"Dear Teenage Me...": Introduction to See the Triumph's 2016 Teen Dating Violence Month Series

By Christine Murray, See the Triumph Co-Founder
 
During February of each year at See the Triumph, we always like to have a special focus on teen dating violence to go along with Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month. We believe that this month is a great time of the year to get conversations going with teenagers about the importance of building safe and healthy relationships as they navigate the dating scene.
 
This year, we’re really excited about the special theme we have planned for our Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month series. Our series this month is called, “Dear Teenage Me…,” and our goal throughout the month is to share blog posts in which our bloggers reflect on what they know now about safe, healthy relationships that they wish they would have known when they were teenagers.
 
In our “Dear Teenage Me…” series, we’re drawing on several sources of inspiration. First, we’ve had two past See the Triumph blog posts that offered messages for teenagers about dating relationships, including “A Message To Teens Who Are Dating” and “Dear Young and Heartbroken.” Second, we recently learned of the song, “Dear Younger Me,” by MercyMe which powerfully captures the loving guidance that adults often wish they could go back and give to their younger selves. As we considered what our goals were for Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month this year, these sources of inspiration resonated with our main goal for the month of getting conversations started with young people.
 
Throughout the month, we’ll be sharing letters that our team of regular and guest bloggers have written as they reflected on their own ideas about what they wished they knew when they were teenagers. We hope that these messages will resonate with teens and adults. And, if you’re an adult with one or more teenagers in your life, we encourage you to write your own letter and share it with a teenager that you’d like to engage in a dialogue about safe and healthy dating experiences. What messages would you hope you can pass along to the teens in your life that could help them navigate their current and future relationships?
 
We hope you’ll enjoy reading the “Dear Teenage Me…” posts we’ll share throughout his month. More than just reading and enjoying them, though, we hope that you’ll be inspired to get talking with the teens in your life—and in ways that capture the spirit of loving guidance that you’d want to go back and give to yourself if you could. Of course, we can’t go back and change the past. And, we may not want to do that even if we could. But, we certainly can look back to our past experiences, think about how we’ve grown and what we’ve learned, and consider how we can use our own experiences to help influence the current generation of teenagers to build safe, healthy relationships, today and in the years to come!