Strategic Bastards and the Art of Coping Flexibility
Tuesday, June 17, 2025.
Let’s say life throws a flaming bag of explosive sh*t at your doorstep. As I see it, gentle reader, you have three options:
Cry.
Meditate and hope for inner peace.
Quietly, methodically, open your Notes app and craft a three-phase mitigation plan with color-coded contingencies.
If you chose Option 3, congratulations: you might be a strategic bastard.
And you might also be better equipped to handle depression.
What Is Coping Flexibility, Really?
Coping flexibility isn’t about being stoic or zen.
It’s about having a diversified psychological portfolio. It means knowing that soothing yourself with peppermint tea is lovely—but sometimes, what you really need is to build a strategic pivot table for your life and kick some ass.
Clinically speaking, coping flexibility is the ability to:
Recognize when your current strategy isn’t working
Drop it without clinging
Shift to a new, context-appropriate response
Iterate with resilience rather than perfectionism
It’s less about raw emotional strength and more about cognitive agility.
Research consistently shows that people who can flexibly shift coping strategies based on the situation—rather than relying on the same one-size-fits-all method—experience less depression, less anxiety, and recover more quickly from adversity.
In short: coping flexibility is not emotional avoidance. It’s strategic adaptation. And it’s deeply under-appreciated in a therapy culture that sometimes over-prioritizes vulnerability without emphasizing discernment.
When Strategy Outperforms Sentimentality
This is where Machiavellian agency enters like a calm executive during an office fire.
McIlvenna et al. (2025) found that this particular subtrait—defined by goal orientation, long-range planning, and emotional detachment from ego drama—is positively correlated with coping flexibility and negatively correlated with depressive symptoms.
We’re not talking about the mustache-twirling villain. We’re talking about someone who knows how to walk into a chaotic emotional scene and think, “Which variable can I control? What’s the next best move?”
In couples therapy, I often see this in one partner who appears cool under pressure—not because they don’t care, but because they’re scanning the system for inefficiencies.
They're not emotionally distant—they're strategically engaged.
And in the context of mental health, that’s not dysfunction. That’s a form of high-functioning resilience.
What About the Narcissists?
Now enter narcissistic extraversion, the charming, driven sibling of the darker narcissistic traits like antagonism.
This isn’t about being insufferable at dinner parties. This is about having just enough self-regard to say, “I deserve better,” and pivot out of depressive spirals with some self-preserving flair.
The research shows it doesn’t directly buffer against depression.
But it does correlate with stronger Machiavellian agency—which, in turn, supports coping flexibility. Think of narcissistic extraversion as the rocket fuel and Machiavellian agency as the navigation system.
When working together, they form a psychological engine that says: I believe in my worth, and I have a plan to preserve it. That’s not delusion. That’s defensible optimism.
Practical Takeaways: Building Strategic Coping as a Skill
This is not about cultivating arrogance or becoming a better manipulator. This is about developing a cognitive skill set that allows you to manage complex emotional terrain like a tactician, not a martyr.
Here’s how to build it:
Run Emotional Post-Mortems
After every emotionally intense experience, don’t just “move on.” Evaluate it like a system failure. What worked? What didn’t? Would you use that coping strategy again?
Create a Psychological Decision Tree
Don’t just feel your feelings—map your options. Pre-make coping menus based on the kind of stress: relational, existential, financial, etc. Give yourself pathways.
Practice Reversal Tolerance
The opposite of flexibility is rigidity. So intentionally practice switching strategies even when one is “kind of working.” Strengthen the muscle of emotional agility by learning to pivot.
Elevate Strategic Empathy
Feelings aren’t facts, but they’re data. Use your empathy not just to validate—but to plan. Empathy that doesn’t lead to insight is just indulgence.
But What About Compassion?
Compassion isn’t softness. It’s intelligent warmth.
And if your compassion doesn’t include the ability to triage your own nervous system during someone else’s breakdown, it’s not sustainable—it’s just codependency in a nicer coat.
Disciplined detachment is not emotional suppression. It’s emotional prioritization.
And it allows you to be present without drowning.
In relationships, this often looks like one person saying, “I see your storm, but I won’t join it. I’ll anchor us instead.”
The cultural script that says the only good partner is the deeply empathic one ignores the stabilizing role of the strategic partner. Strategic bastards keep the ship afloat. They feel just as deeply—they just express it through stability, not symbiosis.
Closing Thoughts
We’ve spent decades moralizing personality—casting traits like detachment, confidence, or strategic thinking as suspicious, even pathological.
But maybe we were too quick to label.
Perhaps the people who stay calm in the storm aren’t cold—they’re just better calibrated.
Maybe the minds that plan their way out of despair aren’t missing something human—they’re just refusing to drown for the aesthetic.
Resilience isn’t always tender. Sometimes it looks like silence.
Sometimes it looks like spreadsheets. And sometimes—when done with integrity—it resembles positive self-regard translated into structure.
So if your nervous system speaks in spreadsheets, timelines, and logic trees?
Good. Listen to it.
You’re not too much.
You’re not too little.
You’re just one of the ones who survives the flood by building a boat.
If you’ve been told you’re too analytical, too distant, too "head over heart"—reconsider the insult.
Strategic cognition is not the opposite of humanity.
It’s what allows many people to survive deeply human experiences (such as profound interpersonal betrayal) without becoming emotionally unmoored.
So maybe you’re not broken.
Maybe you’re built for the harder parts of life.
The unspeakable ones. The chaotic ones.
And maybe the very traits that make you less poetic are the same ones that make you so fucking durable.
You don’t need to feel everything to be whole.
You just need to know when to feel, when to act, and when to get out your damn spreadsheet.
Want to know which of your darker traits might secretly be helping you thrive?
Drop me a line and I’ll send you our worksheet: Finding the Function in Your Flaws
It includes:
A self-inventory of your dominant coping style
Reflection prompts to reframe shame into strategy
A couples-friendly map of shared and clashing resilience patterns
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
RESOURCES:
McIlvenna, M., Fino, E., & Papageorgiou, K. A. (2025). More than just aversive: The bridge between the dark triad and depression and coping flexibility, the role of Machiavellianism. Personality and Individual Differences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2025.112345