Coping: How We Choose to Respond to Adversity
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
An AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™ Perspective
By Mark D. Lerner, Ph.D.
Principal Consultant and Creator, AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness™
Life presents unforeseeable challenges, such as a chronic illness or sudden loss. While we can't choose the overwhelming events that impact our lives, we can choose how we respond to them. This process is often referred to as coping—the capacity to navigate adversity in goal-directed, problem-solving ways.
Many people believe that resilience is the answer. I don't. Resilience refers to the ability to bounce back from adversity. While recovery is important, I believe that the answer instead lies in the psychological mechanism of sublimation—channeling our painful emotional energy into growth, meaning, and purpose.
Having the privilege and experience of helping people to overcome and become for four decades, while simultaneously facing my own challenges, I've found that one of the deepest struggles we have as human beings is the fear of feeling alone.
When faced with adversity, we experience feelings, thoughts, actions, and physical and spiritual reactions. While consulting for the United Nations Department of Safety & Security and training mental health professionals around the world in Paris, France, and in New York City in Acute Traumatic Stress Management, I learned that while the nature of traumatic events may differ significantly, we all experience the same fundamental human reactions when faced with crises.
After years of focusing on helping people overcome traumatic events and writing and presenting extensively on this topic, I needed a change. Perhaps Dr. Donald Meichenbaum, the renowned psychologist, was correct when he cautioned me decades ago that specializing in traumatic stress could consume me. So, I found a mechanism to utilize my knowledge, skill, experience, training, and education to establish the National Center for Emotional Wellness.
Instead of focusing on the events that people faced and their reactions, I chose to focus on emotional wellness: the awareness, understanding, and acceptance of our feelings—and the ability to effectively manage challenges and change. It also reflects our ability to sublimate: to harness painful emotional energy from adversity and channel it into action—to walk the path from victim to survivor and, ultimately, to thriver.
This is where coping becomes transformative in our lives—and in the lives of others we touch.
The goal is not to become someone who never experiences anxiety, sadness, fear, or uncertainty. The objective is to become someone who no longer believes those feelings define their self-worth, future, or capacity to live a meaningful and purposeful life.
Through my challenges—most recently, being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease—I’m learning that I’ve been holding onto a damaging misconception: the belief that if I’m alone, I’m unsafe. I’m beginning to understand that being alone and feeling emotionally alone are not the same thing.
There's an important difference between loneliness and emotional independence. Healthy, adaptive aloneness—solitude—can become a place of reflection, creativity, spirituality, growth, and healing. In fact, many celebrities—people whose lives we honor—have overcome and become, channeling the pain they endured to become the people they are today. While I’ve written this before, it’s worth emphasizing again.
Challenges don’t define us. How we respond to them often does.
Consider Stefani Germanotta—Lady Gaga—who endured bullying and trauma long before the world knew her name. Anderson Cooper has spoken openly about devastating personal losses that shaped his empathy, compassion, and depth as a journalist. John Walsh and Revé Walsh transformed the horrific abduction and murder of their six-year-old son, Adam, into the creation of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Tony Robbins grew up amid instability and emotional distress before becoming a global voice for personal empowerment.
Realizing the rapid growth of technology, which has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in mental health problems, I felt compelled to understand how AI could interact effectively with human emotions. This led to the creation of AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness: the ethical and responsible interface between the cognitive abilities of artificial intelligence and the depth, uniqueness, and complexity of human emotion.
I quickly recognized and emphasized that while AI can provide accessible, evidence-based techniques, strategies, tools, and support to promote emotional well-being, it will never replace authentic, face-to-face human presence—which is essential for emotional wellness. No machine can replace the human connection, moral commitment, and healing presence of another human being.
Beyond practical, timely information presented in the National Center’s Emotional Wellness Library, I created a micro-audio podcast series focused on "what you need to know—rather than what’s nice to know"—for listeners worldwide: Emotional Wellness with Dr. Mark Lerner. My objective was simple: to find multimodal mechanisms for reaching people around the world with timely, practical information, guidance, and support. I chose to close every podcast with the words, “Technology informs. Humanity empowers.”
Coping does not involve suppressing or denying reality or the feelings we experience, especially for those of us who have suffered harm from the actions of others. Coping is the realization that we can tolerate uncertainty and survive painful emotions and regain emotional stability—by identifying a new sense of meaning and purpose.
Perhaps most importantly, coping involves recognizing that our suffering does not have to become the end of our story. Rather, it often becomes our contribution to society. Adversity can become the very mechanism through which we help others heal, grow, and feel less alone.
While we can’t control what happens to us, we can choose how we respond. That choice may ultimately shape not only our own emotional wellness but also the lives of others we touch along the way.
Emotional transparency and vulnerability illuminate
the path toward meaning and purpose.