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    The Invisible Toolbox: Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience
    The Invisible Toolbox: Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience
    The Invisible Toolbox: Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    The Invisible Toolbox: Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience

    By Michael Miello, Ph.D.

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    About this ebook

    The Invisible Toolbox is the first aid kit for your mind—an easy-to-use guide to the 22 best Coping Skills for achieving resilience in the face of depression, anxiety, anger and unwanted urges. This concise book features proven techniques based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and other evidence-based treatment approaches. You’ll find simple instructions for using Mindfulness, Behavioral Activation, Grounding, Deep Relaxation Training, Visualization, Gratitude Journaling, Love and Kindness Meditations, Committed Action, and many more. Instructions for Social Coping Skills will help you get the most benefit from the supportive people in your life. In the Advanced Coping Skills section you’ll learn strategies for working with unhelpful thoughts and beliefs, as well as techniques for clarifying your core values. You’ll also receive step-by-step instructions for creating your own personalized Coping Plan so that you never have to confront life’s challenges armed with the wrong tools again.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Miello, Ph.D.
    Release dateFeb 3, 2017
    ISBN9781370477852
    The Invisible Toolbox: Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience
    Author

    Michael Miello, Ph.D.

    Michael Miello is a clinical psychologist licensed in the state of New York. He earned his Ph.D. from St. John’s University and has been working with clients for twenty years. He is currently in private practice in Westchester NY and Long Island, NY. He is a lifelong student of psychology and a perpetual seeker of the good life.

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    • 5/5
      Awesome book. Getting aware of different coping methods is an eye-opener. Practising them is going to help me and this will also assist me to help my near and dear ones.
    • 5/5
      Very broad and wonderful exploratory understanding of PTSD. Excellent job.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book because it is concise and to the point. I learned quite a few interesting things for my self development.
    • 5/5
      Brief and good, a book with an excellent proposal to a main point on CBT: Coping techniques. I recomend its reading. It´s practical and comprehensive.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    The Invisible Toolbox - Michael Miello, Ph.D.

    The Invisible Toolbox

    Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience

    Michael Miello, Ph.D.

    The Invisible Toolbox:

    Coping Skills for Everyday Resilience

    Michael Miello, Ph.D.

    Copyright 2017 Michael Miello

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    Thank you for downloading this ebook! This ebook is licensed for personal use only. Although this version of the book is available free of charge, this book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you know someone who might find this book to be useful, please encourage them to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

    This book is dedicated to the memory of Jaime Herbert

    The Lantern

    The darkness did surround

    And all it did consume.

    I walked under somber skies

    Bereft of sun, stars and moon.

    I had no direction.

    I had nowhere to go.

    But then I saw a strange sight,

    A faint but steady glow.

    Floating above the treetops,

    An ember, a flicker, a spark,

    A canopy carried by warm breeze,

    Sailing through the dark.

    Such a tiny candle,

    A drifting little prayer.

    And as I followed it,

    I felt you there.

    It led me on

    Through the night

    Until I found

    My own

    Light.

    Table Of Contents

    Introduction

    Part One: Individual Coping Skills

    Part Two: Social Coping Skills

    Part Three: Advanced Coping Skills

    Part Four: Skills Practice

    Part Five: Creating a Personalized Coping Plan

    Closing Remarks

    Afterword: The SAFE VET Project

    About the Author

    Introduction

    This book is for anyone who has been hurting. It’s for anyone who is looking for an answer to the question, ‘What should I do when I feel like this?’ I know you just want to feel better. I know you are tired of being told to ‘let it go’, or ‘pull yourself together’ without any real hints as to how exactly a person does that. If life is a journey, this is a book about standing up after you’ve been knocked down.

    Maybe this has been an exceptionally difficult time for you. Maybe you have been depressed. Maybe you have been alienated from your own life by anxiety. Maybe you are facing a number of problems so difficult that you don’t even know where to start. Let’s look for a place to start together. It’s at times like this that it’s good to remember that it is in the nature of all beings to seek out balance. Even the pain you feel right now comes from your desire to find that balance.

    Our bodies have built-in mechanisms to nurture this balance within us. Walking under the heat of a mid-afternoon sun, we sweat and we crave the shade of a sturdy tree. If the body lacks water, it conserves what it has and it waves the flag of thirst. If the body is cold it shivers, restricts its heat to the most vital organs, and creates in us a great desire to seek warmth. The body knows when it is out of balance and, where it cannot create balance directly, it instills in us the desire to make changes that will restore balance.

    That’s how it is with the mind too. The mind seeks out its own balance. Sometimes it can do this on its own. Sometimes it needs a helping hand. This might seem like a very strange thought—but those painful emotions just might be your mind’s attempt to help. Rightly or wrongly, it believes that these disruptions are the best way to get you to do something different. The mind creates anger when it thinks that our environment (or other people) need to be changed, sadness when there has been a loss that needs to be accepted, and anxiety when it thinks our lives are in danger. So that’s the good news—the mind means well and is trying to help. The bad news is that much of the time the mind has no idea what it’s doing (you know, like when a small thing like a bill or a test grade creates the giant anxiety we should only feel when a T-Rex is chasing us). But that’s not all. In addition to these (at times useless) emotions, the mind, in a misguided attempt to help, also has a way of bombarding us with storms of negative, scary, or discouraging thoughts.

    Keep in mind that none of this is permanent. Anxiety passes. Depression lifts. Anger is forgotten. When the storm subsides and all is at peace, we experience tranquility…balance of the mind. Tranquility is the feeling of being (mostly) free from negative emotions and unwanted thoughts. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as euthymia, but most of us know it better as simply being OK. And being OK is a wonderful thing. For the rest of this book, we will be covering tactics you can try to help you feel OK. We’ll call these strategies, coping skills.

    Coping skills are anything you can do to bring yourself towards a state of tranquility. No coping skill is perfect. They will rarely work instantly. They almost never provide complete relief, but that should not discourage you. One useful way to illustrate this is to use numbers to rate negative emotions, for example, by using a scale of 1 to 10. So with regard to anger, ten out of ten (10/10) anger would be the angriest you have ever felt. A person experiencing this level of disturbance would clearly benefit from any coping skill that would reduce this number. Even reducing a negative emotion from 10/10 to 9/10 would be worthwhile—every little bit helps!

    Before we discuss some examples of actual coping skills, let’s review some things that are

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