7card webinar | Principii ale relațiilor sănătoase cu Raluca Anton (21.10.2025)

Summary

In this webinar, psychotherapist Raluca Anton discusses how to build healthier relationships with ourselves, partners, family, friends, and colleagues. Her central message is that self-understanding and relationship skills develop together: we learn about ourselves through interactions with others, and relationships need ongoing care rather than simply being expected to work.

Key Strategies and Practices

• Explore the relationship patterns you grew up with. Reflect on what you learned about love, safety, trust, care, and physical closeness from your family and wider community. These experiences can shape how you relate to yourself and others as an adult.
• Take responsibility for your own reactions. When a difficult feeling arises, try to understand what it brings up for you before deciding what it means about the other person. A reaction may relate to past experiences as well as the present situation.
• Pause before acting. Give yourself time between feeling an emotion and making a decision. Name what is happening, consider where it may come from, and ask to pause a conversation or decision while you sort it out.
• Use focused expressive writing. When facing a difficult issue, write about that specific topic for around 10–20 minutes, rather than trying to journal about everything. This can help organize thoughts and clarify emotional patterns. A mind map can also make the connections around a topic—such as trust—easier to see.
• Notice bodily signals without treating them as universal facts. Instincts and physical sensations reflect personal history and learned responses. Consider what a sensation may be telling you and, when appropriate, check your interpretation with someone you trust.
• Communicate needs rather than accusations. Avoid generalizations such as “you always” or “you never.” Describe what you need and what specific action would help. For example, explain that you would feel more cared for if your partner checked in or made time together.
• Ask what you contribute to a relationship’s wellbeing or strain. Instead of focusing only on what the other person should change, consider your own role and what you can do differently.
• Address tensions directly where possible. In work or personal relationships, venting to a third person without returning to resolve the issue can reinforce gossip or avoidance. If you seek support from someone else, use it to prepare for a constructive conversation with the person involved.
• Make room for emotional intimacy. Talk about feelings, fears, needs, touch, and closeness. Honest conversation can support trust and intimacy, including in a long-term relationship.
• Treat relationships as something to maintain. Stay curious about what each person enjoys and how they experience care or appreciation. Try shared activities and small, planned experiences; routines can become connecting rituals when people invest in them consciously.
• Invest deliberately in friendships. Close friendships may become fewer with age, so maintaining them can require planned time together, not only occasional messages. Notice whether a friendship feels nourishing or consistently draining.
• Have thoughtful conversations about children and new relationships. When a new partner may become part of a child’s life, discuss the change with the child in an age-appropriate way and keep the conversations going. Don’t make the child responsible for containing an adult’s distress.
• Seek qualified support when useful. A therapist can help identify blind spots and make it easier to understand recurring patterns. For relationship decisions, consider what is happening, what each person is contributing, and what you would be moving toward. Abuse situations require a different approach from ordinary relationship difficulties.
• Be selective about advice and information. Focus on one area at a time, check the qualifications of people offering psychological guidance, and reduce the stream of information you consume. The speakers describe excessive scrolling and multitasking as difficult to process.
• Protect attention for demanding tasks. Raluca Anton describes putting her phone aside and closing off messages and email when she needed to prepare for classes. This illustrates the value of reducing interruptions to focus.
• Do a brief daily emotional check-in. Spend about five minutes asking, “How did I feel today?” rather than only reviewing what you accomplished. Recording the answer can help identify patterns and possible small changes.

The webinar also challenges the idea that people must become completely self-sufficient before they can have good relationships. Personal growth and relationship growth happen in parallel, and a sense of belonging and community matters. A relationship does not have to be long-term to be a valid choice, provided the choice is conscious.

Presenters and Sources Mentioned

Presenters

• Raluca Anton — psychotherapist and psychology PhD.
• Raluca Neacșu — host; leads Client Success and Wellbeing Engagement teams at Seven Card.

Sources and figures referenced

• Harville Hendrix — quoted on relationships as places where people develop and transform.
• Esther Perel — referenced in discussion of intimacy, relationships, and community.
• Gary Chapman — referenced for “love languages” as a starting point for discussing how people experience care.
• Robert Sapolsky — his work on the biology of human behavior was recommended by the host.
• Maslow — his hierarchy of needs was mentioned in a discussion of belonging and trust.