By Matthew Trevor
You catch a close friend who has a history of drug abuse emptying your wallet into his shaking hands. He cries on your shoulder after being caught, pleading loudly and unconvincingly. “I just need someone to talk to,” he says. “I need you to help me.”
The trouble is, you need to talk to someone about this as well; you cannot help your friend until you can learn to help yourself.
RVCC professor Mark Bezanson teaches Interpersonal Communication, a course designed to help students learn to handle situations just like that one. Although former students say he’s “awesome,” he credits the course’s success to the students themselves.
“In my class, everyone is a teacher,” says Bezanson, “and they all learn from each other.”
Bezanson’s approach is to help his students become more in touch with their own feelings, and more in control of their own actions.
In one “icebreaker” task, students must talk with a complete stranger. This could be a man sleeping on a bench or an old woman the student has seen on the way to work but never said hello to and always felt guilty about it.
“Learn to carry out a conversation,” Bezanson tells his students. “What can you learn about yourself as a result?”
Students record their experiences and feelings in a journal.
The class discusses anger, and focuses on anger management, he says, primarily through “stress reduction, mediation, and getting in touch with your breathing, becoming more aware of your inner experiences.” By doing so, Bezanson says, the student still feels anger, but then can choose to either act or not act. “Instead of the anger controlling them, they are controlling it,” he says.
Self-control is perhaps the most important skill Bezanson hopes to help his students learn, because having control over oneself increases one’s choices, he says.
Learning how to have “difficult conversations” may be the most challenging, and most rewarding, aspect of the course, he says. He helps students learn to talk about subjects that deal with strong, scary and disturbing emotions.
This isn’t just book learning. Students hold their own difficult conversations in class. In an exercise he calls “Bag-Share,” students talk about themselves and where they come from. “Symbolic items are used,” he said, “and (the presentations) can often be quite moving when people are honest.”
Bezanson acknowledges that his class is not the RVCC norm. “Some of the students have said that it is better than therapy and that they learned more talking and listening to their classmates than they did to their expensive therapists.” He thinks the students become closer to their classmates, and closer to their families.
For Bezanson, that’s no small measure of success. “People who can do this are happier, and tend to be more successful.”
That ability to bond with others may be the key. Bezanson says his students find the courage to discuss painful subjects like alienation, drug abuse and their parents’ divorce by bonding with one another. For him, that’s the real beauty of the course.
“I can teach the skills,” he says, “but I cannot teach courage.”
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