I’m in the process of spring cleaning/preparing for a move. It’s been stressful but also very therapeutic. I’ve accumulated so much stuff it’s insane.

Amongst the items I came across was paperwork from a place I worked years ago. I hated that place and most of the people in it so I cannot explain how good it felt to physically shred that paperwork and metaphorically shred all the terrible memories associated with it. 

To survive that place, and others like it, I developed some coping strategies. I didn’t do this consciously, but you know how it is, your mind and body sometimes automatically go into protection mode when you’re being attacked.

Although much of our thoughts and behaviours can be attributed to our personalities, there are others that are the direct result of, or response to what we’re experiencing at a particular moment in time. These can be useful in that they help us to deal with challenging or stressful situations. For example, in situations where non-compliance leads to conflict, a person may respond by being overly pleasing and placing other people’s needs above their own to keep the peace. A person who has experienced physical and/or psychological abuse may find that being hostile and aggressive is necessary to keep people away thus reducing the likelihood of further instances of abuse. These are quite extreme examples, and not all coping strategies are healthy but most, if not all of us, rely on some kind of coping mechanism to help us get by. Perhaps you’re loud and opinionated to hide the fact that you feel quite intimidated by the people around you, or maybe you dress a certain way to either attract attention from others or to deflect attention away from yourself. When I was growing up, I used to walk with my head down hoping not to draw attention to myself and my ‘disgusting’ albinism. I also wore earphones everywhere to avoid hearing any negative comments people might throw in my direction.

The thing about coping strategies is that they actually work! They serve their purpose in helping us to navigate stressful situations.

But they’re also a bit like painkillers – they’re great when you need them but prolonged use – especially when you are no longer in pain – can be harmful.

There will come a point when you’ll find your coping techniques no longer serve you. Your situation or circumstances will change and the methods you needed to employ to get you through won’t be necessary anymore. Or your situation or circumstances are the same, but you’ve developed healthier ways of dealing with them. Either way, you’ll need to let the old strategies go.

This is easier said than done for a lot of people. Coping strategies or survival techniques as they may also be known, can become a place of comfort – that ‘go to’ place you can retreat to when things get hard. People who have been practising them for a very long time might come to accept them as part of their character having forgotten that this was a response to a particular situation or circumstance.

Letting go can be tough but not letting go will be tougher because not only are you condemning yourself to living in the past, but in doing so you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to grow and create new experiences and relationships based on who you are now and what’s happening in the present.

The moment I realised that making myself small, walking with my head down, intentionally speaking quietly and not sharing the authentic and quite frankly, awesome aspects of myself had become a hinderance rather than the coping strategy it once was, I stopped doing that shit. Don’t get me wrong, those behaviours had worked when I needed them to at one point in my life but although my circumstances hadn’t completely changed, I had. The things that had once protected me were now holding me back. I wanted to engage with people and with life authentically and to do that I had to step out of my comfort zone and step into something and someone new.

If you think that I came to this revelation years ago, think again. Although the process started in my late twenties, I didn’t fully unpack and then disconnect from all my coping strategies until I was a few years away from saying goodbye to my thirties! There were also some seriously messed up thought patterns I also had to address so the process was long but completely worth it.

Like most things, moving on from coping strategies is a process and as such, there will be times when you’ll forget yourself or doubt yourself and fall back into that familiar territory. Don’t beat yourself up about that, it happens, especially if you and your coping strategies have been together for a long time. If you do find yourself falling back into ‘the old ways’ Just do what Aaliyah suggested: “Dust yourself off and try again”.

Of course, there’s a strong possibility that in shedding our old strategies we may have picked up some new ones. That’s okay. We’re not that different from snakes in that respect in that we’re constantly shedding old skin when it’s no longer needed. From a development perspective, this is a good thing: if you’re not shedding, you’re not growing and if you’re not growing then you might be doing life wrong!

So, like the clothes that don’t fit anymore or that have gone out of style, the books you’ve read but don’t want to keep, the documents relating to the toxic places you’ve worked, and the keepsakes from relationships past, it might be time to let those old coping mechanisms go. Thank them for their service, pack ‘em up and move on.