coping strategy

Coping strategy refers to the mental, emotional, or behavioral tools a person uses to manage stress, pain, or overwhelm. In therapy, strategies are generally understood as adaptive or maladaptive depending on whether they support long-term wellbeing or create new harm.

Adaptive coping includes practices like naming feelings, seeking support, movement, sleep, grounding, journaling, or asking for help. Maladaptive coping often develops in environments where safer options were unavailable and may include numbing, avoidance, addiction, people-pleasing, dissociation, or compulsive control. Clinicians treat maladaptive strategies with compassion—as former survival tools—while gradually building a wider repertoire of regulation skills, boundary work, and self-attunement.