Coping Skills Practice Exercise

Coping Skills and Brain Works Project lessons on this website are designed to prepare pre-teens to better understand and effectively cope with adolescent brain and behavior changes and everyday stress that challenges their coping capability. As we approach the teenage years and middle school the students brain and body are also starting to prepare for the transition from being a child to becoming an adult. During this second decade of life, a pre-teen's sense of well-being and coping confidence will be challenged like never before. Adolescent brain and emotional changes are inevitable. But they often result in one of life’s most challenging periods for dealing with stress, upsets and worry.

Whenever we experience emotional distress arising from the four core wounding experiences - loss, rejection, betrayal and humiliation - we have a choice of "hiding" from or ignoring these upsetting experiences or using our coping brain functions to deal with them. To some degree every pre-teen and teenager must learn to deal with these difficult challenges by learning how their coping brain can deal with its own operation as well as respond to everyday upsets, emotional confusion and stress.

What does the term «coping brain» mean?

Every time we are challenged by new or upsetting experiences our brain must come up with ways to deal with our stress or worry. We need all three coping brain functions:

• thinking;
• feeling;
• self-protection.

Training our brain to use health coping methods means we can heal our own emotional wounds so we also feel better about ourselves. And if you have any questions, ask us!

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Principles for Developing our Coping Ability

The pre-teen years are the best time to learn these skills and begin to use simple, brain-based coping tools. During this time our brain is rapidly developing and our thinking ability becomes more like an adult. These skills and tools give us the power to control our stress and get over daily upsets. We learn coping skills like we learn math, English or music. Coping is like learning a new language. Many of the terms are quite simple to learn (see Resources & Activities), but only through practice can we improve our coping ability . Let's start by introducing some basic coping principles.