Henry’s Baaaack…With Personality Type!
Greetings, Henry here, back again. I’ve been away, traveling The Silk Road, The Road to Mandalay, catching the Trans Siberian railway across Russia, and visiting Iraq and Afghanistan – at least in imagination.
My apologies for being absent from my keyboard and over-involved in the 10,000 things that have decided to descend on me but I am like Jack Nicholson in the Shining: “I’m Back!” Hopefully I’m a bit more warm and fuzzy, however.
I just recently attended a lecture by an author James Hollis who talked about The Eden Project, and has written a book under the same title. It was excellent and I assume the book is the same. He is a thinker so as a writer he is clear, and not muddy.
He goes back to our old Western myth starting at the Garden of Eden. He reminds us that the myth says that God banished Adam and Eve from the garden and that after that they we largely on their own.
His point is that we all have our own Eden. We have been banished from the security of mother’s womb by the violence of birth and eventually separated from mother and our family by the necessities of life.
Consequently since in our Eden we were loved, cherished, valued, we then go out into the world looking for the same experience. We look for someone who will love, cherish and value us. By and by we think we have found that person.
Yet 50% of marriages in America end in divorce, and 60% of second marriages. There are two kinds of problems that interfere with our living peaceably and creatively with our loved one. They are:
1) The patterns that we learned as children in our families. These patterns were learned so long ago that we forget that we have them. We believe that it is the normal way to think and to act. These automatic responses are what C.G Jung called our complexes.
2) The second problem that comes between our beloved and ourselves is our personality type. We look for someone who is different from us, who complements us. They are wise when we are impulsive. They are thoughtful when we are a chatterbox. They have a kind heart when we are more logical. We marry them because they are so wonderful and then we set out to change them so they will be more like us. Many marriages fail on these grounds. We do not know and understand our own or our partners personality type. We just tend to think that they are being difficult, mean, stubborn, or vicious, while all the while they are continuing to be the same kind of person we fell in love with.
We need to learn more about personality type in order to be better mates and parents.
Because such and understanding is so helpful, I am going to be writing a lot more about personality type in this blog and somewhere down the road we will be launching a site based on helping us even further with understanding out type and that of those we love.