What does a person do when confronting, or being run over, by one of life’s difficult events? Mental health professionals, educators and the general public are becoming increasingly aware that building resilience is the key to both surviving and thriving during these inevitable problems of life.
One important way to understand resiliency building is to realize that resilience is built primarily through relationships with caring and competent people. So what does healthy relationship building look like?
A local community organization, the ACEs Resiliency Coalition, known as ARC, has just completed a project to help our community with this issue. The video series Building Relationship Skills Across the Lifespan has just been released for free public access, and is available on our website crowwingenergized.org/mental-fitness/ .
ARC divided the lifespan into four stages — the early childhood years, school-age children, early to middle adulthood, and the elder years. Subject matter experts in each of these lifespans were interviewed about the key issues in their portion of the lifespan. In addition to the common developmental milestones, they were also asked what people can do to improve relationship skills.
Some of the common themes that surfaced in the interviews were understanding child and adult development, acquiring emotional and social intelligence, empathy development, listening actively to others, honoring life stories, and communicating in ways that are honest and respectful.
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Each video in the series is 20-30 minutes long. They are intended for use in both private and public settings. ARC hopes that people who can initiate public conversations in schools, faith communities, civic groups and businesses will sponsor gatherings around this video series. A one hour timeframe is adequate to introduce and verbally process each video.
Following the viewing of the video segment, ARC hopes that each group will have an open ended discussion. Some questions that the discussion leaders might consider are:
What is your first reaction to the video?
What content surprised you, reinforced you, or are you questioning?
Was the video valuable? Why or why not?
What is one personal take away from the viewing of the video and the conversation we’ve had about it?
If your group hosts a video viewing and discussion, ARC would like to hear about it. Please send your comments to Karen Johnson at Karen.Johnson@EssentiaHealth.org .
