When we have Parkinson's disease we must find ways to cope with its daily challenges. Scientists tell us that there are multiple coping strategies that can be learned. These include problem solving, support seeking, avoidance, distraction, information-seeking, emotional regulation and positive cognitive restructuring. We must also learn to avoid negative coping strategies like escapism, bitterness, rumination, helplessness, and social withdrawal.
So how does one go about learning these multiple positive coping strategies and how does one learn to avoid the negative coping strategies? There are often workshops and classes available at hospitals and at adult learning centers that help you to acquire positive coping strategies but that means yet another time commitment, expense and headache.
Another way to learn positive coping strategies is through religion. If you are religious you can draw on your own religious tradition and myriad books, institutions, teachers and the like to help you to practice positive coping strategies. As far as I can tell all the major religious traditions teach you problem solving skills, teach you to call on fellow religious conferees for help; to ‘cognitively restructure’ your situation so that you can see it within a larger more meaningful framework, to control and regulate your emotional responses to stress and so forth. Most religions, furthermore, teach you to avoid dangerous or tempting situations, to eschew bitterness and hatred, to reduce rumination or obsessive worrying about things outside your control and to seek out human contact rather than social withdrawal. In short, religion can teach you both how to acquire and use the positive coping strategies and how to avoid falling into the trap of using negative coping strategies.
If you are not particularly religious chances are that you nevertheless have some form of spirituality or a source of joy, strength and inspiration in your life. If you do draw on that tradition to help you cope with the challenges of PD.
Source:
Skinner, E. A., Edge, K., Altman, J., & Sherwood, H. (2003). Searching for the structure of coping: A review and critique of category systems for classifying ways of coping. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 216–269.
