Healthy Relationships and Communication

  • iHEAL 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • Passive, Aggressive, and Assertive Communication
    Worksheet
    The Passive, Aggressive, and Assertive Communication worksheet gives an overview of each communication style, along with tips to help you recognize each one. This provides a great starting point for conversations about communication styles, and replacing aggression and passivity with assertiveness.
  • Relationship Maintenance
    Worksheet
    Romantic relationships require ongoing effort to stay healthy. Research shows that couples who use certain maintenance strategies have stronger intimacy and commitment (Stafford & Canary, 1991). The more frequently these maintenance behaviours are used, the more effective they tend to be.
  • “I” Messages or “I” Statements
    Worksheet
    This handout explains how “I” statements can help communicate feelings, concerns, and needs without blame or escalation. By encouraging clear and constructive dialogue, it offers students a practical tool for handling conflict and difficult conversations more effectively. 
  • Assertiveness
    Worksheet
    Communicating in an assertive manner can help you to minimise conflict, to control anger, to have your needs better met, and to have more positive relationships with friends, family and others.