My story
Relationships are important whether we like it or not. They can be either our glimmers of joy throughout everyday life, or the knotted-up Christmas lights that have been gathering dust in the garage for a year. Unless you live in a secluded cabin with no internet access, you probably engage in relationships on a daily basis. Whether they are healthy and meaningful is another story.
But most of us aren’t taught how to have healthy relationships as part of school curriculum. We go through life picking partners based on factors that won’t result in greater happiness for us, we get triggered, we lack emotion regulation, and we don’t know when or how to end relationships.
For the longest time, this was my story, too. Healthy relationship skills weren’t modeled or taught to me, and the relationships in my life needed work. This all changed when two things happened. First, I met my now-husband. I had never before met someone so compatible, and I got to see for the first time how effortlessly relationships can really unfold. The second shift was when I moved to Chicago for my Clinical Psychology doctoral program just a few months later.
There, I learned all about the work of John Gottman, Robert Sternberg, Marsha Linehan, and other titans in our field. I absorbed as much information as possible about the skills required to have a healthy relational life. I began working with therapy clients who struggled with relationship issues of all kinds—boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, friends-with-benefits, family members, coworkers… I even chose relationships as the subject of my dissertation research, where I discovered all the things that weren’t working for college women in hookup culture.
My course is a comprehensive and concrete exploration of this topic. I have combined all the skills I’ve learned over the years in scientific, clinical, and personal contexts. I believe that the contents of this course should be taught to all people.
