The Fault In Our Stars Coping

The Fault in Our Coping
“The Fault in Our Stars,” written by John Green is a book about two teenage cancer patients, Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, who are faced with the challenges and the perks of cancer. Throughout the book we learn that Hazel is a miracle but will eventually die due to her death sentence from her cancer. While Augustus is missing a limb, his chances of survival still more promising than Hazels. The two eventually fall in love and by the end of the book, Hazel becomes the healthier one of the two and Augustus becomes another teen who died of cancer. Although the book was a love story, it was much more than just that. Throughout the book, different types of coping skills were demonstrated, showed how coping comes with cancer and the certain situations these characters experience.
Coping is changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to master, minimize or tolerate internal or external demands. Even though cancer has been a stressor in Hazel and Augustus’s lives for years, they are constantly trying to cope with their illness and the problems that come with it. This type of stressor is an uncontrollable stressor, being that the characters do not have control of their cancer and situation. …show more content…
More often than not cancer emotionally affects loved ones close to the actual patient heavily. Throughout the book we constantly see this affect and how Hazel interacts with her family and her friends. She frequently uses relationship-focused coping, which is the cognitive and behavioral effort to manage social relationships during a conflict or stressful time in the person’s life. She does this by trying to keep her distance from Augustus when she first meets him because she is, in her words, a grenade. Augusts as well uses this by keeping his newly found diagnoses a secret from Hazel as much as he could to not have her worry or ruin her