Life Success
For Students With Learning Disabilities:
A Teacher Guide

Emotional Coping Strategies

All people with learning disabilities experience stress in their lives as a result of living with learning problems.  Such stress can be experienced in a variety of settings -- school, work, home, and social life.  In some cases, the stress can be so significant that it leads to psychological difficulties such as anxiety or depression.  One highly successful adult described her experience during the elementary school years:

“In childhood, I think that the critical events of my life had a lot to do with my learning disability.  I carried a lot of stress about that.  It was an impact because it was always there.  I felt like a normal child, but it was always there.  So every day of your life you have to sit down and do your homework and there was ‘didn’t you listen in school?  Don’t you have an example?  Didn’t the teacher tell you how to do it? . . .’ and then there would be tears because you can’t take it from school to home in your mind.  There’s tears and there’s family conversation and there’s tension.”

Although all persons with learning disabilities may experience disability-related stress, successful individuals appear to have developed effective means of reducing and coping with stress, frustration, and the emotional aspects of their learning disabilities.  In particular, there appear to be three components of successful emotional coping:

• Awareness of the situations that trigger stress
• Recognition of developing stress
• Availability/access to and use of coping strategies

For example, a successful adult with learning disabilities in our study manages her anxiety attacks by recognizing that (a) reading aloud in a group triggers anxiety, (b) physical symptoms such as rapid breathing are signs of stress, and (c) slow deep breathing reduces her anxiety.

Successful individuals have developed strategies for reducing stress and avoiding resulting psychological difficulties.  Such strategies include seeking counseling, asking others to do unmanageable tasks on the job, changing activities periodically so stress does not build up, expressing feelings, asserting oneself, utilizing peer support and encouragement, learning to ask for help, planning ahead for difficult situations, staying away from negative or critical persons, obtaining medication if necessary, working out differences with friends and family, and sharing feelings and experiences with sympathetic family members.

Whereas recognizing triggers and using coping strategies helps successful individuals with learning disabilities cope, unsuccessful persons with learning disabilities report being blindsided by events that cause stress.  When overly stressed or emotionally wrought, they have great difficulty thinking of potential resources -- both internal and external -- to help them reduce stress and regain stability.