Navigating the first week of my internship has been an exciting moving experience. I’ve had the joy of dipping my toes into the field I see myself being in five years from now. I am interning at Strong Strong where I am teaching high schoolers from the city of Boston how to foster healthy relationships and how to prevent teen dating violence. This is important to me because Boston has a high rate of domestic violence incidents. I am devoted to playing a part in reducing violence in relationships. I have learned that a lot of people around me grow up with unhealthy representations of love and struggle to find and maintain relationships that are good for them.
Start Strong trains leaders such as myself on a trauma-informed curriculum that helps teens distinguish between unhealthy and healthy qualities in a relationship, the cycle of abuse, what a break up looks like, and other important dialogues. Then we teach teens through workshops and activities in this curriculum. We hope with this knowledge they have the tools and resources in place to make healthy decisions for themselves in current and future relationships.
My most significant task is leading a break up elective where we zoom in on how to practice healthy habits in ending a friendship or a relationship. I have been analyzing the media and doing research on my own to best help the youths understand what a healthy break up looks like in a way they can understand. I have been learning how the media shapes the decisions we make in our everyday lives. The point of the break up elective is to expose young people to healthy breakups because breakups in friendships and relationships have led to alarming rates of violence.
