Healthy Relationships and Communication

Apps

myPlan App
App
This app (created by University of Western in Ontario) provides tailored resources for women in unsafe relationships. Available in Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Books

8 Keys To Building Your Best Relationships
Book/Audiobook
Informed by attachment theory and brain science, this book provides information and exercises to help us cultivate and improve meaningful relationships in an easy-to-understand way.

Hold Me Tight
Book/Audiobook

In Hold me Tight, Dr. Sue Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the general public for the first time. Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship-from Recognizing the Demon Dialogue to Revisiting a Rocky Moment-and uses them as touchpoints for seven healing conversations.

Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones
Book/Audiobook
With deep insight into the life of Indigenous peoples, this book masterfully portrays how a community looks to the past for guidance and comfort while fearing a future of poverty and shame. Includes focus on grief, LGBTQ+ experiences, relationships, etc.
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
Book/Audiobook
This book is famous for a reason! It helps to identify five basic languages of love to better understand and communicate better with your partner (and yourself); focuses on romantic relationships, but different volumes can be found for other types of relationships.
Love Sense
Book/Audiobook

Love Sense covers the three stages of a relationship and how to best weather them; the intelligence of emotions and the logic of love; the physical and psychological benefits of secure love; and much more.

The Lost Art of Listening
Book/Audiobook

Nichols shows how to utilize this ''art by which we use empathy to reach the space across us'' to improve and repair relationships with spouses, lovers, relatives, children, friends and colleagues, and even how to boost one's own ''listenability.'' He also explains what listening isn't, explaining why people don't listen and listing obstacles to listening (especially defensiveness owing to emotional overreaction). Humor, true-life examples and simple exercises make this a practical and even entertaining self-help guide.

Podcasts

All My Relations
Podcast
This is an entire podcast hosted by two Indigenous women who bring in humour and emotion when exploring Native American relationships— relationships to land, to creatural relatives, and to one another. Scroll through the episodes to find the ones that interest you!

 

Videos and Movies

Brene Brown Boundaries Interview
Video
Watch this short interview with Brene Brown who shares the difference between and the importance of having boundaries to express genuine compassion and empathy.

Frientimacy: The 3 Requirements of All Healthy Friendships
Video
In this TED Talk, an author and CEO discusses the three actions that lead to belonging and the factors/what we can do to cultivate meaningful relationships.

It’s not about the nail
Video
Watch this short, comical video about communication in relationships.

The Attachment Theory: How Childhood Affects Life - YouTube Video
Video
How does our early attachment influence our current relationships and views about ourselves? Find out by watching this short YouTube video.
The Family Stone (2005)
Movie
With an elite cast, this film exemplifies and normalizes the complexity of family relationships around the holidays.
Therapy in a Nutshell
Videos

On her YouTube channel called therapy in a nutshell, Emma McAdam, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, makes mental health resources easier to access. She take therapy skills and psychological research and condenses them down into bite-sized nuggets of help.

Worksheets

Assertive Communication Tips
Worksheet
A one-page guide to help you stand up for yourself and communicate your own needs and wants, while taking into consideration the needs and wants of others; includes a practice page.
Communication Style Resource
Self-Help Worksheet or Module
A one-page information resource to help you distinguish between yours and others' passive, aggressive, and/or assertive communication styles; includes a practice page.