On May 8th afternoon, Luong Van Can Fund organized a training program entitled “A toxic or healthy relationship – How to recognize and constitute healthy relationships with our relatives”, with the sharing of two speakers from Menthy Viet Nam: Ms Nguyen Phuoc Cat Phuong – Master of Applied Psychology (MAP) and Ms Nguyen Thi Ngoc Giau – Master of Psychology. Menthy Viet Nam is a reliable partner of Luong Van Can Fund in its effort to care for youth and the community’s mental health.

Menthy Viet Nam hopes to propel mental health to the forefront of public concerns, mental health and reduce stigma and discrimination against those who seek support, education and connections pertaining to mental health. Menthy Viet Nam also hopes to build a friendly community with mental health as the foundation. The program mainly helped Luong Van Can students gain valuable experience informing families, friendships, and other personal relationships. The program helped Luong Van Can students gain valuable experience in constructing family-ship, friendships, and other personal relationships.

The program included two parts:

Part 1: Recognizing whether a relationship is toxic or healthy

The speakers respectively show six indicators of a toxic relationship, including:

• Violent communication: this includes explicit violence and implicit violence.
• Control/ Manipulation: sole person makes the decision, wants to know what the other is doing, threatens others to abandon him or her, break up, etc.
• Imbalance between giving and taking: a relationship that takes without giving or involves unilaterally giving is an unhealthy relationship.
• Frequent liars: they always lie or mention things out of context
• Lack of trust: Lack of mutual trust and affirmation
• Lack of respect: Failure to listen and show empathy

In addition, the speakers offer more indicators of a toxic relationship. It is believed that people in a toxic relationship become exhausted, worried, lonely, insecure and frightened, and others frequently protect them against critics and accusations.

Corresponding to the six signs of a toxic relationship, the speakers also mentioned features of a healthy relationship.

• Giving a clear and understandable communication
• Maintaining independence
• Maintaining a balance of “giving” and “taking”.
• Trusting each other
• Respecting each other
• Problem-Solving

Each person must have confidence and personal independence to maintain a long and profound relationship. And according to the speakers, you can practice many activities to level up confidence in a relationship, including being proactive, listening, always respecting the speaker, always being honest, maintaining credibility, etc.

Part 2: Basic practices for building a healthy relationship  

In the second part, the students had the opportunity to address two case studies about family and friend relationships. Besides, participants were guided to raise their emotional awareness via additional case studies. Ms Giau distilled three basic practices to construct a healthy relationship:

• Conversations in peace
• Maintaining a balance of “giving” and “taking”.
• Communicating  objectively

Luong Van Can Fund would like to thank Ms Nguyen Phuoc Cat Phuong and Ms Nguyen Thi Ngoc Giau sincerely for taking the time to share with Luong Van Can Fund students. We hope that, following these sharings, the students will be able to apply what they’ve learned to build more healthy relationships but seize and address existing gaps.

Source: LVCF Media Team