Margie Freeman LCSW

Providing individual and couples therapy counseling in South Orange and Northern New Jersey

The 5 C’s of Coping

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In Linda Graham’s book, Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, she identifies the 5 C’s of Coping:

  1. Calm: We need to learn from our experiences with others in order to calm down our nervous system.
  2. Clarity: If we learn how to reflect on our experiences, we can maintain clarity as we evaluate our possibilities of response to a crisis.
  3. Connection with resources: Connecting with resources, both internal and external, can expand our options for coping.
  4. Competence: As we learn specific skills and become competent at them, we can draw on those competencies now and in the future.
  5. Courage: We need to call on our courage from our previous coping, to persevere in coping with our current life experiences.

Linda’s book gives us experiential tools and exercises to help us develop the 5 C’s of coping.