Erika (Swensen) Powell

Coming home from my mission, in my last interview with my mission President he said the most important choice you will ever make in this life is who you will marry. That puts a lot of pressure if there wasn’t already some.  There seems to be all of these formulas for successful dating and how to find “the one.” And there are a lot of things I agree with.  For example, there was this theory we discussed in class that I felt could help lead to a successful partnership and relationship. It’s called the RAM model. Which stands for the relationship attachment model. There are five attributes or five things you want to develop with if your relationship. But the catch is one of these qualities cannot be higher than the one before it. So the qualities are know, trust, rely, commit, and touch. So when you begin a relationship you don’t want it to be solely based on touch, or be committed so fast without knowing the person all that well.  So whil...

This week we talked about some topics that can be very “touchy” and extremely controversial. And I wanted to start out with a couple of scriptures. The first one is in Doctrine and Covenants section 10 verse 68, “Whosoever  declareth  more or less than this, the same is not of me, but is  against  me; therefore he is not of my church.” The second scripture is Also in the Doctrine and Covenants section 84:45, “For the word of the Lord is truth and whatsoever is truth is light and whatsoever is light is Spirit, even the Spirit of Jesus Christ.”             This first scripture can sound really intense and kind of scary. I think that the fact that the Lord instructs us to not declare "more or less" than He has declared is one, just important, just in general. Because when we add or take away from what the Lord teaches, we get corrupt doctrine. We start to teach the ways of man rather than the ways of God....

You know how your family just has these unspoken rules? You know like little family traditions. Typically, when I hear the phrase “family traditions” my mind always goes to that song from fiddler on the roof, but also I think about Christmas. Like in my family we always get a new ornament for the year, and we always get new pajamas. It’s a lot of happy memories like those that I associate the word “traditions” positively.                 But some of the times, our “family traditions” or the culture within our family may be hurting our family relationships. Now when I think of family culture I think about my personal family. My mom was born and raised in the Philippines, while my dad was born in the US. Just between my parents I could pick up on some of the different ways they were raised. And I especially saw the culture difference when we would spend time with either of my parents extended family. But that w...

                I had a lot of trouble thinking of what I wanted to talk about this week. The majority of this week we discussed different concepts in a family. For example, the idea of circular causality. Circular causality is the idea that person A will do something because person B did something. While the only reason person B reacted, that way was because of what Person A did. It’s basically a cycle of blame or reason behind behavior.   It can be positive, but most of the time it seems a cause of negative behavior. Other things we talked about were different types of boundaries that are set withing a family. Or the different rules and roles that are usually silent in family systems.                 Something we spent a lot of time talking about that I wanted to share was about boundaries. There were three different types of bo...

  "...Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets. We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society." - TheFamily: A Proclamation to the World What an introduction to this course. This week in my family relations class we studied and discussed different trends related to the family. For example, I studied some research that impacted individuals’ decisions on the size of their future family. Why would that be significant though? To each their own if they want to have children, and who am I to tell someone they should have more than one child. However, I have always believed that the family is ordained of God. This teaching is found in The Family: a Proclamation to the World . This proclamation also teaches that, “The F...

Hello!  My name is Erika Powell. (my school records are still currently Erika Swensen, but I'm so close to being able to change that) The primary purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts and insights from a course I am currently taking at Brigham Young University Idaho, Family Relations. Although I have this blog only because of my grade (..just being honest.) I am really excited to have a place with some of my takeaways and my own insights about this course. A little bit about me, I grew up in Utah. Yes, the Utah bubble and I loved it. I am the oldest in a family of five, just my wonderful parents and my sweet two younger sisters. I have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints my whole life. I also served a volunteer religious mission for eighteen months. I served in northern California, in the Roseville mission. I loved my mission with all my heart. I learned so much and and grew so close to my Heavenly Father, and my Savior Jesus Christ. I al...