Personality interaction in family dynamics. Self improvement and better relationships. Personal and family growth. Motivation, inspiration, and interpersonal interactions.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

03 Families Form Children's Personalities


Let me see, where should I start? There are different ways to describe or define families, such as rich or poor, functional or dysfunctional. But since I am coming from a personality perspective I will way there are four basic family types reflecting the four basic personality types.

We have the nerdy or detailed and more to themselves family, the more emotional and dramatic families, the intellectual families, and the doers, action packed families. And of course a family can and most likely is a mixture of personality types.

But all families play out a common drama, the drama of power. We humans want to meet our needs and often misjudge the needs of others. It is a sort of built in faulty thinking, we can see the reason why we make mistakes and so are easy on ourselves, but it may not be so easy to see why others do what they do, so they must be messing up on purpose, consciously or unconsciously, to make life hard on others, or so we think.

This sets up a drama. There is a perpetrator and a victim. If there is a third party they will side more with one than the other, so they are an active or passive rescuer of the victim. What happens next depends on personalities, family scripts, beliefs, and situational pressures. The combinations are limitless.

Family scripts come from a past emotional history that the people in the present may no longer be aware of. So they begin to vie for power, take on the roles of perpetrator, victim, or rescuer from a long forgotten emotional stance in the style of their personalities, beliefs, and compounding situations of current history. I will give you a cartoon to illustrate, lots of them over time, but lets start with a nerd and a non nerd in the next post.

No comments:

Post a Comment