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Life’s Traumas
Posted: September 9, 2019By Heather Tyson, Former Overcoming Obstacles Student, Indianapolis, Indiana
In my experience, it’s life’s traumas that make the need for life skills education so vital. Life’s ups and downs are going to happen—it’s up to us to learn and share all we can about how to help ourselves with skills. A big part of the statistical problem when it comes to different sorts of violence is due to negative feelings in the home.
I quit listening to the preacher and the teachers at school when my father died. I developed a fight or flight mentality that had me going down the wrong path all of a sudden. It was stuck in my mind that I wasn’t anybody and to shut up because those were the words my mother used once she developed a drinking problem during my teenage years—she was trying to cope with death and other stuff, yet the tape recorder in my head had me feeling lost without the sober mother I knew. My prefrontal cortex was depleted at the tender age of 15 years old before attending an Overcoming Obstacles class. At first, I was reluctant to attend, but once I did it was a neat feeling that told me the teacher and the class were instructing me down the right path of life.
After getting into a fight and barely attending school, I was referred to an Overcoming Obstacles afterschool program in my community. In one of my flight mode feelings, after being reluctant but encouraged by a teacher named Mrs. Brown, I walked to the Christamore House in my community to see what life skills education was all about, and it actually shocked me because the teachers seemed down to earth and interactive. The way they communicated made all of us in the class feel comfortable talking about issues. In school, it had been a “yes” or “no” dialogue when it came to social questions, but the lessons that I learned through Overcoming Obstacles about different cultures, real-life goal setting, coping, and conflict resolution, normalized a lot of the anxious feelings that were swirling in my mind.
Life skills seem like inherited skills, but many young people haven’t been taught them because they have no one to show them the concepts of right and wrong. My dream is to give everybody the knowledge of learning life skills on the front end instead of the back end of life. Although my mother used to tell me to not look at her at times, Overcoming Obstacles talked about eye contact and a lot of those very skills resonate in my life today. I’m so thankful to have been one of the fortunate teenagers to attend this positive path changing class. It helped me become better than the worst version of myself, which I was turning into during my adolescent years.
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