The Blowfish Blog

Couple’s Couch: Relationship Values or What I learned From Teaching Teens, Part 1

I’m not just a sex writer. It’d be nice if writing were my full-time post, but on the off hours I earn the “big bucks” as an intern therapist.

Glamorous is not the word I would use to describe my current position providing counseling services for adolescent girls in the juvenile justice system. These ladies are some tough cookies. What I didn’t glean about their way of going about the world from their probation records (all participants in the program have multiple offenses), I inferred from their ferocious desire to keep me at arms length. Teens are a tough crowd and these teens in particular and far less than “warm.”

So what am I to teach these girls about relationships that they will stay in the room and tolerate?

I know very little about what it must have looked like to grow up in homes with little to no security (emotionally, physically, financially, etc). While having taken some courses on “cultural competency,” I am a far cry from understanding them as cultural beings or what it may mean for them to be 15 and imprisoned and away from lovers and siblings, their pimps and dealers, their friends and/or their babies. By any kind of measure I am a skinny, young, wealthy Caucasian woman from “the city” and I can only imagine what it must be like to have me help them think about their own relationships.

And yet, these young women are teaching me more about my own way of interacting with the world than I could hope to assist in illuminating for them. I’m inspired by what they go through to define themselves and how they must fight for every bit of love they can get their hands on, even when it comes with violence.

As they build new understanding of their relationships with others and learn about sex, love, abuse, and the core of relationships, I’m finding that I was never explicitly taught about these constructs when I was growing up. Relationships just were, whether on not I chose to think about them.

But what I am learning is that learning about them might make for stronger, better, more actualized relationships. For the next few weeks, I’d like to bring some conceptual models of relationships to the table and see what we think of them. As these girls learn about their choices, maybe we can learn more about our own. It’s never too late, after all.

Lesson One: Relationship Values

I often think about the way that I go about intimate relationships. Ruminating is what I do best. But I don’t often consider where I got the relationship values that I hold most dear, nor what I understand intimate relationships to consist of on some deep, unconscious level.

While leading a group with the girls last week entitled “My Relationship Role Models,” I asked the group to think about the very first intimate relationship they spent time around as a young person. The focus of the group was looking carefully at what we learned about relationships from the important people in our lives and seeing how they have affected, or continue to affect, the way we build our relationships now.

Together we considered our options for this first, formative relationship model. Many people chose their parents, although some selected their sibling’s relationship, their grandparents, the leaders of their group home, or some other coupling.

(I encourage you to play along this exercise with me as I run through it now. Maybe we will learn something together . . .).

After selecting a couple to examine, we privately answered the following questions:

1. When I think about the relationship between _____ and _____, the first words that come to mind are _____, _____, _____ and _____.
2. This relationship gave me the impression that men are _____. This relationship gave me the impression that women are _____.
3. The best things I saw about this relationship were _____.
4. The worst things I saw about this relationship were _____.
5. Most of the time, being around this relationship makes/made me feel _____.
6. These are some of the ways this relationship has affected me individually: _____.
7. These are some of the ways this relationship has affected my own relationships: _____.
   (note: question two implies a heterosexual dynamic between relationship partners. It is my belief however, that even non-hetero couples can still teach us messages about gender roles which if why I left it written this way.)

Even though I was the facilitator of the group, I took a worksheet and dutifully began filling it out along with the rest of the room. As I moved through the questions, I found that thinking about my parent’s relationship dynamic was something not something that I had done before, but strangely felt familiar regardless.

I asked the group if anyone walked to talk about what they had written and, after a long pause and eight pairs of averted eyes, one of the more outspoken cleared her throat and read from her list. She used words like “absent” and “angry,” reported feeling that being around her parents made her feel like she wanted to “run away” and that she was “tired of having to parent them” when they fought. She had a lot to say about the negative and somewhat idealized concepts of the positive, but overall we got a terrific read on how her parents related to one another, and to their children.

It wasn’t until a few more people had read their lists that this first girl blurted out, “I do the same shit with my asshole boyfriend. I see myself do the same shit and ask myself why I can’t stop right as I keep going back and doing it.”

I found this realization quite profound.

We often behave the way we’ve seen our loved ones do and wonder why it doesn’t turn out any better for us. We are affected by the relationships that came before us in ways that we may have not seen or considered before.

While many people carry on the patterns they learned before them, we don’t necessarily have to. I believe that illuminating what we have learned from our relationship models will bring about the opportunity to make decisions about which lessons we wish to live by and which we choose to reject. We have the ability to make our values conscious and live by those that we decide we want, not just those that were handed to us.

The girls seem skeptical about this and I get why they feel that way. Perhaps they aren’t at a place to feel empowered enough to choose their life values. Maybe some of us will never feel that directly empowered. But whether or not change comes from seeing one’s past, seeing one’s present clearly will give us the tools to make it better.

— Rebekah Skoor, MA

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This entry was posted on Thursday, 21 February 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.