If you’ve been to therapy before, you’ve probably been given coping strategies. Breathing exercises. Grounding techniques. Cognitive reframing. Thought records. These are the standard tools of the trade, and they’re not useless. If you’ve learned some, they work for you, and you have no complaints, that’s genuinely great. Not everyone needs more than that.
But if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re not in that category. You’ve tried the strategies. You’ve done the exercises. And you’re still circling back to the same place. Not because you did them wrong, and not because you lack discipline. Because coping strategies are designed to manage a problem, not to resolve it.
Steering Against the Pull
Imagine your car pulls to the left. Every time you drive, you compensate by steering slightly to the right. It works. You stay on the road. You might even forget you’re doing it, because the compensation has become second nature.
That’s what a coping strategy does. It gives you something to do about the pull. And as long as you keep doing it, you stay more or less on course.
But the pull doesn’t stop. The moment you let go of the wheel, when you’re tired, or stressed, or caught off guard, the car drifts left again. The same anxiety returns. The same pattern reasserts itself. The same feeling you thought you’d dealt with shows up uninvited, as strong as ever.
This is not a failure of coping. This is coping working exactly as designed. It manages the symptom. It doesn’t touch the cause.
What’s Actually Pulling
The things that keep people stuck are, almost by definition, the things they can’t see. You can’t see the back of your own head without help. You can’t examine the thing that’s driving your distress when part of your mind is organized around not looking at it.
This isn’t a metaphor. Any non-trivial form of psychic suffering is rooted in a place in the mind that operates outside of awareness. What causes most persistent mental conflict is not confused thinking or a lack of skills. It’s having had overwhelming experiences, often early in life, that no one was able to help you put into words. Experiences that were too much to process at the time, and that remain unprocessed because part of you learned to look away as a matter of survival.
A coping strategy can’t reach this. Not because it’s a bad tool, but because it’s aimed at the wrong level. Teaching someone to manage their anxiety through breathing techniques is like teaching them to steer right more effectively. The pull is still there. It will always be there, until someone helps you find out what’s causing it.
The Empowerment Problem
One of the appealing things about coping strategies is that they make you feel empowered. You’re doing something. You have a technique. You’re taking control.
But it’s worth asking whether the feeling of empowerment is the same thing as the reality. If you need the technique every day, if the anxiety or the pattern or the intrusive thought returns the moment you stop actively managing it, then what you have is not control. What you have is a full-time job keeping something at bay. And the unspoken assumption underneath the whole enterprise is that this is the best you can hope for: a life spent managing symptoms that will never actually go away.
I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s what happens when treatment stops at the surface.
What Happens Underneath
When someone does the slower, harder work of actually getting to what’s driving the problem — when the thing that’s been avoided is finally found, and named, and understood — something shifts. The pressure drops. Not because you’ve learned a new way to hold it in, but because there’s less pressure to hold.
There is a hidden and unsuspected power in putting things into words in the presence of another person who knows how to listen for things you can’t hear. This is what depth psychotherapy does. Not symptom management. Not coping. Not learning to live with a problem that never goes away. But finding the thing that’s been pulling you off course, the thing you couldn’t see because you weren’t supposed to look, and finally putting it into language.
After that, you don’t need to steer right anymore. The car goes straight.
A Note on What I’m Not Saying
I’m not against exercises, techniques, or short-term interventions. I’ve practised meditation when I felt I benefited from it, and I wrote a book on it that’s available through my website. Meditation can be a genuinely helpful adjunct for some people at some times. So can breathing exercises, journaling, and any number of other practices. Used wisely, these things have real value.
What I am saying is that they’re not a substitute for psychotherapy. They’re a way of managing the surface while you look for something deeper. Or, if you prefer, a way of steering right until someone can figure out why the wheel pulls left.
If you’ve been coping, and it’s working, and you have no complaints: that’s wonderful. Keep going. But if you’ve been coping and you’re still stuck — if the same patterns keep showing up no matter what you do — then the problem might not be that you need better strategies. It might be that strategies were never going to be enough.
Those are the people I'm here for.
Related: Is Psychotherapy Worth It? · What Does Psychotherapy Actually Do? · When Therapy Doesn’t Work
If this way of thinking resonates, I invite you to get in touch.