Coping modes are shields we build to protect ourselves from deep emotional pain and old psychological wounds. However, these shields actually stop us from healing and keep us stuck in negative cycles.
The pain we’re shielding from comes from activating schemas. These are the deep core beliefs we formed in childhood, often in response to unmet childhood needs, that become the lens through which we experience ourselves, others and the world. Unfortunately, our coping modes are often a big reason these schemas stay intact. Read How Schema Therapy Enhances CBT to learn more.
The Three Coping Modes
Different coping strategies can be categorised into one of three main groups: Overcompensation, Avoidance or Surrender. People might have one mode that is quite dominant, but they can also switch between all three.
1. Overcompensation
Think of this as a ‘fight’ response against the schema. You’re attempting to prove it wrong by acting in the exact opposite manner. On the surface this can look like drive, discipline and success. You work harder, try to control outcomes, and constantly push yourself to achieve.
When you come to therapy, you may say things like. ‘I can’t seem to switch off’, ‘I’ve achieved everything I wanted – but I still don’t feel happy’, or ‘I’m always waiting for things to go wrong’.
Some of the unintended consequences of overcompensation include –
- Inauthenticity – you project a false, ‘larger-than-life’ persona rather than being your true self.
- Relationship Problems – aggressive or superior behaviours often alienate others, leading to conflict.
- Burnout – constant, rigid control and perfectionism can lead to physical and mental exhaustion.
2. Avoidance
This is a ‘flight’ response where you strive to prevent the activation of painful emotions, beliefs or memories. Avoidance can look like:
- Physically avoiding places, relationships, or tasks that might trigger a schema.
- Detaching from one’s own feelings, thoughts, and memories (e.g. blocking out emotions, substance abuse, or excessive distraction).
- Procrastination and postponing tasks which others may mislabel as ‘laziness’.
Avoidance causes your life to shrink because you miss out on opportunities for connection, growth, and joy. And again, the schema is never tested or challenged.
3. Surrender
This is a ‘freeze’ or submission response which often results in you repeating familiar, painful life patterns. It means accepting the schema’s message as simple truth and organising your life around it. Common examples include people pleasing behaviour, inability to set boundaries, and letting others treat you poorly to ‘keep the peace’.
In therapy you might say things like, ‘I don’t really know who I am anymore’.
The cost of surrendering is often depression, low self-worth, and a sense of going through the motions.
A Common Schema and it’s Coping Modes
Let’s explore the three coping modes in more detail. First, we need to familiarise ourselves with a common schema. Many of my clients present with high-functioning anxiety. One of the most common schemas linked to this is…
The Failure Schema – the underlying conviction that, regardless of evidence to the contrary, you will eventually be exposed as inadequate. This often shows up as imposter syndrome.
Now, let’s look at how the different coping modes might show up for this schema…
- Overcompensation – subtly undermining colleagues, dominating in meetings, name dropping credentials, needing to be the most credible person in the room.
- Avoidance – procrastinating on important tasks, avoiding visible evaluation/interviews/ new challenges where there could be a chance of failure (thus confirming the core belief is true). This perpetuates the schema as the person doesn’t have enough opportunities to grow in competence.
- Surrender – not studying for exams, applying for roles below capability, doesn’t try for things they ‘know’ they won’t get. This feels familiar and comfortable even if it causes pain. The person behaves in a way that guarantees failure.
Coping = Keeping Yourself Safe
Your coping modes are intelligent adaptations. These strategies once kept you safe, helped you belong, or allowed you to function in environments that were, in various ways, not safe enough for your authentic self.
One of the reasons high-functioning anxiety often goes unaddressed for years is that the coping modes look, from the outside, like they’re working. The overcompensator gets promoted. The avoider seems calm or self-sufficient. The surrenderer seems wonderfully easy-going and low maintenance.
The functioning itself becomes a kind of camouflage. But the cost is paid internally, in the exhaustion, the disconnection, the sense that no matter what you achieve, something still doesn’t feel right.
How Therapy Can Help
In therapy we work with coping modes in several interconnected ways:
Naming and understanding them without shame. It can be relieving and powerful to recognise when your coping modes are in control. ‘Oh – that’s my over-compensator mode – it’s not me being neurotic, it’s an old protection strategy doing its best’. Externalising the coping mode creates some distance which gives you more choice about how you behave.
Tracing them back to their origins. When you understand that your avoidance of intimacy makes perfect sense given your early experience of emotional deprivation, it becomes possible to approach that pattern with compassion rather than contempt.
Gently, patiently meeting the underlying schema. Coping modes exist because the schema underneath feels so painful, even unbearable. Therapy creates conditions where that schema can finally be approached. First through understanding, then through carefully worked experiential techniques that begin to update how the old belief as a feeling, not just intellectually.
Building new responses. Over time, the goal is to expand your repertoire, so that when an old wound is triggered, you’re not locked into one automatic response. You begin to develop what schema therapy calls the ‘healthy adult’ – a part of you that can notice what’s happening, offer compassion to the wounded part, and choose how to respond.
Meet Jo – Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and EMDR Therapist in Knutsford, Cheshire
With more than 18 years of experience in the field of mental health, I help people gain clarity and untangle themselves from the past so they can experience more fulfilment and joy. If you’re struggling with any of the things described in this article, please get in touch. You can also join me on Instagram for more mental health education.
