Saturday’s Trans Conference

On Saturday I went up to First Event in Peabody, I wanted to go to a couple of workshops and I haven’t been up there to a conference three or four year (more on the trans-conferences on Thursday). So I asked around and a friend wanted to go to the conference so we car pooled.

One of the workshops that I attended was,

Transgender Survivors
Managing both the impact of surviving trauma and the complexity of gender variance can be a profound challenge. The psychological and interpersonal demands of identity, relationships and body can be overwhelming and powerful. In this workshop we will identify a framework through which to understand important themes in a complex journey…

As a social worker the tile attracted me to the workshop, I was interested in what the presenter had to say. One of the topics that she talked out was coping skills. Many of us have no idea what coping skills are, but we develop them throughout our life.

As trans-people we count on a number of coping skills that we don’t even realize that we are using. When we come out, we are using coping skills to handle the stress. When we went out in public for the first time we used coping skills.

So what are “coping skills”?

Wikipedia says this about coping,

In psychology, coping is "constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing” or "exceeding the resources of the person".
[…]
The psychology textbook by Weiten has provided a useful summary of three broad types of coping strategies:
    appraisal-focused (adaptive cognitive),
    problem-focused: Any coping behavior that is directed at reducing or eliminating a stressor, adaptive behavioral
    emotion-focused: Directed towards changing one's own emotional reaction to a stressor

As a trans-woman I use emotion-focus or distraction. I never recognized that I had developed a coping skill when I was standing in a checkout line trying to stifle my fight or flight reaction. I was just concentrating on reading the magazine title and all the different types of candies that they had in isle. But it turns out that is a coping skill (Distraction).

So what are some of the coping skills that you can use…

Well the first one is like I said distraction, do something to take your mind off of what is causing your anxiety. You can distract yourself like I was doing by reading, count the number of different types of candies & bubble gum in the racks. Count the number of people who are wearing blue or like the one time I was sent to the principal office in high school, count the number of holes in a ceiling tile. One of the recommended techniques is to wear a rubber band on you wrist and snap it to distract yourself (I personally don’t like that one, it induces pain).

You can use imagery or visualizing. That guy that is calling you a pervert, imagine him in a dress or that there is a big bird that is shitting on his head. Or imagine yourself in a safe welcoming place, in a field of flowers, sitting out on a beach or other peaceful locations for you. Mine is a waterfall that I have been to, I just imagine myself sitting and looking at the water and listening to the water as it splashes off the rock.

Breathing… square breathing, breathing from the chest, a sigh and other breathing techniques.

There is also something called Progressive Muscle Relaxation where you try to relax one muscle at a time in your body.

There are a number of good websites that have grounding techniques; here are some of them…

• Coping Skills for Trauma
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation
• Top 21 Anxiety Grounding Techniques
• Coping with Anxiety and Panic
• Coping Skills

And here is a video that I like…

Hopefully one of these techniques will work for you or that you can develop a technique of your own through the tools that I have listed here.