The Friday Question: How it works
Every Friday we will pose a question for you all to discuss or privately consider. You can engage with it publicly here on the RFAS blog, or you can join our forum (details below) for a more private discussion. You can write it down to think about later, journal about it, or bring it in to a therapy session with you.
If you would like to volunteer to become a moderator and host future Questions, please email us at volunteer@asexualsurvivors.org—or join our forum and post in the moderator volunteer thread. If you just have an idea for a future Question that you want to share, we have a brainstorming topic on our forum.
Something to Ponder Today
In survivor/trauma-based communities and other communities with a focus on mental health, you tend to hear a lot about coping skills. Sometimes, such discussions can feel mystifying, and “coping” seems like the last thing we are able to do, so it can feel like we simply don’t have coping skills at all.
That’s not true, though. If you’re here reading this, I know that you have found some way to cope with the difficulties of life! And coping skills can be as simple as just taking a few more moments of time to yourself. Other coping skills can include talking or writing about your emotions, relaxation and meditation, taking a walk, working out, doing art, listening to music, making jokes, playing a game… all sorts of things. Yet it can be really hard to identify what our coping skills are when asked about them.
Maybe one barrier to identifying positive coping skills is that when people ask “how do you cope?” in general, without specifying any kind of situation or feeling that we’re coping with, it doesn’t paint a concrete enough picture in our minds for the things that we do in different situations to become clear. So I think it may be helpful instead to have a specific situation or feeling in mind that you’re trying to cope with, and write down ways that help you deal with just that particular case.
What are the coping skills you use when…?
- You feel depressed, sad, or lonely?
- You feel angry, resentful, or frustrated?
- You feel anxious or panicked?
- You feel dissociated or have a flashback?
You don’t have to answer all of these, of course, but hopefully sorting these into different moods helps! Feel free to come up with and discuss other emotions/situations you have to cope with, including even more specific ones—one kind of depression may be very different from another, for example.
On the Forum
- You can discuss this question privately after registering at the forum
- Here are instructions for how to join the forum
- Here’s the invite request form
- You can also still discuss previous questions as well. There is no time limit for joining the discussion.
- Please abide by our rules in both comments and forum posts.
Please note that we are still working things out in the forum, especially technical issues. We are gradually letting people in now who are not moderators or volunteers, but it can basically be considered “in beta” for now. So if you do join, please excuse our forum being a bit of a mess while we get everything tested. There may also be a little bit of a wait time for sending out invites.
Here are a couple of things you should know about posting to the forum:
- All posts are private, and can only be viewed by members
- It is against forum rules to discuss any personal stories shared on the forum with anyone who is not a member without permission of the person who shared it
- You can post as anonymous, once you are a member
The Spoiler Tag
You can hide especially triggering details behind a spoiler tag—which also works in blog comments. Here’s an example:
[spoiler title=’Triggering stuff’ collapse_link=’true’]Explicit/triggering material would go here.[/spoiler]
To make one, just type…
[ spoiler ] ... [ /spoiler ]
…without the spaces. I hope that this helps everyone safely navigate this conversation.
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