this time is the only time you'll ever have.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD)
“
But for years, my best coping strategy has been work. I have assumed so many responsibilities and said yes to so many things. Working hard creates my own gravity. The more I work, the more I am on terra firma.
”
”
David Chang (Eat a Peach)
“
Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity--precisely the time when
you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more
intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more
able to control your emotions, is internal discipline
and toughness.
No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
But it's a changeable world! When we consider how great our sorrow seem, and how small they are; how we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness. For, after all, what business has Time to bring us consolation?
”
”
William Makepeace Thackeray (Barry Lyndon)
“
Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win.
”
”
Max McKeown (Adaptability: The Art of Winning In An Age of Uncertainty)
“
Indeed many children with autism regulate themselves by trying to control their surroundings—by seeking sameness. That isn’t a pathological symptom. It’s a coping strategy.
”
”
Barry M. Prizant (Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism)
“
She has four sons,” Nurse Purvis leads me on, “all with a London post code, but they never visit. You’d think old age was a criminal offense, not a destination we’re all heading to.” I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Sansara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.
”
”
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
“
While I pressed the tissue to my face, Beck said, “Can I tell you something? There are a lot of empty boxes in your head, Sam.”
I looked at him, quizzical. Again, it was a strange enough concept to hold my attention.
“There are a lot of empty boxes in there, and you can put things in them.” Beck handed me another tissue for the other side of my face.
My trust of Beck at that point was not yet complete; I remember thinking that he was making a very bad joke that I wasn’t getting. My voice sounded wary, even to me. “What kinds of things?”
“Sad things,” Beck said. “Do you have a lot of sad things in your head?”
“No,” I said.
Beck sucked in his lower lip and released it slowly. “Well, I do.”
This was shocking. I didn’t ask a question, but I tilted toward him.
“And these things would make me cry,” Beck continued. “They used to make me cry all day long.”
I remembered thinking this was probably a lie. I could not imagine Beck crying. He was a rock. Even then, his fingers braced against the floor, he looked poised, sure, immutable.
“You don’t believe me? Ask Ulrik. He had to deal with it,” Beck said. “And so you know what I did with those sad things? I put them in boxes. I put the sad things in the boxes in my head, and I closed them up and I put tape on them and I stacked them up in the corner and threw a blanket over them.”
“Brain tape?” I suggested, with a little smirk. I was eight, after all.
Beck smiled, a weird private smile that, at the time, I didn’t understand. Now I knew it was relief at eliciting a joke from me, no matter how pitiful the joke was. “Yes, brain tape. And a brain blanket over the top. Now I don’t have to look at those sad things anymore. I could open those boxes sometime, I guess, if I wanted to, but mostly I just leave them sealed up.”
“How did you use the brain tape?”
“You have to imagine it. Imagine putting those sad things in the boxes and imagine taping it up with the brain tape. And imagine pushing them into the side of your brain, where you won’t trip over them when you’re thinking normally, and then toss a blanket over the top. Do you have sad things, Sam?”
I could see the dusty corner of my brain where the boxes sat. They were all wardrobe boxes, because those were the most interesting sort of boxes — tall enough to make houses with — and there were rolls and rolls of brain tape stacked on top. There were razors lying beside them, waiting to cut the boxes and me back open.
“Mom,” I whispered.
I wasn’t looking at Beck, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw him swallow.
“What else?” he asked, barely loud enough for me to hear. “The water,” I said. I closed my eyes. I could see it, right there, and I had to force out the next word. “My …” My fingers were on my scars.
Beck reached out a hand toward my shoulder, hesitant. When I didn’t move away, he put an arm around my back and I leaned against his chest, feeling small and eight and broken.
“Me,” I said.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Forever (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #3))
“
She doesn't approve of either sentimentality or graveyard humor at crime scenes. She says they waste time that should be spent working on the damn case, but the implication is that coping strategies are for wimps.
”
”
Tana French (In the Woods (Dublin Murder Squad, #1))
“
It sounded somewhat doom-laden, so I felt obliged to look it up more thoroughly, in case I should eat some chocolate rather quickly.
”
”
Carol Anne Dobson
“
Always valuable, your attention has now also become one of your most insecure assets and most-sought-after possessions.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD)
“
He had to take sleep by surprise. Preparing for bed simply alerted insomnia, brought all the busy thoughts, the renegade remorses and guilts and recriminations.
”
”
William Browning Spencer (Zod Wallop)
“
Accepting false hope as a coping strategy only sets us up for a longer fall.
”
”
Trevor Moawad (Getting to Neutral)
“
Cynicism appears to be a coping strategy by the cognitively less gifted to avoid being duped by others.
”
”
Iain McGilchrist (The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World)
“
Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.
”
”
Diane Langberg (Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse (AACC Counseling Library))
“
But here is the thing about anger: People hold onto it because letting go means dealing with pain. It is a coping strategy that seems to show strength and confidence, but in reality it shows how much you care about someone's actions, which leads to this question: Why is this person's respect so important to you?
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
How do you get through any of your classes?" Cath had hours of assigned reading, almost every single night.
"Coping strategies."
"Such as?"
"I record my lectures and listen to them later. Professors usually cover most of what's on the test in class. And I find study groups."
"And you lean on Reagan --"
"Not just Reagan." He grinned. "I'm really good at quickly identifying the smartest girl in every class."
Cath frowned at him. "God, Levi, that's so exploitive."
"How is it exploitive? I don't make them wear miniskirts. I don't call them 'baby.' I just say, 'Hello, smart girl, would you like to talk to me about Great Expectations?'"
"They probably think you like them."
"I do like them."
"If it wasn't exploitive, you'd harass smart boys, too --"
"I do, in a pinch. Do you feel exploited, Cather?" He was still grinning at her over his coffee cup.
"No," she said, "I know that you don't like me."
"You don't know anything."
"So, this is old hat for you? Finding a girl to read a whole book to you?"
He shook his head. "No, this is a first."
"Well, now I feel exploited," she said, setting her drink down and reaching for the book.
"Thank you," he said.
"Chapter seven --"
"I'm serious." Levi pulled the book down and looked at her. "Thank you."
Cath held his eyes for a few seconds. Then she nodded and pulled back the book.
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
“
America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.
”
”
Pew Research Center (The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown)
“
Once an individual shines bright walking in average light to some may appear as dim surroundings..
”
”
Victoria Addino (Facets)
“
In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. P. 25
”
”
Michael E. Porter (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy)
“
Like others who've experienced immense suffering, I was just doing the best I could to survive in the aftermath of my traumas.
”
”
Stephanie M. Hutchins
“
We’ve got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (ADHD 2.0 : New Science and Essential Strategies for Thriving with Distraction—From Childhood Through Adulthood)
“
Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity,precisely the time when
you need strength. What best equips you to cope with tthe heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for it, to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
I was powerless over my childhood but the coping strategies that I developed, to survive, all of which were creative and brilliant and got me through, as an adult those became my defects of character. Those became my shortcomings, control and all that kind of stuff... and that's my responsibility.
I was a blameless child in what happened in the home; I take responsibility for my behaviors as an adult.
”
”
Ashley Judd
“
The enthusiasm that characterizes our time is, unlike current events, hopeful and, like all enthusiasms, playful. The energy that flashes through our electronics has leapt into most of our bloodstreams and brains.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD)
“
Is 'self-care' a neoliberal scam promoting individualistic coping strategies in the absence of broader social obligations or the possibility of radical structural change? (Well, yes, I say to myself as I slip into my fourth late-night bath of the week, thinking about
my next semester of unemployment.)
”
”
Ellena Savage (Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding)
“
Ultimately, culture, secular and otherwise, is a collection of survival strategies. The things that look like decoration—poetry, novels, music, dancing—if you strip away all the layers, are mechanisms for coping, surviving, understanding.
”
”
Ben Fountain
“
Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world. Made up of innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms, among lots of other things, our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met.
”
”
Ian Morgan Cron (The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery)
“
The key to happiness is to listen to campy Parisian music and smile at a bird. It hinges on insanity, but it works.
”
”
Erica Goros
“
Authoritative parenting strategies all share one thing in common: they teach children to consider their impact on the people around them.
”
”
Craig Malkin (Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists)
“
Noble failure atones for the impossibility of resisting progress successfully.
”
”
Richard Appignanesi (Yukio Mishima's Report To The Emperor)
“
We also know that there is a mindset that helps people cope well with setbacks, points them to good strategies, and leads them to act in their best interest.
”
”
Carol S. Dweck (Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential)
“
Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.
”
”
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
“
when we move from feeling blinded by thoughts to more realistic assessments, it’s easier to harness our resources to consider, how can I can cope?
”
”
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
“
Have a Plan B, and maybe even a Plan C. Because unexpected changes are most difficult to handle when we don't have a backup.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
By the time the clock had moved past midnight on Christmas 1993, they finally clicked the last piece into place: Angola, nestled between Zaire and Namibia and bordering the vast lapping Atlantic. Then, having succeeded in putting the world back together, they went to bed.
”
”
Jessie Ann Foley (The Carnival at Bray)
“
At times, we get so swept up by an emotion or thought that we don’t follow through and imagine that whatever the outcome, we’ll most likely manage to cope. The worst is rarely as bad as we think.
”
”
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
“
the dysregulation of the body’s neurobiological system, that impairs one’s ability to pay selective attention to one’s surroundings. The world becomes a land without street signs, the individual a car in bad need of a tune-up. The vastness of the attentional system partially accounts for the variation of ADD “types.” Where one individual needs an oil change, the next needs spark plugs replaced. Where one individual is withdrawn and overwhelmed by stimuli, the next is hyperactive and can’t get enough stimuli. Where one is frequently anxious, the other is depressed. To compensate, each develops his or her own coping strategies that developmentally add to, or subtract from, the brain’s various subsystems. So Mr. A becomes a stand-up comedian, and manic. Ms. B becomes an architectural wizard with obsessive-compulsive traits. Their offspring become a sculptor and a stunt pilot. None of them can balance their checkbook. And all of them wish they had more time in the day. With such diversity in the disorder,
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
“
Do you want to live a long, healthy, and prosperous life? Don’t smoke. Exercise. Eat right. But also take good care of your interpersonal relationships and the way you deal with life’s inevitable upsets and traumas. Your mind-set, your coping strategies, how you navigate challenging circumstances, your capacity to transcend distress, your capacity to love – these things, I believe, are also a matter of life and death.
”
”
Sandeep Jauhar (Heart: A History)
“
You learned that self-compassion is a coping strategy for stress and an attitude toward life. Having self-compassion means being kind to yourself and realizing you’re only human, so you don’t have to be perfect.
”
”
Melanie Greenberg (The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity)
“
Accordingly, the Chinese texts regard war not as an instrument for the attainment of this end or that but as the product of stern necessity, something which must be confronted and coped with and managed and brought to an end. Clausewitz emphasizes that war is brutal and bloody and seeks to achieve a great victory. By contrast, the Chinese texts are permeated by a humanitarian approach and have as their aim the restoration of dao.
”
”
Martin van Creveld (A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind)
“
Over the years I have developed and employed a variety of such coping mechanisms, mostly focusing around a philosophy I call, “Live Because.”
“Live Because” is in contrast to what I’ve termed “Live Despite,” which is the idea that people can live rich, full lives in spite of their physical or emotional barriers. “Live Because” takes this a step further by suggesting that in many cases, patients can live a more fulfilling life with their illness than they could ever have done without it.
Ehlers-Danlos syndrome has transformed me from a frequently petty and self-absorbed person into the person I am today (still somewhat self-absorbed, but a lot less petty, and with a clearly defined purpose of alleviating whatever suffering I can). I am better because of my illness, and not just in spite of it.
But this process was, and still is, a journey. Chronic illness is nearly always accompanied by depression, and the need to constantly remain one step ahead of my illness has left me fearful and exhausted. I could never go through this alone...
A part of me will always be angry; such is the process of mourning the pieces of oneself that are lost to chronic disease. I have learned to accept the duality of being bitter and at peace; ignorant and enlightened... while still laying a foundation of hope for the possibility that I can still realize my personal dreams and ambitions, even if not in the exact ways I had expected.
”
”
Michael Bihovsky
“
The more difficult it is for us to articulate our experiences of loss, longing, and feeling lost to the people around us, the more disconnected and alone we feel. Of the coping strategies my research participants have shared with me, writing down experiences of heartbreak and grief have emerged as the most helpful in making clear to themselves what they were feeling so they could articulate it to others. Some participants did this as part of their work with helping professionals; others did it on their own. Either way, the participants talked about the need to write freely, without having to explain or justify their feelings. It was these interviews that led me to look more closely at the idea of writing SFDs as part of the rising strong process.
”
”
Brené Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
“
Looking at your own experience of abuse, many factors can influence the degree of traumatic impact you experience. Howe we handle stress in our lives varies; some of us have learned better coping strategies than others. The severity, intensity, frequency, and length of time the abusive episodes have lasted all strongly impact your response as well. Other powerful influences include the length of time your personal traumatic reaction lasts after your partner's abuse stops and your history, before you ever met your partner.
”
”
Carol A. Lambert (Women with Controlling Partners: Taking Back Your Life from a Manipulative or Abusive Partner)
“
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.
”
”
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
“
When social critics deplore the materialism of our time and its preoccupation with money, fame, and superficial values, they overlook that the driving force behind the changes we have seen -- one of the greatest periods of change in history -- has been thought. It wasn't big bucks or social status that drove this change. It was, and is, the force of the play of the mind. As materialistic as we may be, playful thinking got us here.
”
”
Edward M. Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD)
“
I finally had the courage to start talking about how I developed dissociation as a coping mechanism as a child and carried that through my life, I talked about being trained to initiate and accommodate abuse and about how these coping mechanisms carried over for me as a teenager and young adult.
”
”
Olga Trujillo (The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder)
“
Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. And avoidance isn’t benign. It can hurt us, hurt other people, and lead to increased and mounting anxiety.
”
”
Brené Brown (Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience)
“
Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the
faulty—even the revolting, repugnant, or vile. In this activity of management, tolerance does not offer resolution or transcendence, but only a strategy for coping.
”
”
Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire)
“
Some find that they can keep bereavement at bay by staying busy. This is a perfectly normal way of coping which works well for some – but if you keep bereavement away by constant action, you may pay for it later. The action may turn out to be an avoidance technique, like putting a finger on the pause button on the bereavement video. When you stop doing whatever you were doing – going to parties, helping others, seeing movies – you still return home to a film which hasn’t moved on since you stopped watching it.
”
”
Virginia Ironside (Youll Get Over It: The Rage Of Bereavement)
“
People with ADHD can put coping strategies in place that help them to plan more effectively, but both members of the couple need to be conscious that this requires significant effort and lots of organizational tools such as lists, charts, conversations, and the like. Don’t assume that just because you are both adults, you can also both plan well.
”
”
Melissa Orlov (The ADHD Effect on Marriage: Understand and Rebuild Your Relationship in Six Steps)
“
Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment" as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment.
”
”
Jeremy Holmes (John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern Psychotherapy))
“
In this era, you must deliberately preserve and cultivate your most valuable connections to people, activities, and whatever else is most important to you. Anyone can cultivate these connections, drawing from them the strength and will a person needs to handle the best and worst of life, but only if you plan to do so and insist on adhering to your plan.
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Edward M. Hallowell (CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD)
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The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.
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Joanna Cannon (The Trouble with Goats and Sheep)
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For children who depend on mentally escaping into their minds to survive, imagination can become both refuge and desert island.
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Na'ama Yehuda (Communicating Trauma: Clinical Presentations and Interventions in Traumatized Children)
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When the chips are down it’s amazing what we humans can do and yet all too often we pretend to ourselves that if things go wrong we won’t possibly be able to cope.
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Ben Hunt-Davis (Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?- Olympic-winning strategies for everyday success)
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There are many things in life that can help you to cope with emotions that have a habit of bringing you down. Just always remember; help comes in all forms, and not necessarily only from people.
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Martin R. Lemieux
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For example, in order to identify these schemas or clarify faulty relational expectations, therapists working from an object relations, attachment, or cognitive behavioral framework often ask themselves (and their clients) questions like these: 1. What does the client tend to want from me or others? (For example, clients who repeatedly were ignored, dismissed, or even rejected might wish to be responded to emotionally, reached out to when they have a problem, or to be taken seriously when they express a concern.) 2. What does the client usually expect from others? (Different clients might expect others to diminish or compete with them, to take advantage and try to exploit them, or to admire and idealize them as special.) 3. What is the client’s experience of self in relationship to others? (For example, they might think of themselves as being unimportant or unwanted, burdensome to others, or responsible for handling everything.) 4. What are the emotional reactions that keep recurring? (In relationships, the client may repeatedly find himself feeling insecure or worried, self-conscious or ashamed, or—for those who have enjoyed better developmental experiences—perhaps confident and appreciated.) 5. As a result of these core beliefs, what are the client’s interpersonal strategies for coping with his relational problems? (Common strategies include seeking approval or trying to please others, complying and going along with what others want them to do, emotionally disengaging or physically withdrawing from others, or trying to dominate others through intimidation or control others via criticism and disapproval.) 6. Finally, what kind of reactions do these interpersonal styles tend to elicit from the therapist and others? (For example, when interacting together, others often may feel boredom, disinterest, or irritation; a press to rescue or take care of them in some way; or a helpless feeling that no matter how hard we try, whatever we do to help disappoints them and fails to meet their need.)
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Edward Teyber (Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model)
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When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.
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Harold S. Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People)
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An intolerance for uncertainty is an important contributing factor to all types of anxiety. Those of us who are generally uncomfortable with uncertainty are more likely to experience anxiety in specific situations as well as to have trait anxiety and anxiety disorders. Our anxiety often leads to one of two coping mechanisms: worry or avoidance. Unfortunately, neither of these coping strategies is very effective.
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Brené Brown (Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience)
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There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them. Whenever I’m sad I’m going to die, or so nervous I can’t sleep, or in love with somebody I won’t be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I’ll go take a hot bath.'
I meditate in the bath.The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water’s up to your neck.
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Sylvia Plath
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But history always taught children at an early age to seek power and to do whatever means necessary to hold on to it. While the libraries were often filled with endless books dedicated to the strategies on the art of war and the detailed instructions on how to defeat one’s adversaries out on the gruesome battlefields; however, there were seldom any books written discussing on how to cope afterwards. How it felt emotionally to live after the war. Once the battle was fought and won.
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Kristina Stangl (The Sleeping Knight (The Enchanted Forest Saga, #2))
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The prime strategy of the technocracy “is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with—and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts.
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Theodore Roszak (The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition)
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For those of you with ADHD, please hear what we are saying. Your tolerance for pain and failure—the ability to “go with the flow”—is most likely a coping strategy for dealing with the inconsistencies that your ADHD has created. It is time for a new coping strategy. The old one—creating a high pain threshold and going along—has not served you as well as you have convinced yourself. It is part of the reason that your relationship is in trouble. That pain threshold does not align with your partner’s needs. A better relationship strategy is to face the ADHD symptoms head on and treat them, using every resource science suggests will work.
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Melissa Orlov (The Couple's Guide to Thriving with ADHD)
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It’s critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they’re already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with it. As a psychologist, I know this through and through. As a parent, though, I often forget it.
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Lisa Damour (The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents)
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MPD is based not on defect but on talent and ability. The patients have used their ability to dissociate to cope with overwhelming childhood trauma, which usually involved both physical and sexual abuse. MPD is a creative and highly effective strategy for preserving the integrity of the organism in the face of chronic catastrophic trauma.
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Alice Jamieson (Today I'm Alice)
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Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. The sense of separation from God is real, but the meeting of stillness reveals that this perceived separation does not have the last word.
This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves “so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside.”
The grace of salvation, the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence, dispels this illusion of separation. For when the mind is brought to stillness, and all our strategies of acquisition have dropped, a deeper truth presents itself: we are and have always been one with God and we are all one in God (Jn 17:21).
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Martin Laird (Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation)
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The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cutoff between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with. He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.
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Iain M. Banks (Use of Weapons (Culture, #3))
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There is absolutely nothing surprising about a severely stigmatized group embracing their stigma. Psychologists have long observed that when people feel hopelessly stigmatized, a powerful coping strategy–often the only apparent route to self-esteem–is embracing one's stigmatized identity. Hence, 'black is beautiful' and 'gay pride'–slogans and anthems of the political movements aimed at ending not only legal discrimination, but the stigma that justified it. Indeed, the act of embracing one's stigma is never merely a psychological maneuver; it is a political act–an act of resistance and deviance in a society that seeks to demean a group based on an inalterable trait. As a gay activist once put it, 'Only by fully embracing the stigma itself can one neutralize the sting and make it laughable.
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Michelle Alexander
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Every action is a losing, a letting go, a passing away from oneself of some bit of one’s own reality into the existence of others and of the world. In Jesus Christ, this character of action is not resisted, by trying to use our action to assert ourselves, extend ourselves, to impose our will and being upon situations. In Jesus Christ, this self-expending character of action is joyfully affirmed. I receive myself constantly from God’s Parenting love. But so far as some aspects of myself are at my disposal, these I receive to give away. Those who would live as Jesus did—who would act and purpose themselves as Jesus did—mean to love, i.e., they mean to expend themselves for others unto death. Their being is meant to pass away from them to others, and they make that meaning the conscious direction of their existence.
Too often the love which is proclaimed in the churches suppresses this element of loss and need and death in activity. As a Christian, I often speak of love as helping others, but I ignore what this does to the person who loves. I ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending and losing and deterioration of the self. I speak of love as if the person loving had no problems, no needs, no limits. In other words, I speak of love as if the affluent dream were true. This kind of proclamation is heard everywhere. We hear it said: 'Since you have no unanswered needs, why don’t you go out and help those other people who are in need?' But we never hear people go on and add: 'If you do this, you too will be driven into need.' And by not stating this conclusion, people give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia, where we can reach to everybody’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves. Believe me, there are grown-up persons who speak this kind of nonsense. And when people try to live out this illusory love, they become terrified when the self-expending begins to take its toll. Terror of relationship is [that] we eat each other.
But note this very carefully: like Jesus, we too can only live to give our received selves away freely because we know our being is not thereby ended, but still and always lies in the Parenting of our God....
Those who love in the name of Jesus Christ... serve the needs of others willingly, even to the point of being exposed in their own neediness.... They do not cope with their own needs. They do not anguish over how their own needs may be met by the twists and turns of their circumstances, by the whims of their society, or by the strategies of their own egos. At the center of their life—the very innermost center—they are grateful to God, because... they do not fear neediness. That is what frees them to serve the needy, to companion the needy, to become and be one of the needy.
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Arthur C. McGill (Dying Unto Life (Theological Fascinations))
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So the holy elders,” I added, “claim that the best strategy to cope with troublesome logismoi is simply to ignore them.” “Precisely. Our first defense against destructive logismoi is complete indifference. This is the healthiest and most productive method to head them off right at their inception. Ignore them completely. Never open up a dialogue with these intruders. Do not interact with them either out of curiosity or out of overconfidence.
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Kyriacos C. Markides (The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality)
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It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, or transformational coping—the dissipative structures of the mind—are so essential. Without them we would be constantly suffering through the random bombardment of stray psychological meteorites. On the other hand, if we do develop such positive strategies, most negative events can be at least neutralized, and possibly even used as challenges that will help make the self stronger and more complex.
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience)
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The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It’s an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own.
Lareau stresses that one style isn’t morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement."
That word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the term: "They acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They appeared comfortable in those settings; they were open to sharing information and asking for attention It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences." They knew the rules. "Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires."
By contrast, the working-class and poor children were characterized by "an emerging sense of distance, distrust, and constraint." They didn’t know how to get their way, or how to "customize"—using Lareau’s wonderful term—whatever environment they were in, for their best purposes.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with. He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.
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Iain M. Banks (Use of Weapons (Culture, #3))
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Joint-stock companies could be similarly flexible. “The absence of close control by the British crown in the early stages of colonization,” Elliott points out, left considerable latitude for the evolution of those forms of government that seemed most appropriate to the people actively involved in the process of overseas enterprise and settlement—the financial backers of the enterprise and the colonists themselves—as long as they operated within the framework of their royal charter. In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.” 10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system. Such systems thrive, theorists tell us, from the need to respond frequently—but not too frequently—to the unforeseen. Controlled environments encourage complacency, making it hard to cope when controls break down, as they sooner or later must. Constant disruptions, however, prevent recuperation: nothing’s ever healthy. There’s a balance, then, between integrative and disintegrative processes in the natural world—an edge of chaos, so to speak—where adaptation, especially self-organization, tends to occur. 11 New political worlds work similarly.
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John Lewis Gaddis (On Grand Strategy)
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The Age of Affluence represents a daring experiment on the part of elites in maintaining their dominance not by starving and bludgeoning their opposition into submission, but by seducing it into compliance. […] totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us […] The prime strategy of the technocracy is to level life down to a standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with–and then, on that false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnicompetence over us by its monopoly of the experts. The business of investing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy.
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Theodore Roszak (The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition)
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golden opportunity to learn to cope with criticism and anger effectively. This came as a complete surprise to me; I hadn't realized what good fortune I had. In addition to urging me to use cognitive techniques to reduce and eliminate my own sense of irritation. Dr. Beck proposed I try out an unusual strategy for interacting with Hank when he was in an angry mood. The essence of this method was: (1) Don't turn Hank off by defending yourself. Instead, do the opposite—urge him to say all the worst things he can say about you. (2) Try to find a grain of truth in all his criticisms and then agree with him. (3) After this, point out any areas of disagreement in a straightforward, tactful, nonargumentative manner. (4) Emphasize the importance of sticking together, in spite of these occasional disagreements. I could remind Hank that frustration and fighting might slow down our therapy at times, but this need not destroy the relationship or prevent our work from ultimately becoming fruitful. I applied this strategy the next time Hank started storming around the office screaming at me. Just as I had planned, I urged Hank to keep it up and say all the worst things he could think of about me. The result was immediate and dramatic. Within a few moments, all the wind went out of his sails—all his vengeance seemed to melt away. He began communicating sensibly and calmly, and sat down. In fact, when I agreed with some of his criticisms, he suddenly began to defend me and say some nice things about me! I was so impressed with this result that I began using the same approach with other angry, explosive individuals, and I actually did begin to enjoy his hostile outbursts because I had an effective way to handle them. I also used the double-column technique for recording and talking back to my automatic thoughts after one of Hank's midnight calls (see Figure 16–1, page 415).
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David D. Burns (Feeling Good: Overcome Depression and Anxiety with Proven Techniques)
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Specialist or Strategist? Isn’t it true that the more you practice, the better you get? Yes, but, and this bears repeating, the intuitive mastery we are striving for is not brilliant skill at predictable tasks. As the late science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, pointed out, specialization is for insects. Humans need the mystifying ability to cope with the unpredictable and ambiguous challenges posed by thinking adversaries in the real world. Since kendo masters practice hard, don’t we need to put in long hours to develop super competence? The answer is absolutely yes. However, sixteen hours at the office doing the same things day after day simply make you a workaholic (and very likely a micromanager); they do not per se confer an intuitive skill useful in competitive situations. Tom Peters suggests that you can spot who is going to do great things by what they do on airplanes. They don’t pull out the laptop and grind spreadsheets. Instead, they “read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the umpteenth time,” or pick up insights on human behavior from the great novelists.
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Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
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solid player is a mental game fish if they: Change a proven winning strategy because they are running bad/hot. Never recognize when someone has played well against them and/or believe everyone they play against is bad and just gets lucky. Try to win every hand. Think the outcome of a hand can be changed by shouting, praying, or playing a favorite hand. Get frustrated when a bad player plays badly and they even educate them as to why they are bad. Feel like a failure when they lose a hand that was played profitably. Think the solution to running bad is to stop playing or change stakes. Read a poker book cover to cover and think they know everything in it. Watch some of Phil Galfond’s training videos and think they should now be able to crush the game like him. Believe that they are cursed or that other people are luckier than they are. Believe it’s possible to own another player’s soul. Play more hands when they are winning/losing. Play fewer hands when they are winning/losing. Play badly when the stakes are too small for them to care. Allow things to get personal with another regular. Tell bad beat stories to anyone that will listen, while doing nothing to improve how they react to bad beats. Say “one time.
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Jared Tendler (The Mental Game of Poker: Proven Strategies For Improving Tilt Control, Confidence, Motivation, Coping with Variance, and More (The Mental Game of Poker Series Book 1))
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Stress mindsets are powerful because they affect not just how you think but also how you act. When you view stress as harmful, it is something to be avoided. Feeling stressed becomes a signal to try to escape or reduce the stress. And indeed, people who endorse a stress-is-harmful mindset are more likely to say that they cope with stress by trying to avoid it. For example, they are more likely to: Try to distract themselves from the cause of the stress instead of dealing with it. Focus on getting rid of their feelings of stress instead of taking steps to address its source. Turn to alcohol or other substances or addictions to escape the stress. Withdraw their energy and attention from whatever relationship, role, or goal is causing the stress. In contrast, people who believe that stress can be helpful are more likely to say that they cope with stress proactively. For example, they are more likely to: Accept the fact that the stressful event has occurred and is real. Plan a strategy for dealing with the source of stress. Seek information, help, or advice. Take steps to overcome, remove, or change the source of stress. Try to make the best of the situation by viewing it in a more positive way or by using it as an opportunity to grow. These different ways of dealing with stress lead to very different outcomes.
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Kelly McGonigal (The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It)
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There are many examples where species share common plastic traits. What appears to be convergence may just be the plastic response of the organism to its environment. Examples include the following: Limbs that protrude from an animal’s body have more surface area per unit mass than the rest of the body. In cold weather the animal loses more heat per unit mass from these limbs than from other parts of the body. In many species the tails and legs are shorter for those living in colder climates and larger for those in warmer climates. Gulls’ wings are shorter in cold climates than in warm. Hares and foxes also have shorter ears in cold climates than in warm. Eskimos have shorter arms and legs than do people living in warmer climates. . . . Jodan’s rule: Many species of fish tend to have more vertebrae when they live in cold water than do the same species living in warm water. These differences have been shown to depend on the temperature at which the fish have been reared.
What these rules show is not convergence. They show that different species adopt the same anatomical strategies when they have to cope with the same environmental conditions. We have seen that these strategies cannot come from random mutations. It is much more reasonable to say they come from environmental cues acting on the genetic program.
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Lee Spetner
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Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher
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George Monbiot (The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life))