Survival skills
by Lauren Dummit, LMFT, CST, CSAT-S
Due to their similarities, coping mechanisms, or coping skills, are often confused and discussed synonymously with survival strategies or defense mechanisms. Both processes are activated in times of stress. Both methods decrease the arousal of negative emotions and either activate the nervous system or shut it down. While they are certainly related, they are not necessarily the same. The function of both processes is to adapt, yet the manner in which each does so can be quite distinct.
Often, when people have experienced developmental trauma, attachment trauma, or relational trauma in their families of origin, they develop certain defenses in order to adapt to their current environment or relationship so that they can survive. As a result, their personalities become formed around the survival strategy. Typically, the survival skills that they may have relied on in their childhoods were an adaptation, functioning to allow them to emotionally endure the intolerable pain of not having their needs met by their caregivers. Most frequently these strategies, which were so crucial to survival as children, are carried into adulthood and then no longer serve to benefit the individual, but, instead, they create dysfunction in his or her life and relationships, both with himself and others.
According to Dr. Aline LaPierre, Psy.D. and Dr. Lawrence Heller, PhD. there are five basic survival adaptation strategies, that are formulated in unity with one’s unmet needs. Dr. LaPierre, Psy.D., and Dr. Heller, Ph.D. who developed the Neuroaffective Relational Model (NARM) to restore connection and heal developmental trauma, discuss “five biologically based core needs that are essential to our physical and emotional well-being: the need for connection, trust, attunement, autonomy, and love-sexuality.” When these needs are unmet, “predictable psychological and physiological symptoms result: self-regulation, sense of self, and self-esteem become compromised. They postulate that most of the emotional issues and challenges can be traced back to early life developmental and shock trauma that compromise the development of one or more of the five core capacities. When one has developed the capacity to attend to his or her own core needs, he or she is able to experience self-regulation, internal organization, expansion, connection, and aliveness, which are all representative of physiological and psychological well-being.
When one’s biologically based core needs are not met in early life, the five adaptive survival styles, methods of coping with the disconnection, dysregulation, disorganization, and isolation from which the child suffers, are activated. Humans are created with the capacity to adapt to adverse experiences by detaching from distressing internal and external experiences and the anguish produced by not having our primary needs met. “Survival styles are adaptive strategies children use to protect the attachment relationship with parents…They adapt to their parents’ acceptance or rejection in order to maintain and maximize the attachment and love relationship.” These survival strategies get woven into their identity. Often, one’s personality develops around them, so they are carried into their adult life and relationships.
According to Dr. Aline LaPierre, Psy.D., and Dr. Lawrence Heller, Ph. D., these adaptation strategies are directly related to the core need that was not met. For example, when the need for connection is unmet, children give up their sense of feeling as if they have a right to be alive and take up space in the world, creating an innate sense of shame. They often disconnect in an attempt to make themselves unseen.
When caregivers do not attune to their child’s needs, the child is told that his or her needs do not matter. Children end up sacrificing their own needs, putting the needs of others, especially the caregivers’, before their own. They often become deprivational, feel underserved, and even feel guilty for having needs.
When the child cannot trust in his caregiver's relationship, he does not develop a sense of authenticity because he receives the implicit message that he must be who his caregivers expect him to be, or else the parent's love will be sacrificed. The child begins to feel that he is being used to keep the parent happy and satisfied.
Children are robbed of assertions of independence for fear of being abandoned or hurt when their need for autonomy is not met. They form a people-pleasing, placating personality. They often grow up to fear authority and then act out in covert, passive-aggressive expressions of rebellion or micro-aggressions due to their pent-up anger.
Those with the Love-Sexuality survival style grew up feeling that they had to be perfect or to perform and achieve in order to be loved. In childhood, their hearts were often broken by their parents (usually the opposite sex parent), who dismissed or rejected their loving feelings. They frequently grow up to be highly successful, energetic, and attractive. However, they rarely live up to their expectations of perfection, and deep down feel shame that they are never good enough. Their sense of self-worth is conditional, based on their performances.
According to Pia Mellody, an internationally renowned expert, author, and speaker on codependence, when children grow up in a dysfunctional family system, they learn to adapt to meet their needs by living in extremes. As they grow up, these adaptation strategies, or survival again become part of their ways of being in the world, affecting their perspectives and beliefs about the world around them and their relationships with themselves and others.
Pia Mellody discusses five core issues influenced by family dysfunction and in which children learn to live in the extremes. They are self-esteem, boundaries, dependency, reality, and moderation. When one has healthy self-esteem, he is able to validate himself from within. He does not feel better or worse than anyone else. An inflated or low self-esteem are opposite ends of the spectrum. One either feels the need to go one up, feeling superior to others, or to go one down, feeling less valuable than others.
Healthy boundaries mean that one can both set appropriate boundaries in relationships to keep himself safe or practice containment boundaries to protect others from inappropriate behavior. For example, if one is angry, he can choose to use his words to calmly communicate his feelings to the other instead of impulsively reacting to his aggressive impulses by hitting the other person. However, those living in the extremes either have no boundaries, damaged boundaries, loose boundaries, or have walls as boundaries, which impedes their ability to let people in and experience emotional intimacy and closeness.
People who have dependency issues either do not even know what their needs and wants are, or they may be overly dependent, needy, and clingy. On the other end of the spectrum, they may be anti-dependent, which means that they project a sense of not needing anything or anyone and that they are entirely self-reliant and self-competent. A more moderate option is to exhibit interdependence, meaning that the person is mainly independent but can also be vulnerable and ask for help when needed, acknowledging that we all have needs, some of which cannot be met by ourselves, such as affection.
Those who have grown up learning to live in extremes often have difficulty owning their own reality, meaning they struggle to experience their authentic selves and, therefore, to share that with others. This includes an awareness of how they look and how their bodies function, an understanding of what or how they think, consciousness of their emotions, and recognition of their behavior and how it affects others.
Lastly, people who have grown up in dysfunctional family homes often cannot express their realities moderately. They are frequently perceived as either out-of-control or overly controlled with their physical appearance (ie. being obese or severely underweight,) their thinking and opinions, their feelings, or their behavior. This usually stems from having their own caregivers model this immoderate behavior for them in childhood.
Defenses help the individual by distorting reality and coping strategies attempt to solve the problem, thus changing their reality. Miceli and Castelfranchi (2001) support this notion and add that “coping behaviors involve conscious modification of cognitive and emotional appraisals, which eventually modify the reactions to the stressful event rather than distort the perception of the event.” The individual has complete control of the coping strategies used. The individual can choose to stop a particular coping style and choose another approach. A choice of a specific coping strategy implies intent and full awareness of the behavior. On the other hand, defense mechanisms typically employ outside consciousness and understanding of the individual. One cannot intentionally choose to use another defense mechanism.
Coping is an integral part of the stress process. It is usually viewed as a complex set of processes that may moderate the influences of stressful life events on the individual’s physical and mental health. Healthy coping skills are made up of both internal and external resources. Internal resources are the skills, practices, and abilities that support an individual. Typically, they do not require the support or presence of another person or thing. Some examples include grounding exercises (ie. feeling one’s feet on the ground, the back against the chair, orienting themselves to time and space by naming five objects in the room, self-care practices (ie. getting enough sleep,) identifying and asserting one’s needs, self-regulation strategies (ie. breathing exercises, chanting, noting one’s internal sensations with curiosity,) and/or mindfulness exercises.
A regulated nervous system means that one is experiencing the feeling of being calm, relaxed, and generally comfortable in his body. Ideally, everyone would be able to maintain a regulated nervous system and return to equilibrium reasonably quickly after a stressor or trigger from the past. However, when people have experienced trauma, sometimes they get stuck in either a state of increased sympathetic activation or nervous system hyper-arousal, causing their heart rates to go up, anxiety, perhaps heat in their bodies, or parasympathetic activation, or hypo-arousal, resulting in a feeling of depression, lethargy, or possibly shut down.
If individuals mindfully listen to their external experience with curiosity, the nervous system can give them essential information about their levels of relaxation and dysregulation, which can be a valuable resource. When people can receive information from their bodies about their external sensations and experiences, it allows them to act on those signals in their best interests, putting self-care into action. When individuals notice when they are dysregulated, they can create the capacity to choose to return to feeling settled, which can be a precious life skill, allowing them to avoid feeling stuck on a rollercoaster of chronic dysregulation.
External resources, on the other hand, involve something or someone outside of oneself. Some examples are calling a friend, sponsor, or mentor, going to a 12-step meeting or therapy group, or going to yoga. It is most effective to utilize internal and external coping skills for maximum support. However, external resources are not always available, so knowing how to self-soothe and use only the resources within us is crucial.
Survival strategies serve a purpose; they keep one defended against pain. Therefore, the thought of giving them up can feel frightening and overwhelming. It is also highly challenging and takes a great deal of deep work in order to change these patterns that one has relied on for so many years and sometimes throughout one’s entire life. However, one must just weigh the function they serve against the dysfunction or limitations in one’s life and relationships to determine whether or not it is worth the journey.
References
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: how early trauma affects self-regulation, self-image, and the capacity for relationship. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Lu, L., & Chen, C. S. (1996). Correlates of coping behaviours: Internal and external resources. Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 9(3), 297–307. doi: 10.1080/09515079608258709
Mellody, P., Miller, A. W., & Miller, J. K. (1989). Breaking Free: A Recovery Workbook for Facing Codependence: Harper & Row.
Miceli, M., & Castelfranchi, C. (2001). Further Distinctions Between Coping and Defense Mechanisms? Journal of Personality, 69(2), 287–296. doi: 10.1111/1467-6494.00146