Coping Mechanisms vs. Healing Companions: The Difference a Service Dog Makes
- Libby DeKorte
- Jul 23
- 5 min read
Traditional Coping Mechanisms for PTSD
Coping is the series of behaviors and thoughts that we use to handle stressful situations. Coping can be proactive or reactive. In their article COPING MECHANISMS, Doctors Vikas Gupta and Emad Algorani (2023) divided coping into proactive and reactive.
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In proactive coping, you anticipate stress in the future. You may set strict routines or procedures in place for yourself in order to set yourself up to be less reactive in the future. You may find yourself feeling prepared, but also rigid and on guard.This may also include suppressing emotions, avoidance, and disengagement.
This may look like going to the gym seven days a week at six a.m. and working out for at least 75 minutes. You may push yourself to your limit to occupy your mind and fight against gravity to ground yourself. You may feel you need to add even more time at the gym to avoid stress at work or home, and determine the gym is your safe place to push yourself. Exercise is a positive proactive coping strategy. However, it can become harmful if you hyperfocus on the routine, avoid emotional challenges outside of the safe space, and if you push yourself too hard physically.
In reactive coping, you react following the stress. You may not feel prepared when stressors arrive and tend to react on emotion or enter survival mode, engaging in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses.
This may look like pleasing others, the fawn response, when you have too much on your plate, but are being asked to help a loved one anyway. At your own detriment, you abandon previous commitments you made in order to avoid the stress of having to say no to the person in front of you. This may work out fine at first, but the pressure of time and worry of completing those mounting commitments may result in a fight response with anger, or a freeze response where you procrastinate or avoid doing any of the things you set out to do.
Sometimes we use traditional coping mechanisms to keep ourselves busy and distracted, rather than healing what’s going on deep inside of us. We may add more to our plate, cover, hide, add more resources-many of them even beneficial, but we feel we need to do more. Think of it like the duck who looks calm and collected floating on the surface, but is kicking like mad under the water. For this reason, it is healthy to find ease, do less in order to heal, and work through what we are feeling inside.
Going back to the duck analogy, it can be transformative to stop kicking and just flow.
Deeper, Transformative Support Offered by Service Dogs
Have you heard of the theory of post-traumatic growth? In the 1980s, Doctor Richard Tedeschi and Doctor Lawrence Calhoun studied how people change in positive ways as a result of trauma and adversity, and they coined the term “Post traumatic Growth” in 1995. Today, post traumatic growth inventories can be used to evaluate healing and strength after experiencing trauma. One model was developed by Doctors Tedeschi and Calhoun, and they look for responses in the following five areas: Appreciation of life, Personal Strength, Spiritual Change, Relationships with Others, and New Possibilities
Service dogs can impact all five of these critical growth areas for veterans and first responders.
Appreciation of life: Service dogs help you appreciate life when you witness the simple joy they experience in the present moment. They love warm concrete in the sun, a bird flying overhead, a cold drink of water, and an ear rub.
Personal strength: The strength you will discover in your spirit to protect and care for your canine will illuminate the strength of those around you who protect and care for you.
Spiritual change: Our spirit can be related to how we feel about our purpose. When you care for an animal, and they for you, you both ensure one another’s well-being.
Relationships with others: You will form a strong bond with your dog, like no other, and this relationship will influence how you interact with those around you. Dogs can teach us to welcome, appreciate, ask for what we need, forgive, and balance work with rest.
New possibilities: Each day offers new possibilities and this is the bittersweet part of life, but this is what proves we are alive and able to change. What new possibility would you like to consider? Start with a small hope and nurture it.
I hope you are able to accept past trauma as an agent of change in yourself, and remain open to the idea that positive transformational change is underway in you right now.
New Life K9s
Our mission at New Life K9s is not only to save lives, but also restore hope, purpose, and connection for the individuals our dogs serve. Through the power of the human-canine bond, we ensure that veterans and first responders who have sacrificed for our communities receive the life-changing support of a service dog-at no cost to them. We are accredited by Assistance Dogs International, ensuring we share a mission of training and placing the highest quality of trained assistance dogs to individuals with disabilities to improve their quality of life.
Our dogs are trained to assist you rest easier, knowing they are there. They can turn on lights if you wake from a nightmare, and turn them off once you are calm. Touch is so important for calming our nervous system, and your dog could nudge you when anxiety is rising to remind you to redirect that energy and pet them instead, lowering blood pressure and easing your mind. Oxytocin, the “bonding” or “love” hormone released when you cuddle with them, reduces stress, builds trust, and fosters social connections. Our service dogs can remind you to take medication and bring it to you. If it is difficult to get up or down, they are trained to brace you, and can even assist you with dressing and undressing.
If crowds or social situations feel challenging, they can guide you through a crowd, create personal space between you and others by laying next to you, and help generate human interaction where the focus is on them.
If you are a veteran or first responder open to the possibility of deep, transformative growth with a service dog, or if you would like to help us on our mission, we would love to talk with you.
How about you? Has your life ever been impacted by a support animal? Are you considering it? What questions can we answer about our service dog program? Let me know in the comments.
Algorani EB, Gupta V. Coping Mechanisms. [Updated 2023 Apr 24]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2025 Jan-. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559031/
Tedeschi RG, Calhoun LG. The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: measuring the positive legacy of trauma. J Trauma Stress. 1996 Jul;9(3):455-71. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.2490090305
