Mental illness can constantly be overlooked, but luckily the general perception of mental illness has improved throughout the years. There are now many resources and therapists that support people who need to heal.
According to the National Library of Medicine, 48.4% of women and 48.8% of men in the United States experience physiological aggression by those around them. This percentage continues to increase every year and being provided with healthy coping strategies can cause a decrease in this number.
Trauma causes a lot of negative impacts in a person’s life such as trust issues, insomnia, panic attacks, anxiety, and many other things. However, learning healthy coping strategies can help a person to avoid stress or unpleasant emotions that are affecting their everyday lives.
Odette Reyes is a therapist at the Institute for the Redesign of Learning agency who is full of determination and believes that everyone should have someone by their side through difficult times. This mindset continues to make her an amazing mental health specialist who does everything in her power to ensure that steps are taken in order for someone to improve their mental health.
Physiological aggression can have long term effects which is why Odette shared
some of the best coping mechanisms she has found after seven years of experience. “First of all, I don’t really believe in exposure therapy but I do feel like finding a safe person and a person they feel comfortable with and try to ask that person for help because if you don’t trust a person that’s going to make it even worse and harder for you to ask for help.” This will allow a person to feel at peace and allow them to develop trust with other people.
Odette continues to find solutions to help others such as music, meditation, and journaling. “For sure journaling, like writing about your experiences right I think that’s a great one. Listening to music I feel like music helps you through any stage of your life since there is music through happy moments, there’s music for hard moments, there is even music for when you are mad and you just want to let it out,” Odette explains, “So music is another powerful one, guided imagery or mediation are also very good coping skills to help you connect with yourself and center yourself.” Odette believes that everyone should try these coping strategies anytime they are having a bad day in order to continue feeling that sense of hope that will help the process of your healing.
Odette wants everyone to turn to healthy coping strategies instead of unhealthy coping mechanisms such as ““Going into drugs, alcohol. Those are definitely ones or addictions obviously any types of addictions like gambling, again drugs, substance use.” Odette hopes that people realize these are not good ways to heal because it gives you long term negative effects.
Understanding the difference between healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms will prevent many mental health issues and hopefully prevent many suicide cases. In order to heal you have to ensure you are moving forward in the right steps that a therapist is hopefully encouraging you to take. Odette gives some encouragement for everyone who wants to move on to the next chapter of their lives. “ First of all I would tell them to sit with their feelings to not bottle them up and that whatever they are going through is valid because life is hard but to also remember that for every bad day they could also have a good day.”
