Keynote Speakers Libby Gutschenritter, Sheridan Riolo and Rhea Kimble from the One Love Foundation presented about healthy relationships in a Zoom hosted for the Katy Benoit Campus Safety Awareness Month on Thursday, Sept. 24.
Sierra Brants, ASUI director of Safety, Health and Wellness opened the presentation by explaining the tragedy of Katy Benoit losing her life in 2011 due to relationship violence.
Emilie McLarnan, associate director of Violence Prevention in the Dean of Students Office, said she has been learning about the One Love Foundation for the past couple years. She has been connected with their regional representative for training purposes, and throughout that time she has become increasingly impressed by what they do. Her admiration of their mission has grown.
“What they do is totally in line with the message we want students to integrate into how they relate to each other,” McLarnan said.
The One Love Foundation is an organization that provides relationship education to help people recognize and understand what makes a relationship healthy or unhealthy and avoid abusive relationships.
The speakers hosted a fun and interactive workshop with videos and slideshows where the they took turns explaining the 10 aspects of an unhealthy relationship and then the 10 aspects of a healthy one.
“When we talk about relationships with One Love, it’s not just a romantic relationship,” Gutschenritter said. “We often hear relationship and think of dating. We think of marriage. We think of long term partnerships, but we have relationships with our friends, with our families. We have relationships with teammates, classmates, sorority sisters, fraternity brothers, colleagues.”
The 10 unhealthy aspects expressed in the videos and later discussed and observed throughout the night were as follows: intensity, possessiveness, manipulation, isolation, sabotage, belittling, guilting, volatility, deflecting responsibility and betrayal. For the healthy traits, the video explained comfortable pace, trust, honesty, independence, respect, equality, kindness and taking responsibility.
Once the aspects were recognized and understood by participants, the speakers shared pop culture references by analyzing the relationships of characters on popular shows.
To start this, Riolo analyzed one of the most well-known toxic couples in the television universe; Kelly and Ryan from “The Office.”
Intensity, volatility, guilting, sabotage and manipulation were all clearly present in the multi-season on-again-off-again relationship between the two.
“With Ryan and Kelly’s relationship you could probably make a case for all 10 of the unhealthy signs, but these are the particular behaviors that we pointed out,” Riolo said.
After observing a few more fictional relationships and pointing out good and bad aspects of each, the presenters talked about language to use when helping others in unhealthy relationships.
“Instead of saying, ‘your partner is so controlling you need to dump them immediately,’ focus on the unhealthy behavior,” Riolo said. “‘Hey I noticed the other day that your partner was talking about smashing your phone, do you want to talk about that? How did you feel about that?’”
She explains that this language makes a difference because instead of labeling a person, you are labeling behaviors.
“I can honestly say that I will use this approach and words in the future,” Brantz, one of the workshop participants, said. “I am also more confident in getting help if I see unhealthy signs in my relationship or others.”
Paige Fiske can be reached at [email protected].