December 7, 2023 Inspiration Hour: Healthy Relationships

We all have many different relationships in our lives: from friends, to family, to fellow students, to co-workers, to romantic relationships, and the list goes on. For all of these different types of relationships, we can do some things to help make those relationships healthy. Here I will talk about a few of the big ideas that I have found in my experience and research that can help us to have healthy relationships.

• Build your relationship with yourself. Often we do not think about the relationship we have with ourselves and often this relationship can go neglected even if we are putting a lot of effort into other types of relationships. What I have seen is that if we work on having a healthy relationship with ourselves it makes it easier, and even possible to have healthy relationships with others. To do this, start with practicing self-compassion. As defined by Dr Kristin Neff there are 3 components to self-compassion: Self-kindness rather than self-judgment, common humanity/human connection rather than isolation, and mindfulness rather than over-identification. One way we can work on these skills is through analyzing and questioning our thoughts. Here is a resource on one way to practice this skill.
• Boundaries. This is where we spent most of our discussion during the inspiration hour, so here I will just say that boundaries are important to building healthy relationships both with ourselves and others. Here is an article that has more information on boundaries.
• Time and connection. In order to build any relationship we need to have time with the other person. There is a difference here between quality and quantity. We need some of both. Not all of our time together needs to be quality or well-planned time, but if we do not have any of that, our relationship may struggle. If it is a leisure-type relationship consider discussing each other’s interests and spending time doing activities that both are interested in as well as that one or the other is interested in so we can learn more about them and maybe why they like that activity. One example of time spent together that does not need to be planned out is what I call parallel play. All this takes is to be in the same space (physical or virtual) with the person. Often we are doing different things, but we are able to pause and talk to each other or just simply look at each other. My wife and I both need time to decompress. When we do this, we often do not like to interact much, but we like to be in the same space and support each other in our own efforts to decompress.
• Empathy. Brene Brown defines empathy as: “connecting with people so we know we’re not alone when we’re in struggle. Empathy is a way to connect to the emotion another person is experiencing; it doesn’t require that we have experienced the same situation they are going through.” More details from Brene Brown are found here. And a fun video on the difference between sympathy and empathy. As we can connect with others on an emotional level and not discount their emotional experience, and they do the same with us we can build strong and healthy relationships.
• Open Communication. In any healthy relationship, we need to be able to clearly communicate with each other. When we can have open and honest communication it allows us to further connect with each other. We should be able to talk about our emotions and our boundaries and be able to do it in a positive way. One example of this is using I statements. Also, practice active listening during your conversations. Active listening is when you are listening intently yo understand the person rather than simply listening enough to prepare your next statement. When others listen actively to us, we feel heard and it builds connections.
• Problem-Solving. We need to be able to not only talk about what we are feeling, or what is bothering us, but we need to be able to come to a positive mutual outcome. Problem-solving is a great skill individually and in relationships. Here is an article that talks about problem solving specifically in romantic relationships, but works for most other types of relationships as well. The key to problem solving in my experience is that we both need to be in a state of mind where we can listen to each other. If our stress response is activated in our body we will struggle to truly listen and come to a sensible agreement. It is okay to take a break from the conversation and do something to ground yourself like deep breathing, going for a walk, exercising, journaling, listening to music, etc. The key is that you set a time to come back together and finish the conversation when you are both in a better place. The advice that people used to give to newly married couples, “never go to bed angry,” is absolutely the wrong answer. If you need to sleep it off and then talk about it in the morning, great! Often the discussion will go better that way anyway. It is great to have a conversation with the other person about your desire to problem solve from a grounded place so that they know if you ask for a break you are not avoiding the conversation, you simply want to be in the right mindset.

This by all means is not an all-inclusive list. I believe that if we start to practice some of these techniques in our lives we will have better and healthier relationships.