Wellness Tools & Coping Skills and Recovery
While being a peer support specialist I have learned about coping skills & wellness tools & recovery and the difference between the two.
The tools I am talking about are tools you use to cope with trauma-causing events and situations in life. Such as family or friend’s death, ( suicide & cancer are examples), health problems like epilepsy, schizophrenia, heart failure, cancer, etc, relationship problems, loss of employment, abuse from other people (physical or mental), and much more. It is good to keep track of what wellness tools work for you and know the difference between wellness tools and coping skills.
Coping Skills
Coping skills are resources you use or activities you do to cope with trauma-causing events and situations. Coping skills are things like exercising, talking with family or friends, spending time with pets, taking walks, and sometimes negative result causing activities, objects, and actions.
The catch to coping skills is it can also be things such as drinking alcohol too much, doing drugs such as opioid addiction, cocaine, meth, and or heroin. Coping skills also can be things like abusing yourself like cutting, self-injury, and self-harm
Wellness Tools
Wellness tools are used to cope with trauma-causing events and situations in life, coping skills but also to help with recovery, but unlike coping skills wellness tools are used for wellness and nothing else. The name explains that the tools are for your wellness. Making that those tools have only positive effects.
Wellness tools are things such as journaling, exercise, meditation, going to a therapist, spending time with pets (Pets are proven to have positive effects on mental health), and spending time with family members and friends. There is no end to what you can use as a wellness tool.
The status of wellness tools changes as time goes on. It is helpful to keep a record of them and to change the record if a wellness tool doesn’t work anymore or turns into a trigger that may cause you emotional problems and be a new source of your trauma.
Summary
Together both coping skills and wellness tools are used for recovery. The difference is that, unlike coping skills, wellness tools are a positive tool with only a positive result and no negative side effects.