By Keishonda Sherman/reporter

Speaker talks healthy relationships

Students gained insight about how to build healthy relationships and recognize abusive ones at a workshop April 18.

SE counselor Carisa Bustillos-Givens broke down the meaning of intimate partner violence, or IPV, and the signs to look for in a potentially dangerous relationship. 

IPV is an umbrella term that includes physical, sexual, emotional, psychological and verbal abuse that occurs in a situational context or battering, which is coercive, controlling behavior used to limit, direct and shape the partner’s thoughts, feelings and actions.

“People try to normalize jealous emotions,” Bustillos-Givens said. 

Showing the envious behaviors of Nick Jonas in his music, she talked about how the portrayal of men and women in media influence ideas of what a relationship should and should not look like.  

“Media tends to objectify women, which doesn’t exude mutual respect,” she said. “People don’t talk, they get aggressive.”

Social media can be a huge factor in making or breaking a relationship, Bustillos-Givens said. About 50 percent of cases of students who are stressed or struggling in school have to do with their relationships.

“We must ask ourselves questions as to what cues occur in the relationship,” she said.

Healthy relationships are built on agreement, respect, open communication, mutual enjoyment and the space to feel safe, Bustillos-Givens said. 

She said as humans we have the right to make mistakes, learn from them and strive to do better next time.

“We have to feed ourselves, to take care of ourselves,” she said.