We will be hosting our Inclusion Week (formerly known as R-Word Week) next week (3/7-3/11) and have some fun events planned! If you are new to DC, Inclusion week at DCHS is a week dedicated to making inclusion a reality for all people with and without Intellectual disabilities. Paired with Special Olympics Colorado, the goal of this week is to foster a more inclusive environment for all at DCHS.

We will be having Spirit Days as follows:

• Monday: It's OK to stand out, wear crazy socks!
• Tuesday: We see through each other's differences, wear camouflage
• Wednesday: We blend together as one, wear tie-dye!
• Thursday: Hats on for inclusion, wear a hat!
• Friday: Everyone a Huskie! Wear DC gear or inclusion shirts!

We will also be having a Unified vs staff basketball game Friday 3/11 from 4:30-5:30 (possibly with a dunk tank.... STAY TUNED!) If you are interested in playing in the game please let me know - the more the merrier!

Let your students and families know that they can register for a free virtual event to learn more. Please send them the information below.

Register now for a free virtual event:

Navigating Financial Aid Offers

Wednesday, February 23 at 7pm ET | 6pm CT | 5pm MT | 4pm PT Register Now

Thursday, February 24 at 8pm ET | 7pm CT | 6pm MT | 5pm PT Register Now

After being accepted to college, you’ll receive a financial aid offer that outlines your financial aid eligibility at that specific school. Each financial aid offer will contain similar information overall, but since there’s no standard format they can be difficult to interpret. In this session you’ll learn how to decipher each financial aid offer so you can confidently determine which college is the best fit.

Space is limited, so please register early!

KEY POINTS

• Teens’ emotions are powerful and strange, and they deal with new interoceptive signaling arising within their changing physiology.
• Contrary to expectation, boy teens are at greater risk of mental upheaval from heartache than girls.
• Teens benefit from parents’ understanding and support in regulation of this trauma.

Valentine’s Day celebrates the golden and glorious side of romantic love. But when romantic love first emerges—generally during the teen years—it is new, strange, and powerful, and can wreak havoc on both teens and their parents.

Parents, researchers, and policymakers are more concerned about the dangers of teen sex than teen romance, yet romantic love—something different from sexual yearnings—takes up a huge proportion of teens’ emotional energy. Girls attribute 34 percent of their strong emotions to romantic relationships, whether fantasy or real. Boys attribute 25 percent of their strong emotions to these.1 This is more than any other single topic—more than friends and more than school. While there is no comparable data about teens who do not feel at home in their assigned gender, they tell me that “thinking about who will love me and how it will be” is a constant preoccupation, “always there, even when it’s not right in front of me.”

Having recently trawled through three decades of interviews with teens for my new book The Teen Interpreter,2 I am convinced that few adults understand the force and depth of teen romance. “It’s puppy love,” or “It’s just a crush,” they say. Yet, when teens fall in love, and when they lose love, they feel that their life depends on getting the right answer to the question, “What is this?” and “What does this mean?” When parents minimize their pain, teens feel a loss of support that compounds their love grief.

Unfamiliar Interoceptive Signals

Teens work hard to understand their new range of emotions. Their efforts are comprised by interoception—that sixth sense of ourselves as embodied, with sensations from the internal state of our organs—the pumping of our heart, the digestive activity in our stomach, the filling and emptying of our lungs, the heat, wind, touch, and texture on our skin. With their rapidly developing brains and bodies, along with a new supply of hormones, teens confront unfamiliar interoceptive signals, including “that strange feeling in my stomach when he notices me” or “that shameful freeze when she talks to me.” With a romantic partner, they can join forces to express their feelings. When they lose that romance, they suffer not only from loss but also from loneliness. When they seek support from a parent, they are often disappointed.

When a teen’s first love ends, parents interpret this loss via the myths that their grief is short-lived, and that, during its acute phase, girls are more vulnerable than boys to the impact of love grief. This month's annual celebration of romantic love is an opportunity to sharpen our understanding of teens' romantic loss.3

Differences Between Girls and Boys During a Breakup

Girl teens are said to be more dependent on close relationships than boy teens; hence, they are expected to suffer more from a breakup. But this is among many common assumptions about what girls feel versus what boys feel that turn out to be false. In fact, when it comes to romantic relationships, teenage girls are less vulnerable in the wake of a breakup than teen boys. Those on the frontline of teen mental health have known this for many years: A high-school counselor explained, “The boys fall apart when they break up with a girlfriend. They can’t study. They [sometimes] start to drink. If they come to me with problems about their work or their parents, I can help them. But when they come saying they’ve just broken up with a girlfriend, I see a red flag.”

The difference is that girls have a greater friendship network to draw on. Close friends act as co-regulators of emotions; through intimate conversations, friends help them reflect on their feelings, stimulating the brain’s executive functions that then calm anxiety and despair. But boys, because they tend to shut down friendship intimacy in later adolescence, when the guy code exerts its demands to be “strong” and “independent” and to carry emotional burdens in silence,4 are more dependent on a romantic partner who may be their sole source of intimacy. Moreover, boys tend to have more stable friendships and are less practiced in the hard lessons of rupture and repair that girls learn in late childhood. A first romantic breakup then becomes a trauma that they are very slow to process.

This difference can be seen in the language teens use to describe their experiences. While teenage girls describe breakups as “really hard” or “a shock” and admit they feel “lost” or “stuck,” teenage boys use words such as “falling apart” and “shipwrecked” and “tailspin,” which imply severe disruption and disorientation. Rejection by a lover threatens their identity, health, and mood. No one should add to their loneliness by minimizing their pain.

Douglas County Youth Employment Program (DCYEP) is deeply committed to ensuring that all eligible Douglas County youth residents between the ages of 15-25 have the opportunity through numerous program services to connect with career pathways that will lead to high-demand and excellent job opportunities and training.

We can assist eligible Douglas County youth residents with many things, including getting their GED, paid work experiences, paid training, skill-building, financial literacy, and more. We can also assist program participants with supportive services such as bus passes and gas vouchers to get to and from work and work clothing or shoes.

Eligibility

• Must have a household income less than $75,000/year
• Must be a Douglas County resident
• Must be lawfully present
• Must be between the ages of 15-25
• If older than 18 years old, there must be a minor (under 18 years old) living in the household to qualify. Minor can be a sibling, their own child, cousin, etc., but they must reside in the household.

For additional information, to refer someone to the program, or to request a presentation of this information please feel free to contact me at YouthEmploymentProgram@douglas.co.us.

We’re also happy to provide flyers.

Breanna Bang
Workforce Specialist

Douglas County Youth Employment Program

Arapahoe/Douglas Works!

Email BBang@Douglas.co.us

Phone 303-752-8963

Web www.adworks.org

Mail 6964 S. Lima Street, Centennial, CO 80112

Office 4400 Castleton Ct., Castle Rock, CO 80109

KEY POINTS

• Researchers have found no correlation between narcissism and romantic love or high self-esteem and love for others.
• Self-compassion (extending the same grace to ourselves that we show others) enables healthier, more fulfilling relationships.
• While early life experiences shape our current degree of self-compassion, it is also a skill that we can strengthen.

An oft-quoted saying goes something like this: “you cannot truly love someone until you love yourself.” The self-help world has embraced this idea, but does it hold up when examining empirical research? Is self-love really a prerequisite for loving others? Or might it actually be a hindrance to the kind of altruistic, transcendent love, so many of us crave?

Love and Narcissism

Psychologists have tested the role of self-love in relationships by looking at the link between narcissism (extreme-self love) and love for others. Can people who see themselves as most worthy of admiration channel positive attention towards others?

Researchers Ha et al. expected the opposite to be true. They hypothesized that high self-love would lead to weaker love for others. Instead, they found no relationship between narcissistic self-love and romantic love.

Researchers Campbell et al. found no evidence that narcissistic self-love improves relationship quality in a similar study. However, they did find that narcissism goes hand-in-hand with what’s known as “ludus love” – an approach to romance that involves flirting, game playing, and using distance to maintain power. That said, this type of love is almost definitely not the sort implied by the assertion that we have to love ourselves to love others.

In short, narcissistic self-love seems to have little or no impact on love for others and may even get in the way of deep, companionate love. Though narcissism can appear to look like self-love on the outside, it is often fraught with stress, defensiveness, and high vulnerability to criticism on the inside.

Love and Self-Esteem

Campbell et al. looked to self-esteem to see whether this positive self-regard could benefit our relationships. But no apparent relationship emerged. High self-esteem doesn’t seem to be related to deeper or more fulfilling feelings of love for others.

The researchers found that high self-esteem might serve a different function in relationships. Its purpose may be to serve as a buffer, reducing our likelihood of experiencing manic, obsessive love. Perhaps self-esteem doesn’t help us love others, but it does prevent us from losing ourselves in the process of falling in love.

Love and Self-Compassion

So, what’s the deal? Do these findings debunk the belief that we cannot love others until we love ourselves? Not necessarily. Another more recent approach to defining self-love comes in the form of “self-compassion.”

Psychologist Kristin Neff breaks self-compassion into these components:

• Self-kindness: refraining from criticizing ourselves.
• Common humanity: the recognition that being imperfect and flawed is human.
• Mindfulness: being aware of our negative self-talk to soothe it away.

In short, self-compassion is an unconditional acceptance and grace toward ourselves, offered in the same way we demonstrate compassion toward others.

Krieger and team have found that people with low self-compassion are more likely to avoid their problems, have more negative thoughts and feelings, and experience worse overall well-being. And various researchers, such as Neff and Beretvas, have found that self-compassion is linked with healthier and more positive romantic relationships.

So, is the old saying true? Yes and no. It seems we can and do love others even without self-love. But turning our feelings of love – particularly self-compassion – inward enables us to have healthier and more fulfilling relationships with others.

Your Level of Self-Compassion

To get a quick sense of your degree of self-compassion, take this abridged Self-Compassion Scale, based on the assessment developed by Neff. Answer each question on a scale of 1-5, with 1 meaning “almost never” and 5 meaning “almost always.”

1. I’m disapproving and judgmental about my flaws and inadequacies.
2. When I’m feeling down, I tend to obsess and fixate on everything wrong.
3. When I think about my inadequacies, it tends to make me feel more separate and cut off from the rest of the world.
4. When something upsets me, I get carried away with my feelings.
5. When things are going badly for me, I see the difficulties as part of life that everyone goes through.
6. I try to be loving towards myself when I’m feeling emotional pain.
7. When I’m going through a very hard time, I give myself the caring and tenderness I need.
8. When I'm feeling down, I try to approach my feelings with curiosity and openness.

If you scored low on items 1 - 4 and high on items 5 - 8, your self-compassion skills are likely well-developed. If you scored high on items 1 - 4 and low on items 5 - 8, it’s time to bulk up your self-compassion muscles.

Three Tips to Increase Self-Compassion

While our degree of self-compassion is highly impacted by our upbringing and early life experiences, it is a skill that we can strengthen. Here are three research-backed techniques for harnessing the benefits of self-compassion for yourself and others:

1) Transfer your compassion.
Many people have well-honed compassion skills for others but struggle to apply those thoughts and actions to themselves. If you identify with this tendency, this “transfer trick” can work well for you.

Imagine someone (a person or animal) for whom you feel deep care and compassion. Picture them close to you. Fill yourself with love for them, and notice where you feel it in your body. Once you can sense it clearly, expand that circle of compassion to include yourself. Especially when you notice yourself being harsh with yourself, pause, find that feeling, and transfer it to yourself.

Another way to transfer your compassion is to find a childhood photo of yourself. Hold the image in your hands and look at it closely, paying attention to your eyes in the photo. Describe this child and their hopes and fears, and quirks. Then imagine saying the mean things you say to your adult self to this child. If you notice protective, compassionate feelings arise, take note of them.

Next time you are mean to yourself, remember that that little kid in the photo is still in you, looking out at the world through your eyes. Consider how the “adult you” can show love toward this little person rather than making them feel worse.

2) Name your critic.
Another great technique for developing self-compassion is recognizing the harsh, critical, or otherwise abusive voice we hold in our heads. This is a voice many of us have developed to push ourselves toward doing better. It might even work occasionally, but it usually does more damage than good. Sometimes it’s the internalized voice of a parent, a teacher, societal pressure, or a combination of various punishing forces in our lives.

Try to spot this voice in action, noticing how it sounds, what it says, and even how it changes your posture and movements. Instead of thinking of this voice as you, create a bit of distance from it by giving it a name. Call it Critical Carl, Judging Judy, or whatever nickname feels right to you and defuses some of its power.

Then, when you notice the voice speaking up, acknowledge it and politely send it away. For example: “Oh, hey, Carl. I hear you. Thanks for looking out for me. But I’ll take it from here.” Strange as it may sound, this technique is highly effective at helping us interrupt harmful thoughts and can even inspire a chuckle when we need it most.

3) Spot your need.
One more simple yet powerful way to turn moments of self-abuse into self-compassion is to learn to ask ourselves: “What do I need right now?” When someone we love is in pain, most of us try to figure out how to make them feel better. In the same way, this technique helps us focus our energy on uncovering what we want rather than what we don’t want.

For example, if you feel ashamed or guilty, your underlying need might be acceptance. This realization can prompt you to talk to someone you can trust. Or, if you’re feeling frustrated with yourself, an underlying need might be a sense of progress. This insight can inspire you to create a plan of action rather than dwelling on the problem. It all starts with asking, “What do I need?”

To summarize: The popular expression “you cannot truly love someone until you love yourself” isn’t quite true. Many of us bypass the skill of self-love and tumble straight into loving others. And narcissistic self-love can even block intimate love.

That said, there is also wisdom in this aphorism. Developing our self-compassion can lead to deeper and more fulfilling relationships with others. What’s more, self-compassion is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself. After all, the longest relationship you’ll ever have is the one you’re in with yourself.

Things keep changing. The clock ticks, the day unfolds, trees grow, leaves turn brown, hair turns gray, children grow up and leave home, attention skitters from this to that, the cookie is delicious but then it’s all gone, you’re mad about something for a while and then get over it, consciousness streams on and on and on.

Many changes are certainly good. Most people are glad to put middle school behind them. I’m still happy about shifting thirty years ago from single to married. Painkillers, flush toilets, and the internet seem like pretty good ideas. It’s lovely to watch grass waving in the wind or a river passing. Fundamentally, if there were no change, nothing could happen, reality would be frozen forever.

On the other hand, many changes are uncomfortable, even awful. The body gets creaky and worse. We lose those we love and eventually lose life itself. Families drift apart, companies fail, dictators tighten their grip, nations go to war. The planet warms at human hands, as each day we pour nearly a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Countless species go extinct. As William Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

And change itself is often—maybe innately—stressful. When you are really open to the fact always in front of our noses that each moment of now decays and disappears in the instant it arises—it can feel rather alarming. Life and time sweep us along. As soon as something pleasant occurs in the mind’s flow we reach for it but whoosh it passes away right through our fingers leaving disappointment behind. Inherently, anything that changes is not a reliable basis for enduring contentment and fulfillment.

Yet it is also true that some things remain always the same. In their stillness, you can find a refuge, an island in the stream of changes, a place to stand for perspective and wisdom about events and your reactions to them, a respite from the race, quiet amidst the noise. Perhaps even find a sense of something transcendental, outside the frame of passing phenomena.

How?

Stillness, a sense of the unchanging, is all around, and at different levels. Look for it, explore its effects on you, and let it sink in.

For example, it’s not the ultimate stillness, but there is that lovely feeling when the house is quiet and you’re sitting in peace, the dishes are done and the kids are fine (or the equivalent), and you can really let down and let go. In your character, you have enduring strengths and virtues and values; situations change, but your good intentions persist. In relationships, love abides—even for people who drive you crazy!

More subtly, there is the moment at the very top of a tossed ball’s trajectory when it’s neither rising nor falling, the pause before the first stroke of the brush, that space between exhalation and inhalation, the silence in which sounds occur, or the discernible gap between thoughts when your mind is quiet.

In your mind, there is always an underlying calm and well-being that contains emotional reactions, like a riverbed that is still even as the flood rushes over it (if you’re not aware of this, truly, with practice you can find and stabilize a sense of it). There is also the unchanging field of awareness, itself never altered by the thoughts passing through it.

More abstractly, 2+2=4 forever; the area of a circle will always be pi times the radius squared; etc. The fact that something has occurred will never change. The people who have loved you will always have loved you; they will always have found you lovable. Whatever is fundamentally true—including, ironically, the truth of impermanence—has an unchanging stillness at its heart. Things change, but the nature of things—emergent, interdependent, transient—does not.

Moving toward ultimate matters, and where language fails, you may have a sense of something unchangingly transcendental, divine. Or, perhaps related, an intuition of that which is unconditioned always just prior to the emergence of conditioned phenomena.

Wherever you find it, enjoy the stillness and let it feed you. It’s a relief from the noise and bustle, a source of clarity and peace. Give yourself the space, the permission, to be still—at least in your mind—amidst those who are busy. To use a traditional saying:

KEY POINTS

• A sense of school belonging is an important component of a successful school experience.
• The benefits associated with having a sense of belonging are widely known.
• Studies that have explored school belonging show that it has many benefits for individuals.

Over three decades ago, researchers identified that the need to feel a sense of belonging was a powerful motivator of human behaviour. Despite this, ongoing studies are still uncovering the implications, drivers, and effects of a sense of belonging in our daily lives. Researchers continue to seek answers to how belonging should be defined, treated, and enhanced.

In a school setting, students have a need to feel accepted and appreciated by their peers and teachers in order to feel like they belong. Those who feel included in their school communities are more likely to attend class, participate actively in their school work, and build lasting bonds with fellow students. It’s well established that belonging is important, but sometimes the magnitude of this importance can be overlooked.

In this post, we are going to do a deep dive into the benefits of school belonging to gain a greater appreciation as to why belonging matters and recap what we know so far.

What is belonging and school belonging? A refresher

Baumeister and Leary (1995) defined belonging as an individuals’ innate motivation to form and maintain interpersonal relationships that are lasting, positive, and significant. Their belongingness hypothesis proposes that we have a universal need to belong, that is, a pervasive desire to form and maintain interpersonal relationships that are lasting, positive, and significant (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

Since this time, the definition of belonging has become broader—often associated also with places or experiences (Allen, 2020)—with a general feeling of being an integral part of something including surroundings, culture, community, school, and work (Hagerty et al., 1992). Not necessarily people alone. The expansion of how belonging has been conceptualised intends to draw from a more universal perspective and honours perspectives of belonging related to diverse cultures and connections that people have with the land, the environment, and the ecosystem.

What is school belonging?

School belonging refers to a student’s feelings of being accepted within their school. Students often describe it as "fitting in" or feeling safe and comfortable at school. It is commonly defined as the extent to which individuals feel they are “personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others—especially teachers and other adults in the school social environment” (Goodenow & Grady, 1993, pp. 60-1). School belonging can include a sense of affiliation with the school, relationships within the school environment, and an individual’s perceptions and feelings about school.

What are the benefits of school belonging?

Studies that have explored school belonging show that it has many benefits for individuals, especially for adolescents, through psychological health and adjustment, academic development and outcomes, and physical health. The following sections aim to summarise the literature to demonstrate the expansive nature of this research.

Psychological health and adjustment

Belonging to school may impact students' mental health and adjustment more than we realize. Ongoing research has established that students' mental health and well-being improves when they have a better sense that they belong at school (and vice versa).

Here are the findings from a selection of studies as illustrative examples of the benefits of school belonging concerning psychological health and adjustment. That is, school belonging has been found to:

• Improve mental health and emotional well-being (Arslan, 2018, Arslan et al., 2020; Li & Jiang, 2018; Parr et al., 2020; Sebokova et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2018)
• Boost self-esteem and associated positive outcomes (Foster et al., 2017; Peng et al., 2019)
• Reduce feelings of alienation, isolation, and disaffection or low social integration and social exclusion (Allen & Kern, 2017; Arslan et al., 2020; Palikara et al., 2020)
• Be negatively related to mental health problems such anxiety and depression (Allen et al., 2018)
• Increase performance and self-belief in abilities to succeed academically (Chun et al., 2016; Holloway-Friesen, 2019)
• Encourage connection to social institutions other than schools where individuals might be required to compete for places for jobs or further education (Parker et al., 2021)
• Reduce the likelihood of adolescents being neither in employment nor in education or training (NEET) (Parker et al., 2021)
• Facilitate emotional stability, enjoyable learning experiences, positive attitudes towards learning, attachment to peers as well as increase happiness and satisfaction, all of which can improve motivation at school (Ibrahim & El Zaatari, 2020)
• Protect against feelings of disconnection with schools and the likelihood of social ills such as internet addiction to satisfy unfulfilled psychological needs (Li et al., 2016; Peng et al., 2019)
• Offer a protective factor against peer conflicts or other forms of abuse by encouraging positive interactions and reducing risks of involvement in school aggression (Davis et al., 2019; Denny et al., 2016; Li et al., 2020; Valido et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021)
• Aid in the psychosocial adjustment of students who have gone through traumatic experiences or other forms of stresses (Cardeli et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2021)

Academic development and outcomes

Students who feel like they belong to school are more likely to have successful school experiences. Students' motivation and effort towards schoolwork are influenced by their sense of school belonging.

Listed below are the examples of the benefits of school belonging concerning academic development and outcomes. School belonging has been found to be positively related to:

• Academic success, social inclusion, and life satisfaction (Arslan et al., 2020, Brooms, 2016; Palikara et al., 2020; Scorgie & Forlin, 2019)
• Decreased school dropouts (OECD, 2018; Tuhanioglu, 2016; Uslu & Gizir, 2017)
• Increased academic motivation and lower academic stress or educational dissatisfaction after leaving school (Abdollahi et al., 2020; Allen et al., 2018)
• Reduced likelihood of absenteeism, misconduct, school disengagement, or students leaving school early without a qualification (Allen et al., 2016; Ibrahim & El Zaatari, 2020; Korpershoek et al., 2020; OECD, 2018)
• Academic hardiness (Abdollahi, et al 2020)
• The promotion of academic attainment and increased likelihood of on-time graduation among students with chronic medical conditions (Kirkpatrick, 2020)
• Greater school achievement and reduced school bullying (Arslan, 2021)
• Favourable school grades, positive experience in school, and higher self-worth and perception of scholastic competence (Korpershoek et al., 2020; Pittman & Richmond, 2007)

Physical Health

Belonging to a school community has various effects on kids' physical well-being. It also has an inverse link with risk-taking behaviours, such as using substances and tobacco products and the development of early sexual orientation (Allen et al., 2018; Goodenow, 1993; Slaten et al., 2016). Sense of belonging is linked to:

• Less internalizing and externalizing behaviours and improved wellbeing (Arslan, 2021; Arslan et al., 2020; Pittman & Richmond, 2007)
• Lower body mass index among girls (Richmond et al., 2014)
• Reduced odds of emotional distress, suicidal ideation, physical violence, illicit drug use, and having multiple partners in adulthood (Steiner et al., 2019)
• The avoidance of risks associated with emotional distress, physical violence, prescription and other drug misuse in adulthood (Steiner et al., 2019)
• Better health perceptions (Hale et al., 2005)

Conclusion

Establishing the beneficial effects of improving a student's school belonging is critical if we are to prioritise it through interventions, research, and practice. The many and varied benefits of school belonging need to be reminded so that we are able to propel it forward as a future goal in educational contexts going forward.