blueFire Wilderness Supports Social Wellness Month
Boise, Idaho (PRWEB) July 13, 2015 -- blueFire Wilderness supports Social Wellness Month by offering insight on how to forge strong relationships with family and friends. As a leading provider of therapeutic services to adolescents and their families through wilderness therapy, blueFire understands that maintaining healthy, positive relationships is an important aspect of healthy living. Social Wellness Month promotes the improvement of communication skills and the establishment of solid, respectful relationships.
Studies show that socially isolated people are more susceptible to illness and have a death rate two or three times higher than those who are not socially isolated. Additionally, building close friendships is proven to cause higher levels of immunoglobulin A, an antibody that prevents cavities and illness.
One important aspect of social wellness is creating close relationships with friends and family. In order to build strong ties, blueFire Wilderness offers the following recommendations:
- Practice active listening. Make sure to focus on what someone is telling you rather than thinking of what your response will be.
- Encourage friends and family to share their thoughts and feelings. When people feel heard and respected, they feel better about themselves.
- Make time for friends and family and show appreciation for them. Be sure to engage in acts of kindness and consideration that they would perceive as caring.
- Be compassionate rather than cynical. Being honest and straightforward is important for building solid, lasting friendships.
- Admit your mistakes. Being able to admit to that you’re wrong is essential to maintaining healthy relationships.
- Quality over quantity. Having a few good friends who actually care for you is much better than having many friends who hardly know you and are just using you for the sake of being “popular”.
A recent study showed that creating strong social networks can improve self-esteem and overall mood.
“One of the keys of social wellness is learning to live in harmony with others and contributing to the welfare of the community as a whole rather than thinking of ourselves,” commented Kathy Rex, Executive Director of blueFire Wilderness. “After working with thousands of teens and families over the years I have seen firsthand the benefit of learning how to maintain healthy relationships with friends and families.”
At blueFire Wilderness, creating a supportive environment for the promotion of social wellness is a major priority of the program. blueFire helps reconnect families in need of healing through a progression from one-way communication such as letters and videos, to two-way communication such as shared phone calls and video teleconferences and ultimately the reuniting at the 4-day family workshop.
“Every week, our clients do one form of communicating their success and struggles to their parents. Parents get to see their child improve socially from week to week,” says Jon Worbets MA LPC, Clinical Director and co-founder of blueFire. “Through our wilderness therapy program, clients learn how to repair old relationships and build new ones in order to discover a side of themselves they never knew was there.”
For more information about how to promote social wellness, please visit the following:
Stanford Healthcare: https://healthysteps4u.org/test/social-wellness/
University of New Hampshire Health Services: http://www.unh.edu/health-services/ohep/social-wellness
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blueFire Wilderness is a wilderness therapy program based just outside of Boise, Idaho that offers teens ages 11-17 a comprehensive adventure experience. blueFire Wilderness combines clinical expertise, academic assessments and a family systems approach to help teens struggling emotional, behavioral and social challenges. For more information, please visit http://www.bluefirewilderness.com/ or call 1 (844) 413-1999.
Kathy Rex, blueFire Wilderness Therapy, http://www.bluefirewilderness.com/, +1 208-308-3163, [email protected]
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