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Are modern coping strategies truly helping us flourish — or feeding a deeper hunger? Explore how psychological myths about happiness, growth, and identity may be leaving us emptier than before.

The Slide to Psychologising Life

How often do you read about ‘how to cope’ in the everyday press, and in professional magazines? Such writing is often presented as an endeavour to help us care more about others, and to be fair, is probably sincere at that level.

But how often are those efforts cover for the ‘good lies’ of the Father of Lies because they are roundly, soundly and pervasively reductionist? I suggest, often.

Indeed, authors such as Carl Trueman have been describing in detail how much of Western society has followed this pattern of thinking:

1. Individual freedom is paramount
2. That includes how we form our identity
3. The critical focus point for identity has become our sexuality
4. Sexual identity has become politicised into claims of ultimate autonomy rights
5. And this takes us back to point ‘a’…

I was reminded of this recently in listening to further debates about our core values in Australia. Beliefs about identity were excluded from the debates, apart from ethnic identity. But interestingly, each set of beliefs does have ideas about identity, and in our multicultural and multi-religious society, that means ideas about identity and coping can be very diverse.

However, it is probably fair to say that the majority of ‘secular’ Australians (those who are atheistic or pagan) broadly conform to the pattern identified by Trueman.

That means that when they are in personal distress, they would look to ideas of how to cope. And therein lay more deceits because those self-focused identity basic assumptions do not reflect reality well.

Adopting Psychological Coping Strategies

Decades ago, Gerald May (in his 1982 Will and Spirit) started to observe this conundrum in what he called ‘psychological coping strategies’ within the helping professions. He noted that these strategies looked helpful (in what we would call wellbeing), but in fact fell short in inviting people to more mature places in their lives.

May claimed that many people who look for spiritual nourishment through modern psychological methods “often wind up increasingly hungry” (p. 11). He described three categories of hunger-inducing psychological methods, each of which we can see could be included within wellbeing strategies.

The Coping Mentality

In his description of ‘the coping mentality’, May suggested that people see life as one challenge after another, and that our wellbeing work is presented as seeking to overcome these stresses. Therefore, wellbeing success is determined by how well we minimise stress.

However, May claimed that maybe unpleasant things are a part of life from which we are called to learn. He suggested that if we try to avoid unpleasantness, or believe that we should never have any, we ultimately experience deeper loneliness because we believe we are being controlled (by our miseries), even though we are working to control all of life.

As he expressed it: “Seldom is any credence given to the possibility that something truly creative might come through these unpleasant feelings.” (pp. 12–13) If May was correct, then a question arises, “How does flourishing and wellbeing help with transforming unpleasantness into creativity?”

The Happiness Mentality

May’s second psychological myth is the ‘happiness mentality’. This is the myth that “… if one lives one’s life correctly, one will be happy”. The corollary is that “… if one is not happy, one is doing something wrong.” (p. 14) Therefore, “… any sign of unhappiness in their lives is a symptom of psychological or spiritual disorder”.

Such a way of thinking might lead to increased demand for wellbeing activities, but it does “deprive [us] of the rich dark side of life, the leaven, the creative complementarity without which happiness is empty.” (p. 15)

The Growth Mentality

May’s third identified shallow strategy, the ‘growth mentality’, carries the assumption that “… human beings can find wholeness of fulfilment through their creative potentials” (p. 18). This third strategy is consistent with the other two in fostering the belief that people can “… learn, earn, or otherwise achieve fulfilment by virtue of personal will” (p. 20). Despite its promises of encouragement and solutions, “… as long as it holds to the supremacy of self, however, these attempts are bound not only to fail but also to distort and confuse the search”.

All three attempts “… integrate psychology and spirituality within a framework where personal will, self-importance, or even psychology itself has the upper hand”. (p. 21). In contrast to these strategies, May (1982) suggested we should journey into deeper selflessness.

The difficulty inherent in our broken humanity is, as May suggests, that we have natural tendencies towards wilfulness in terms of our decision-making. This could include professional learning about wellbeing, if it feeds the myth of happiness through self-will.

And Today?

As we noted, Carl Trueman has described in depth that we live in an era where identity is publicly focussed through a politically sexualised lens. This way of viewing life thrives on the myth that we are our own. That myth is reinforced when we try and use the supposedly self-sufficient coping strategies outlined by May.

Those lies are sustained because we marginalise or dismiss the Creator God because we deny our own spirituality – the ‘unseens’ that are more important than the ‘seens’, as the apostle Paul put it. (2 Corinthians 4:18)

So, what can we do this week to help those around us be more attuned to the centrality of the non-physical aspects of our humanity – and hopefully, help them see more of the awe and wonder of the Creator through His Creation, rather than be focussed on a false basis for identity and coping?

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