Everyday we as human beings are faced with conflicts and interactions that furnish stress. The ways we decide to endure the burden of this stress are defined as coping methods. For example, when you attended your first day of school you were extremely anxious and nervous about meeting all of those new people. At first you are bombarded with a vast amount of stress, but after a little while you begin to cope with your surroundings by interacting with the other kids in order to reduce your anxiety. We use coping methods almost all the time. Whether we are driving a car having to deal with terrible drivers or sitting at work dealing with angry customers. Everyone copes differently, but personally, a few methods I use to deal with stress are Dissociation, Denial, and Humor.
Dissociation is defined as, "a state of separation or disunion" (Webster's, 1993). Dissociative behaviors in a sense disconnect a person from the real world. For the majority of the population, this method is used to cope with everyday stress, but in some cases individuals have shown drastic failure to gain contact with reality (Matlin, 1992, .
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p.502). For example, extreme memory loss, changes in identity, or split personalities (1992). Most other people, like me, exuberate dissociative behaviors in ways to efficiently combat stress. The break between mental procedures into two totally separate developments at the same time produces a sort of comfort or relief for the individual exercising it. Ernest Hilgard proposes that it is strongly related to hypnosis in that the divide of mental processes produces two conscious realities for a person (Hilgard, 1986, as cited in Weiten, 2000, p.147). It is suggested that a person under hypnosis will not respond to pain due to the fact that that the pain isn't registering in the part of consciousness that reacts with other people (2000, p.148).
Another coping method people use is denial.