In previous blog posts we talked about two of Covey’s habits that involve creating healthy relationships. Specifically, we talked about Habit 4, which involved thinking win-win and Habit 5, which involved seeking first to understand and then to be understood. Hopefully by now you have begun incorporating those habits into your relationships and have seen some improvement. We know that social support is of extreme importance when it comes to maintaining our recovery. In order to ensure the social support we are receiving is of the highest quality, we need to be interacting in healthy relationships. To help us do that, I thought I would introduce the Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) Skill: Interpersonal Effectiveness. DBT is a therapeutic technique that helps us integrate skills into our every day lives that enable us to change behavioral, emotional, thinking, and interpersonal patterns associated with problems.
Over the next seven blog posts, we will look at different skills we can utilize to improve and maintain our relationships with people we are close to and even complete strangers. The goals of interpersonal effectiveness are to:
- Be skillful in getting what you want and need from others, which includes:
- Getting others to do things you would like them to do
- Getting others to take your opinions more seriously
- Saying no to unwanted requests effectively
- Build relationships and end destructive ones, which includes:
- Strengthening current relationships
- Finding and building new relationships
- Ending hopeless relationships
- Walk the middle path, which includes:
- Creating and maintaining balance in relationships
- Balancing acceptance and change in relationships.
Today you can begin to learn and incorporate interpersonal effectiveness skills into your life . Today you can increase your ability to maintain healthy relationships!
(Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash)
