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Tina: Coping is how you manage stress on either an everyday thing that's happening in your life or a tragedy. It's how you manage it and how you overcome it.

Sara: Coping is trying to deal with either your emotion or the problem in a stressful either situation or an environment that causes you to feel either stressed or uncomfortable.

Abebriel: Problem-focused coping is where you try to change the stressor itself. So the thing that's causing you stress, you change that rather than trying to change the way you feel about it.

Aleigh: I have a very huge fear of clowns. So if I see a clown, I immediately get anxious, scared, terrified, things like that. My children love clowns, so I'm having to learn how to find a way to cope with seeing clowns. If I really can't handle it emotionally, I may have their grandparents take them instead.

Sara: When I had to deal with it was putting my dog down. I was devastated. Then I started to realize that there were little things I could do about it like maybe slowly start to get rid of her toys, give them away. It really helped me get past that, so that would be how I dealt with the situation itself. When it comes to the emotion-focused coping, I started really coming to the sense that it was OK and that I could talk to others about it and just help myself grieve and get past that situation.

Looking into the future and knowing that I have a huge final exam coming but I also have a job interview the day before, I know that being extremely proactive, knowing that I'll be very busy, and maybe starting early or changing my schedule early, studying a lot earlier for that final exam is going to help with that stress.

Tina: In my community, we had five teens die in four weeks, including my son. His best friend died with him, and then we had another teen die right after that. The community fell apart. That just overwhelmed me. Right away, I jumped into fundraising and raising money in memory of these kids, my son, whatever. I did several different things like went to the state capital and passed teen driving laws and all this other stuff, and we haven't lost a teen in 10 years.

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