The mission of Healthy Relationships Initiative is to promote happy, healthy, and safe relationships of all kinds. When we think of the ingredients of healthy relationships–like trust, respect, safety, and acceptance–doesn’t it seem like everyone would want to have the healthiest relationships they can imagine? Who wouldn’t want to enjoy positive, caring, and supportive relationships in all areas of their lives?
I believe that healthy relationships are a universal goal, and that each of us has a deep yearning for closeness and connection with others. And yet, there’s a big difference between wanting to have healthy relationships and actually having them in the real world!
So, what gets in the way of people’s deeply-held desires for having healthy relationships and their actual ability to build and sustain healthy relationships over the long-term? This is one of the major questions we’ve looked at through our planning process to prepare for launching the Healthy Relationships Initiative.
Our goal was to identify the main barriers faced by members of our community that can stand in the way of building healthy relationships. Identifying these barriers is extremely important for our overall efforts to foster a community-wide initiative that promotes healthy relationships. In part, building healthy relationships is about helping people build up their knowledge and skills to support their relationships. But, all the knowledge and skills in the world will only go so far when people face different types of barriers that would keep them from achieving their relationship goals.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a Social-Ecological Model as a framework for understanding community-based prevention initiatives, and this model tells us that we need to understand how societal, community, relationship, and individual factors work together to impact people’s lives and relationships. We’ve used this framework for understanding the significant barriers to healthy relationships in Guilford County. To inform our understanding of community barriers, we’ve used a variety of sources of information, including our community needs assessment survey, focus groups, existing data reports, and input from our HRI Steering Committee.
In a meeting with our Steering Committee, we asked the community leaders who serve on the committee to label “bricks in the wall” that represent the barriers they’ve seen as presenting challenges for people in Guilford County. You can see some examples of the brick walls they came up with below:
Across all the different ways that we’ve identified barriers to healthy relationships in our community, some common themes have come up, including the following barriers at different levels of the Social-Ecological Model:
Relational: Lack of family models, parenting stress, lack of supportive relationships, communication problems, being overwhelmed with responsibilities, lack of time for one another
Community: Isolation, housing, transportation, language barriers, difficulty navigating community systems, economic challenges
Societal: Stigma around seeking help, political influences, biases, racial disparities, lack of jobs, proliferation of technology, societal norms that encourage negative relationship behaviors
What other barriers would you add to the list? As we move forward with launching and growing the Healthy Relationships Initiative, we hope you’ll partner with us by working to remove the barriers in our community that make it more difficult for people to build and maintain healthy relationships. Working together, we can build resources that offer support for strengthening relationships in Guilford County!
You may have never heard this song by Neil Sedaka, but the lyrics of his infamous song, “Breaking Up is Hard To Do” really speaks to the difficulty of ending a relationship. The pressures around “getting over” you ex may seem to be all around you, no matter where you may turn for relief. It’s quite possible that at this age, you may be experiencing a breakup for the first time and may have no idea how to handle the situation. Maybe this person was your first love and you’ve having a hard time moving on from the relationship? On the other hand, maybe you’re feeling guilty about breaking up with the person you once dating and are having second thoughts?
All of these feelings are completely normal to have after a breakup. These more uncomfortable feelings indicate that you truly cared about this person and their well-being.
To help guide you in this process, refer to some of the tips below as you navigate this difficult transition.
Take your time to recover. Don’t let others dictate how long it should take for you to move on after your breakup. You may be experiencing the end of the relationship as particularly sad and heartbreaking, so if it takes a little longer for you to recover, that is okay! Don’t feel rushed to “get over it,” or “move on,” even if you feel pressure from friends and family. Appreciate any small steps you can take in moving forward as these small steps will turn into bigger steps you make towards moving on when the time is right.
Seek support from friends and family. Although your friends and family may be encouraging you to move on more quickly than you may be ready for (and this can be frustrating at times) they can also serve as a support system for you during this difficult time. After a breakup, you may have more time to reconnect with friends and family, which can be particularly helpful after ending a relationship. These relationships are important to helping you stay connected socially as opposed to becoming withdrawn, isolated and lonely.
Consider what you learned from your relationship and breakup. Take this time to learn about yourself after the relationship has ended. What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about how you operate in relationships? What can you take away from this experience? Try to keep a positive perspective on the lessons you can learn as these lessons can help you develop more positive experiences in your future relationships!
Seek help if needed. Sometimes we need extra help during hard times. A professional counselor can help you make sense of your breakup and how you can move forward in your future. Don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed if you feel the need to seek extra support. Ending a relationship is NOT easy by any means and in seeking professional support, you are acknowledging both the significance of the relationship and the importance of improving your own emotional health.
Technology has been part of the dating game for a while, but in recent years with the increase of online dating apps, smart phones and social media platforms, the use of technology in the dating world has transformed into a trend that doesn’t appear to be dying anytime soon!
So whether you’re into using technology as a part of your dating experience or not, you’re bound to have some experience dealing with technology at some point in time. Some important to conversations to have with your partner may include the following:
What are the rules around social media applications such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, etc.?
Do we post our relationship status online?
Is it ok to friend and/or follow my friends?
What is your comfort level around making comments about our relationship online?
What are the expectations around responding to text messages? Do you expect for me to text back in a certain amount of time? How often to you expect to communicate via text message as opposed to talking on the phone or meeting in person?
What are your expectation about sharing passwords to various online accounts?
What are your feelings around sharing photos and sexting?
Remember, there are no hard and fast rules as to how you should utilize technology in your dating relationships. Some relationships are more fluid and open with partners not having an issue with certain types of online communication. Regardless of your feelings around incorporating technology into your dating relationship/(s) it’s important to have open, honest conversations about your feelings and expectations with the person/(s) you’re involved with.
Be careful with how you choose to engage in relationships online. While not intended to scare you, it’s important to remember that people can be deceptive in how they choose to engage with others online. Sometimes individuals may not reveal the entire truth about themselves (i.e. sharing false photos or information). This is certainly not the case in ALL online relationships, but it’s important to be careful.
So remember, before you post “It’s Complicated,” as your relationship status on Facebook, remember that utilizing technology in your dating relationships can also be just as complicated!
As we launch Healthy Relationships Initiative this month, we want to introduce you to the leaders of HRI. Today, we’re featuring Christine Murray, who is the Director of HRI and an Associate Professor in the UNCG Department of Counseling and Educational Development.
Tell us a little bit about your professional background and how it connects to your work with the Healthy Relationships Initiative.
My background is in the counseling field, and specifically couple and family counseling. I knew very early on that I wanted to be a family counselor, and in fact made that decision when I was in high school. When I went to college, I loved learning about family dynamics and the psychology of relationships. I went to the University of Florida for graduate school to become a marriage and family therapist, but ultimately went the academic route to become a professor. I’ve been working at UNCG since 2005, where I coordinate our department’s couple and family counseling track. I love working with our students as they launch their careers in the counseling field!
In recent years, most of my research has focused on survivors of intimate partner violence and other forms of abuse in relationships and families. I’m passionate about this work and stay connected to research and practice that addresses violence and abuse through such activities as the See the Triumph campaign that I co-founded and service on the Executive Committee of the Guilford County Family Justice Center.
My work with Healthy Relationships Initiative is highly connected with my work on violence and abuse. Through HRI, we are “swimming upstream” to work toward preventing violence by promoting safe, healthy, and happy relationships. Violence and abuse are preventable, but we need to support people in learning information and skills that can help them to build and maintain health and safety in their relationships.
Why are you excited to be involved with the Healthy Relationships Initiative?
There are so many parts of HRI that I’m excited about, but one of the things that I’m most excited about is the opportunity to partner with so many great organizations and people in our community. You can see many examples of this in our partner organizations throughout our February launch activities, but you’ll see many more partnerships and collaborations as the initiative evolves in the coming months and years. It’s going to take many different segments of our community working together to truly change the culture around relationships in our community, and I love how we can be innovative in partnerships when we get out of our silos and start working together across disciplines and organizations.
I’m also especially excited to be involved with HRI because we get to take a strengths-based focus on relationships and families in our community. There are a lot of challenges, problems, and barriers in our community that keep people from having the best possible version of relationships that they could experience. But, we assume that people already possess resources and strengths that they can build upon to address these challenges. Through HRI, we have the opportunity to support people as they learn new information and skills to strengthen their relationships, from whatever starting point they begin that process!
If you could change one thing about relationships in our community, what would you change?
The biggest change I’d like to see is for more people to feel comfortable reaching out for help to address the relationship and family challenges they face. There is a big stigma in our society that often keeps people from admitting they are having problems. People can feel pressure for everything to look okay and that everything is under control. Far too many people suffer in silence because they’re afraid of reaching out for help or admitting that they have problems.
The truth is that relationships are hard! Problems and challenges are a natural and expected part of relationships and family life. The stigma around admitting you’re struggling in relationships–or any other area of your life–is a really major issue for our community. It’s certainly possible that problems will go away on their own, like the old saying that says, “Time heals all wounds.” This may be true in some cases, but what I’ve seen more often is that, when people don’t resolve or manage the problems in their relationships, they actually get worse!
It’s ironic, then, that the things people do to act like everything’s okay actually can make problems worse! It’s a vicious cycle, but it can be stopped. Problems are much, much easier to address when we catch them early on. That’s why it’s so important for our work with HRI that we do all we can to change the culture in our community to one where people feel comfortable admitting they are struggling and then reaching out for help. And, when they reach out, we need to make sure that they are able to easily identify and access the help they need.
How have your own experiences with relationships and your family influenced your thinking about the Healthy Relationships Initiative?
My professional background has equipped me with a lot of knowledge about relationships. And yet, I always have to sort of laugh when people refer to me as a “relationship expert.” If I’ve learned anything through the intersections of my personal life and my professional career, it’s that there’s a huge difference between having head knowledge about relationships and the messiness and complications of relationships in the real world!
I’ve read many textbooks and other sources that are full of theories and research about relationships and families. It always makes so much sense and seems easy in the textbooks. But then, we get to real life relationships, and it’s anything but easy! Every person, and every relationship is so unique. There are no easy answers to many of the relationship and family challenges that people face. However, I believe that people can benefit in all of their relationships if they learn information and skills for fostering strong relationships.
In my personal life, I’ve experienced some of the best and worst that relationships have to offer. I’m blessed with many great, supportive relationships with friends and family members, and I’m thankful for this every day. At the same time, I’ve been through some major relationship and family challenges that I wouldn’t wish on anyone! I’d like to think that all of these experiences have helped me to understand more deeply the types of challenges that other people may be going through, so that I can be best equipped to help them through those challenges.
What do you think is the #1 key to a happy, healthy, and safe relationship?
I’m going to say there are actually two keys to happy, healthy, and safe relationships, and they are kindness and a willingness to grow and learn.
Kindness says, “I’m going to intentionally seek out ways to show I care for you.” It’s really tempting to take relationships for granted over time. We can start forgetting to show the people who mean the most to us the kindness that we show to others. But when we try to be intentional about bringing kindness to our closest relationships, we show those people that they matter for us, and we infuse those relationships with positive energy and opportunities for connection.
A willingness to grow and learn says, “I’m not you, but I want to understand you, and I’m willing to make changes in my life so that we can build the best relationships we can possibly have.” When we can admit that we still have learning and growing to do in order to make our relationships the best they can be, we keep an open mind for seeing new ways to connect in our relationships. When it comes to relationships, I think that what we do know is often less important than what we’re willing to admit we don’t know.
In my view, happy, healthy, and safe relationships start with a foundation of kindness and openness to learning and growing. When people bring these two characteristics to a relationship, it opens so many opportunities for building great relationships
Imagine you’re baking some cookies. As you prepare the cookie batter, you may change a few things up a bit in the recipe–who doesn’t like a few extra chocolate chips, after all? But, overall, you need to get the right mix of ingredients in the cookies, or they just won’t taste right. Have you ever added baking powder when you were supposed to use baking soda? Or too much salt? Now, I’m nowhere close to being a master chef, but I can tell you that food doesn’t turn out right when you don’t have the right ingredients in the recipe.
Relationships can be a lot like baking in that way. There are important ingredients to include in a relationship to help it become happy, healthy, and safe. When one or more of the important ingredients are missing from a relationship, the relationship can feel off, or it can start to deteriorate into having a lot of major problems over time. Just like a cookie doesn’t turn out right without the best mix of ingredients, relationships won’t turn out just right if we don’t put in the right mix of positive relationship ingredients.
What are these important positive relationship ingredients? As we’ve planned for the launch of the Healthy Relationships Initiative, we’ve thought carefully about what it means to have a “healthy” relationship. It is not our goal to suggest that there is one ideal way to have a healthy relationship! We know that the “recipe” for healthy relationships can take many forms, and people’s ideas about what makes a healthy relationship are impacted by many factors, including their cultural background, their religious views, and their past experiences.
Together with our Steering Committee and other partners, we’ve worked to identify core features of relationships that we believe are relatively universally accepted as being a part of healthy relationships. We know that our list isn’t perfect–part of the beauty of relationships is that they are each unique, just like the people in them. However, we believe that the following characteristics are common among healthy relationships, even across different backgrounds:
What are your reactions to this list of ingredients for healthy relationships? Would you add any others to the list? One important way that our metaphor of a “recipe” for healthy relationships falls short is that, unlike cookies, relationships grow and change over time. Once a cookie is made, it’s baking process is complete. However, the process of relationships is never really complete.
What this means for the ingredients of healthy relationships is that different ingredients may be more or less necessary at different times in a relationship’s development. For example, there are times when conflict management skills take on the main role in the relationship, while fun may be more important at other times. Part of the key to fostering healthy relationships over time is for people to know when to activate important relationship skills to best support the unique context of their relationship at that point in time.
As you think of the positive ingredients involved in your own relationships, consider steps you could take to infuse more of them into your connections with the people who are important to you! With cookies, too much of an ingredient can lead to a baking fail. With relationships, however, being intentional about infusing more positive ingredients usually helps to strengthen and build healthier, happier relationships!
The mission of the Healthy Relationships Initiative is to infuse the local community with information, resources, and services to promote happy, healthy, and safe relationships and prevent the negative consequences of relationship distress. There’s an important meaning behind those three words–happy, healthy, and safe. These words are meant to capture different levels of the quality of relationships that are important in people’s lives.
Even though our main focus through HRI is on couple and family relationships, the basic elements of healthy relationships apply to many different types of relationships, including your friendships, work relationships, and even brief interactions you have with people everyday in your life–like your neighbors, employees of businesses you visit, and social acquaintances.
An assumption underlying HRI is that, at any given point in time in our community, there are people at differing levels of relationship quality. We assume that some people in our community enjoy happy, healthy, and safe relationships and are not currently facing any major relationship or family challenges. At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are facing very serious relationship and/or family problems, which might include family violence and abuse, substance abuse, serious mental health challenges, infidelity, or divorce. Between these two positive and negative extremes, others in the community may have overall positive relationships, but new problems may be developing, or they are facing ongoing problems that do not create high levels of distress. This spectrum of relationship quality is depicted in the figure below:
Where do your own relationships fall along this spectrum? It’s likely that there’s some variation in the quality of the different types of relationships in your life, such as a couple relationship, a parent-child relationship, your friendships, and your relationships at work or in the community.
Beyond just thinking about the overall quality of your relationships, we offer you another way to consider your relationships, using the idea of happy, healthy, and safe relationships that is part of our mission for HRI.
What do we mean by Happy, Healthy, and Safe Relationships?
Although the terms–happy, healthy, and safe–may sound somewhat simple, there’s actually a bigger idea behind them. Each of these terms represents a level of relationship quality, with safety as the foundation, healthy as the next level, and happy as the peak or optimal level of relationship functioning. Let’s take a closer look at each of these levels:
First, safe relationships are free from all forms of abuse, neglect, and any other threats to one or more person’s physical or emotional safety, well-being, and development. Any form of violence or abuse in a relationship violates the trust and safety in that relationship, and violence and abuse are antithetical to healthy and happy relationships.
At the next level of relationship quality, we have healthy relationships. Although each individual’s definitions of healthy relationships may vary, the core of healthy relationships is built on respect, trust, safety, acceptance, freedom of choice, positive communication and conflict management, and fun. Perfection is not a requirement for healthy relationships: even healthy relationships encounter challenges and conflicts. In healthy relationships, these challenges become opportunities for growth and learning.
We use the term happy relationships to describe those relationships that are at their optimal level of functioning. In addition to being safe and healthy, happy relationships are joy-filled. Happy relationships offer people a nurturing source of care and support. People in happy relationships treasure their time together, make each other a priority, and have a deep understanding of one another.
It’s important to keep in mind that the quality of relationships can change over time, especially as relationships grow, change, start, end, and face challenges. This is very normal, and it’s part of why relationships are so complex!
So, what about you? Where do your relationships stand when you consider different ways of describing their quality? No matter where you’re starting from, there are steps you can take to strengthen and maintain your relationships. Our goal through the Healthy Relationships Initiative is to meet people where they are to help them have access to information and resources to take the next step (whatever it is!) toward strengthening their relationships. We hope you’ll stay connected with us in the coming months and years as HRI takes root in our community!
We are pleased to announce that we are now offering several Tip Sheets from our Healthy Relationships Initiative Toolkits in Spanish! Please visit http://www.guilfordhri.org/espanol/ to download Tip Sheets for Couples, Families with Young Children, and Teenagers!
Nos complace comparti Conjuntos de Herramientas para la Iniciativa de Relaciones Saludables en Español. Por favor visite http://www.guilfordhri.org/espanol/ para más información.
