Building Resilience through Coping Skills

Valerie R. Cherry, PhDLead Mental Health Specialist

How do we help Job Corps youth rise above adversity and handle difficult situations?

• Effective coping skills– Better control over their lives – Ways to manage stress– Promote achievement of emotional

well being– Help maintain employment

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After this presentation, participants will be able to:

• Identify and define key concepts related to stress, coping, and resilience.

• Differentiate important culturally-based aspects of coping and resilience.

• List four personal attributes that promote resiliency among youth.

• Identify four specific coping skills that can be taught to students to build resilience and support personal success in Job Corps and beyond.

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Definitions

• Stress• Coping• Resilience

A. A pattern of positive adaptation in the context of past or present adversity

B. The effect of anything in life to which people must adjust

C. Anything people do to adjust to the challenges and demands of stress

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Stress• Stress: A condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that

“demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.” (Richard S Lazarus)

• Stress requires us to adjust our attention and behavior and makes demands on our energy.

• Stressor: Anything that has the effect of causing stress.• Stress Capacity: The amount of stress a person can carry, since each

person has some stress in their lives.• Stress Load: This refers to the amount, or quantity, of stress a person has

in their lives.• Eustress- Good stress • Distress - Bad Stress

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Stress Theories• Hans Selye– General adaptation

syndrome• Alarm reaction• Stage of resistance• Stage of exhaustion

• Richard Lazarus– Transactional Model

• Transaction between a person and their environment

• Primary appraisal: person evaluates situations as benign or stressful

• Secondary appraisal: person decides how to deal with stress

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What Causes Stress?• Several theories explain the causes of

stress:– Holmes and Rahe- Life events theory: stress

occurs when the situation requires more resources than are available

– Kobasa and colleagues- Hardiness theory: one’s attitude toward the events determines stress, not the event.

– Social support theory: insufficient social support for responding to event

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Is the glass half full or half empty?

• A situation can be stressful or not—it all depends on your perception of the event

• A response to stress can be effective or not—it depends on your resources and coping strategies

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Coping• Anything people do to adjust to the challenges

and demands of stress.

• Any adjustments made to reduce the negative impact of stress.

• Constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of a person.

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YOU ARE THE EXPERT!

• What are some of the ways you see our students attempt to cope with extremely stressful situations?

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Conceptualizing Coping Strategies

• Biological/physiological – fight or flight

• Cognitive – how we think about the situation

• Behavioral – behavior related to mental process

• Learned – strategies learned from modeling/observation

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What We Know About Development and Coping

• Emotion-focused – increases with age• Problem-solving skills – mixed findings• Negative appraisal varies in dimensionality• Avoidant physical/cognitive responses increase with age• Attention – increases with age• Sense of competence – younger over-estimate; older

perceive competence as enduring• Internal locus of control – increases with age

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Coping Mechanisms

• Problem-focused: – Person attempts to change the situation

• Emotion-focused:– Thought alteration: reframe the situation to make

it less threatening• Social Support– Two-way communication in which a person can

confide their concerns and receive support from others

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Why do some youth grow up in two-parent homes with all the apparent support and advantages a child could need, yet still end up making poor choices that lead them to problems with drugs, alcohol or other high-risk behaviors? Conversely, why do some youth come from broken homes, dysfunctional families or communities dealing with alcohol and drugs, and yet are still able to resist the pull of these activities?

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Resiliency

• It’s not what happens to you but what you make out of what happens to you that makes you resilient.

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True or False

• Resilience is a trait. • Resilient people are independent and self-

reliant.• Resilient people are immune to stress and

negative emotions.• Adversity makes people stronger.

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Individual Resilience

• What influences psychological resilience?– Temperament– Experience with past adversity– Can be developed

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Domains

• Physical• Intellectual• Social• Psycho-Emotional• Spiritual• What could our students do in each of the five

domains to keep themselves strong under stress?

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Job Corps Process in Coping and Resilience

• Job Corps staff:– can be positive resources – can present impediments – are models

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Culture, Coping and Resilience

• Connection between culture, coping, and resilience

• Individualism vs. collectivism

Culture…..

• Affect the way we form networks and the importance we assign to them.

• Decides what skills and activities that are appreciated. • Is a protective factor which includes values and faith. • That which is learned, shared, transmitted and altered

from one generation to another. • The norms, beliefs, and values that provide

prescriptions for behavior.• WORLD VIEW is culturally based!

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Culturally Relevant RiskFactors and Considerations

• Socioeconomic status• Social support• Prejudice and

discrimination• Acculturation stress• Gender

• Discrimination and stigma erode resilience

• Gender constraints are problematic

• Guilt and shame• Meaning• Mastery and control• Help-seeking, stigma,

and mistrust

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Youth Coping within a Cultural Context

• Coping strategies vary across groups• Ethnicity x Context = Coping• Avoidant coping = adaptive and maladaptive

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“One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach, one can collect only a few.”

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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Personal Attributes that Promote Resiliency Among Youth

1.Self-confidence and a positive self image2.Capacity to manage strong feelings

and impulses3.Capacity to make realistic plans4.Good communications skills5.Close bond with at least one positive adult

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Coping Skills to Build Resilience

• Problem-focused: Any coping behavior that is directed at reducing or eliminating a stressor, adaptive behavioral.

• Appraisal-focused (adaptive cognitive)• Emotion-focused: Directed towards changing

one's own emotional reaction to a stressor.

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Problem-Focused Coping

• Efforts to act on the source of stress to change the person, the environment, or the relationship between the two.

• There are four basic steps in problem solving:– Defining the problem.– Generating alternatives.– Evaluating and selecting

alternatives.– Implementing solutions.

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Appraisal-Focused Coping

• Appraisal-focused strategies occur when the person modifies the way they think, e.g., employing denial, or distancing oneself from the problem.

• People may alter the way they think about a problem by altering their goals and values, such as by seeing the humor in a situation.

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Emotion-Focused Coping

• Coping efforts that are directed toward regulating emotional states:– Denial/avoidance– Distraction or minimization– Wishful thinking– Self-control of feelings– Seeking meaning– Self-blame– Expressing/sharing feelings

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Additional Coping Techniques

• Social support groups• Information gathering• Hobbies• Forgiveness• Meditation/Prayer

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Social Support Groups

• Friends, family are essential to help buffer the effects of crisis

• Support groups enhance feelings of acceptance

• Research supports the impact of support groups

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Coping Skills Curriculum Download

• Emotional and Social Well Being (Social and Emotional Learning)– Lesson 1: Gratitude– Lesson 2: Emotional Awareness– Lesson 3: Empathy– Lesson 4: Standing Up for What’s Right– Lesson 5: Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation– Lesson 6: Assertiveness – Lesson 7: Goal Setting

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Problem Solving Skills Curriculum Download

• Soft Skills to Pay the Bills — Mastering Soft Skills for Workplace Success– A curriculum developed by Office of Disability

Employment Policy (ODEP) focused on teaching "soft" or workforce readiness skills to youth, including youth with disabilities

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