Healthy Relationships for Life

Yesterday RISE offered its “Healthy Relationships for Life” workshop for 10 local teens in Johnson City.

Participants worked together to:

• Craft lists of characteristics that make a good friend, a good romantic partner, and a person who is good for themselves. They realized that healthy romantic partners need to have mostly the same characteristics that good friends have, like being trustworthy and kind, sharing time, respecting boundaries, and being fun among others.

• Craft lists of characteristics they want to avoid in friendships, in romantic partners, and in their relationship with themselves. These included manipulation and coersion, physical and emotional abuse, lying, and disrespect.

• Determine whether some situations between friends or partners seemed healthy or unhealthy—and share why. They found there isn’t one right answer to every situation, and that an unhealthy behavior doesn’t necessarily make a whole relationship unhealthy—unless friends or partners cannot or will not work to make the relationship healthier.

• Make a list of things that give some people more power, like money, education, having a home, having support from friends/family, age, size, strength, popularity, color, and gender.

• Evaluate the power dynamics of different fictional couples to see how/whether they can balance power in the relationship. They noticed that a power imbalance doesn’t mean that abuse will happen, but makes it easier for abuse to happen and for the abuser to hide it.

This workshop is appropriate for teens through adult participants. If this is something that would be helpful for people you work with or are in community with, please reach out—we love to work with partners in the area to create healthier relationships for life!