How can we prevent letting the stress of daily hassles lead to domestic violence?
Part of prevention involves working on your communication skills, including your listening skills, and being able to respect someone’s boundaries. We think that if people look for healthy ways to communicate their needs in a relationship that they will be less likely to become abusers. Of course, that learning process can begin outside of a dating relationship. We can learn to communicate our needs better to our friends, family, co-workers, and other people in our lives. Part of good communication is having the ability to listen to the other person. That also means listening to someone when they are setting boundaries for us and respecting those boundaries. Learning to be assertive instead of aggressive or passive-aggressive is an important part of preventing domestic violence. Here are some ways we can practice healthy behaviors that can benefit our dating relationships: • Practice saying no in daily situations that don’t involve sex, because if you can learn to set boundaries in non-
