1. Lead Mental Health Specialist
Building Resilience
through Coping Skills
Valerie R. Cherry, PhD
Lead Mental Health Specialist

2. How do we help Job Corps youth rise above adversity and handle difficult situations?
Effective coping skills
Better control over their lives
Ways to manage stress
Promote achievement of emotional well being
Help maintain employment

3. After this presentation, participants will be able to:
Identify and define key concepts related to stress, coping, and resilience.
Differentiate important culturally-based aspects of coping and resilience.
List four personal attributes that promote resiliency among youth.
Identify four specific coping skills that can be taught to students to build resilience and support personal success in Job Corps and beyond. 

4. Definitions Stress Coping Resilience
A. A pattern of positive adaptation in the context of past or present adversity
B. The effect of anything in life to which people must adjust
C. Anything people do to adjust to the challenges and demands of stress

5. Stress
Stress: A condition or feeling experienced when a person perceives that “demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize.” (Richard S Lazarus)
Stress requires us to adjust our attention and behavior and makes demands on our energy.
Stressor: Anything that has the effect of causing stress.
Stress Capacity: The amount of stress a person can carry, since each person has some stress in their lives.
Stress Load: This refers to the amount, or quantity, of stress a person has in their lives.
Eustress- Good stress
Distress - Bad Stress

6. Stress Theories Hans Selye General adaptation syndrome Richard Lazarus
Alarm reaction
Stage of resistance
Stage of exhaustion
Richard Lazarus
Transactional Model
Transaction between a person and their environment
Primary appraisal: person evaluates situations as benign or stressful
Secondary appraisal: person decides how to deal with stress

7. What Causes Stress? Several theories explain the causes of stress:
Holmes and Rahe- Life events theory: stress occurs when the situation requires more resources than are available
Kobasa and colleagues- Hardiness theory: one’s attitude toward the events determines stress, not the event.
Social support theory: insufficient social support for responding to event

8. Is the glass half full or half empty?
A situation can be stressful or not—it all depends on your perception of the event
A response to stress can be effective or not—it depends on your resources and coping strategies

9. Coping
Anything people do to adjust to the challenges and demands of stress.
Any adjustments made to reduce the negative impact of stress.
Constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of a person.

10. YOU ARE THE EXPERT!
What are some of the ways you see our students attempt to cope with extremely stressful situations?

11. Conceptualizing Coping Strategies
Biological/physiological – fight or flight
Cognitive – how we think about the situation
Behavioral – behavior related to mental process
Learned – strategies learned from modeling/observation

12. What We Know About Development and Coping
Emotion-focused – increases with age
Problem-solving skills – mixed findings
Negative appraisal varies in dimensionality
Avoidant physical/cognitive responses increase with age
Attention – increases with age
Sense of competence – younger over-estimate; older
perceive competence as enduring
Internal locus of control – increases with age

13. Coping Mechanisms Problem-focused: Emotion-focused: Social Support
Person attempts to change the situation
Emotion-focused:
Thought alteration: reframe the situation to make it less threatening
Social Support
Two-way communication in which a person can confide their concerns and receive support from others

14. Why do some youth grow up in two-parent homes with all the apparent support and advantages a child could need, yet still end up making poor choices that lead them to problems with drugs, alcohol or other high-risk behaviors?
Conversely, why do some youth come from broken homes, dysfunctional families or communities dealing with alcohol and drugs, and yet are still able to resist the pull of these activities?

16. Resiliency
It’s not what happens to you but what you make out of what happens to you that makes you resilient.

17. True or False Resilience is a trait.
Resilient people are independent and self-reliant.
Resilient people are immune to stress and negative emotions.
Adversity makes people stronger.

18. Individual Resilience
What influences psychological resilience?
Temperament
Experience with past adversity
Can be developed

19. Domains Physical Intellectual Social Psycho-Emotional Spiritual
What could our students do in each of the five domains to keep themselves strong under stress?
People may demonstrate resilience at one
point in life and not at another;
People may demonstrate resilience in only
some aspects of life;
There are linkages among the multiple domains of adaptation, positive and negative
Resilience is Dynamic

20. Job Corps Process in Coping and Resilience
Job Corps staff:
can be positive resources
can present impediments
are models

21. Culture, Coping and Resilience
Connection between culture, coping, and resilience
Individualism vs. collectivism

22. Culture…..
Affect the way we form networks and the importance we assign to them.
Decides what skills and activities that are appreciated.
Is a protective factor which includes values and faith.
That which is learned, shared, transmitted and altered from one generation to another.
The norms, beliefs, and values that provide prescriptions for behavior.
WORLD VIEW is culturally based!

23. Culturally Relevant Risk Factors and Considerations
Socioeconomic status
Social support
Prejudice and discrimination
Acculturation stress
Gender
Discrimination and stigma erode resilience
Gender constraints are problematic
Guilt and shame
Meaning
Mastery and control
Help-seeking, stigma, and mistrust

24. Youth Coping within a Cultural Context
Coping strategies vary across groups
Ethnicity x Context = Coping
Avoidant coping = adaptive and maladaptive

25. “One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach, one can collect only a few.” —Anne Morrow Lindbergh

26. Personal Attributes that Promote Resiliency Among Youth
Self-confidence and a positive self image
Capacity to manage strong feelings and impulses
Capacity to make realistic plans
Good communications skills
Close bond with at least one positive adult

27. Coping Skills to Build Resilience
Problem-focused: Any coping behavior that is directed at reducing or eliminating a stressor, adaptive behavioral.
Appraisal-focused (adaptive cognitive)
Emotion-focused: Directed towards changing one's own emotional reaction to a stressor.

28. Problem-Focused Coping
Efforts to act on the source of stress to change the person, the environment, or the relationship between the two.
There are four basic steps in problem solving:
Defining the problem.
Generating alternatives.
Evaluating and selecting alternatives.
Implementing solutions.

29. Appraisal-Focused Coping
Appraisal-focused strategies occur when the person modifies the way they think, e.g., employing denial, or distancing oneself from the problem.
People may alter the way they think about a problem by altering their goals and values, such as by seeing the humor in a situation.

30. Emotion-Focused Coping
Coping efforts that are directed toward regulating emotional states:
Denial/avoidance
Distraction or minimization
Wishful thinking
Self-control of feelings
Seeking meaning
Self-blame
Expressing/sharing feelings

31. Additional Coping Techniques
Social support groups
Information gathering
Hobbies
Forgiveness
Meditation/Prayer

32. Social Support Groups
Friends, family are essential to help buffer the effects of crisis
Support groups enhance feelings of acceptance
Research supports the impact of support groups
classic breast cancer support group study

33. Coping Skills Curriculum Download
Emotional and Social Well Being (Social and Emotional Learning)
Lesson 1: Gratitude
Lesson 2: Emotional Awareness
Lesson 3: Empathy
Lesson 4: Standing Up for What’s Right
Lesson 5: Dealing with Conflict and Confrontation
Lesson 6: Assertiveness
Lesson 7: Goal Setting

34. Problem Solving Skills Curriculum Download
Soft Skills to Pay the Bills — Mastering Soft Skills for Workplace Success
A curriculum developed by Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) focused on teaching "soft" or workforce readiness skills to youth, including youth with disabilities