Recently I wrote about the difference between personality type and personality disorders. Originally called “character disorders,” a personality disorder is “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment” (from the DSM-IV). The personality disorders we recognize today are listed here.

When most people think of the word “character,” I imagine they think first of a person’s moral fiber, his ethical nature. When clinicians talk about character disorders, they refer to problems with the aggregate qualities of an individual’s personality: who is he, when we sum him up? Over the years, my observation has been that character disorders are right behind addictions for the amount of human suffering they cause. Some people’s experiences are that they may even cause more suffering, since they are not as easily identified as other mental disorders and frequently go undiagnosed. We only know that someone causes us discomfort and pain, that being around them is hard, and that we have to watch what we say and do around them. They are not safe people, even if they are predictable over time.

I am convinced that many people’s childhood wounds are caused by having had a character disordered parent. Also known as neuroses, character disorders are marked by rigidity, an inability to yield when given the choice, and an almost complete blindness to the other person’s perspective, suffering, or emotions about an event, often caused by the character disordered person.

People with character disorders or neuroses (what I call “character disorder lite”)  act in ways that cause more problems than they solve–usually for other people more often than for themselves. Almost everything they do, in fact, is about them and results in their getting what they want and need, almost always at another person’s expense. Their blindness to other people’s concerns and needs is usually the result of a deeply held belief about the world, though not necessarily a conscious belief. Their belief in the world as they see it is so strong that any evidence to the contrary is discounted: this is the hallmark behavior of the personality disordered.

During the first decade of a character disorder’s bloom, the ill individual will have many opportunities to have her flaws pointed out to her, usually first by close friends and later by relatives. This pattern occurs mainly because a personality disorder develops out of a misbegotten childhood, in which a child’s parent or parents are themselves doing a disordered dance. The parents may play good cop-bad cop, with one parent the sick one and the other the rescuer or enabler, or each parent may have his or her own obvious disorder. In spite of their problems, though, unlike those with substance-abuse, psychotic, or even mood disorders, the personality disordered manage to keep their children in school, hold down jobs, and even to achieve socially-desirable ends such as education or advanced training, all while the character disorder ticks away like a timed bomb.

Usually, close friends or romantic partners are the first to realize that the character disordered are nutty, mainly due to the disordered person’s inability to yield, compromise, or otherwise see things the other person’s way. A romantic partner who needs a nutty spouse because of having had a nutty parent can serve as a good foil for the character disordered person: the relationship just feels right.  There will be a rush of romance, a deep spiritual connection, something bigger than life and more meaningful; the two become enmeshed and appear to others like a two-headed beast. Where one goes, the other follows; everything is romance and adventure except that the two have undertaken a quest of character without actually having any personhood at all.

Within 2-5 years of entering a relationship with a character impaired person, you know it. You know something is wrong, because the first year’s excuses and apologies have worn off  and the rigidity of your partner, friend, colleague, neighbor or loved one is remarkable. They do all the taking and very little giving. The giving they do is for appearances sake and involves no real sacrifice, for there is always something better to be gotten as the result of any “sacrifice” they do make. They are like vampires, and I’ve thought for a long time that the reason why the vampire is an enduring mythical creature is that our world is full of vampires. They suck the life out of others while giving nothing lively themselves.

Naturally, being the host comes to be a problem for others. The host either falls ill and becomes a vampire him- or herself, or struggles for freedom. Interpersonal conflicts are inevitable whenever the disordered come into prolonged contact with healthy people. They want to play a healthy person but they never can quite pull it off, for there are no substitutes or fakeries for realness.

The inability of the character disordered to yield sacrificially, even when appealed to in the most heartfelt ways, is a hallmark of this personality. They may be aware of the problems experienced by those around them, but they cannot make a connection between these problems and their own behavior. The problems the other person experiences are not their fault; the fault is always with the other person. This is true even when the other person is a person of reputation, experience, or quality to whom the disordered formerly turned for advice or help. Clinicians have written reams about how notoriously difficult it is to treat the personality disordered. They, of all those with mental disorders, are the most likely to get just “well” enough to function again and then to terminate therapy or any healthy relationship they have. They may return a few times a year for consultations, but you will never see a personality disordered person remain in therapy consistently longer than one year. Like addicts, they cannot maintain healthy interpersonal relationships as judged by everyone in the relationship for more than a year at a time. They can fake anything for about a year, or even long enough to get a degree or get the job or land the promotion: but a fiasco will occur and the result will be the loss of trust, relationship, and love.

Friends, partners, spouses, and eventually family members will all come to see the character disordered as difficult, rigid, and someone who cannot be appealed to. They will struggle with the emotional vampire and try to get them to change. There will not be change, for the hallmark of a personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV, is rigidity and persistence of personality traits. They just don’t see that they are the cause of the problem. When negative consequences to their rigid choices and decisions are experienced, they still are not to blame. They march on to the tune of their individual score and make more bad decisions based on an erroneous world view that can only create more negative outcomes.

And much of the problem is about outcomes. The character disordered, lacking clarity, the humility to accept wise advise based on the experiences of others, and being highly defended against changing their own unconsciously-held but deep beliefs about the world, inevitably experience poor outcomes. They buy a house, a car, a dog, marry a person, undertake a career, take a job, adopt a child, invest in a mutual fund, or make some other major decision that others who know them best advise against, have unhappy outcomes as the result of their own choices, have emotional reactions against others for their bad advice, experience all sorts of problems with maintaining what they bought, living in it, driving it, working there, raising the child, caring for the dog, etc. so later sell it, regret it, quit it, give it away, or get rid of it, and all the while never realize or recall that everyone told them so. They went to people who didn’t know them very well for advice and got whatever seal of approval they wanted, let what they did affect everyone who loved them (but didn’t care), and were not to blame for the outcome. There is never a character-changing realization of cause and effect, of sowing and reaping, or of win-win interpersonal relationships, because the true unconscious goal of the character disordered is eternal unyieldingness, of going their own way.

God-like, they cannot change.

Last week I wrote about the difference between personality or temperament preferences according to one’s type and moral choices. There’s no personality preference that excuses a person from moral, sane behavior. While working on this series, I was reminded of a family therapy group I co-led with a colleague some years ago. One of the indispensable tools in our tool box was the MBTI, which we used to help couples understand why they often didn’t see eye-to-eye, and what they could do to gain insight and change the way they related to one another.

An interesting byproduct of our work on personality types was a question raised by one of the group’s participants, Ned: what’s the difference between a personality type and a personality disorder? How do I know which is which when I’m dealing with problematic interpersonal relationships?

ned’s story

Ned was a single dad who attended the group because he was trying to heal a broken relationships with his son. After taking the MBTI and learning about personality preferences, he expressed concerns that his own preferences for introverted, intuitive thinking ran so far counter to his son’s extraverted, sensing personality that maybe he had alienated his son needlessly. Perhaps, he suggested, his son took after his ex-wife, the young man’s mother. They hadn’t gotten along very well, either. Were the problems and the falling out they’d had Ned’s fault, after all?

We found that as people learned about type and how it can affect one’s marriage and especially one’s child-rearing experiences, they often became concerned about whether they’d done their children a disservice by not fully accepting or understanding their personality preferences. Decent parents are always concerned about screwing their kids up. Unfortunately, screwed up parents are also concerned about screwing their kids up; they just can’t or won’t do what it takes to produce a healthy child, which primarily involves becoming a healthy parent first. Our work in the group was to try to separate one sort of parent from another, give the able parents the tools they needed, and get the screwed up folks into individual therapy.

I couldn’t answer Ned’s question about the estrangement with his son without knowing more details of the circumstances. Ned came in for several sessions of individual counseling so that we could try to sort things out. Ned was the adult child of an alcoholic whose early childhood was spent in a tense household occupied by an intelligent alcoholic father and dependent mother. After his parents divorced, he’d had to grow up quickly, becoming the “little man” around the house and juggling life between two households, as children of divorce must do. When he grew up, he fell in love with and married another adult child of an alcoholic, Allison, whose childhood had been chaotic and full of abuse and abandonment.

Ned and Allison believed that their love would pull them through any difficulty, and their love worked for them until Allison’s first pregnancy, which ended in a stillbirth. Ned recalled that she had never seemed to recover from the loss of their first child, and gradually developed a wine habit over the next few years. By the time their second child, Gabe, was born, Allison was drinking a bottle of wine every night. One evening while Ned worked late, Allison had passed out on the couch and Gabe had wandered out into the neighborhood. A concerned neighbor had taken the child home and notified Ned.

Ned had given Allison an ultimatum: either she got sober, or he would leave with Gabe. Allison agreed to stop drinking, and they attended AA and Al-Anon, where they learned about the addictive process, recovery, and mental and moral health. Allison had a year’s sobriety under her belt by the time Gabe was four years old.

Over time, however, Ned realized that sober Allison wasn’t much improvement over drunk Allison. She was intensely self-centered, had mood swings, and was also clingy and demanding of his time. She called Ned’s office several times a day “just to talk,” and regularly called him home for one emergency or another. She expressed many fears, including fear of strangers, fear of intruders, and suspicions about friends and family members. She was hyper-vigilant, observing and commenting on everything. Though always busy and occupied with a great many tasks that involved Gabe spending a substantial part of his time with her strapped into a car seat, stroller, or shopping cart, she was deeply lonely. She had no close friends and had alienated the few recovered family members they had. She was obsessive, driven, and tightly wound. Ned began to feel he was being choked.

In an effort to help his wife, Ned suggested she try yoga, which might calm her down, give her something to do, and expose her to other women who might befriend her. Allison loved yoga and began to practice religiously. “Emphasize ‘religiously,’” Ned had smiled wryly. Allison seemed to need an obsession to keep her from being in the present with Ned and Gabe. Though the principles taught in yoga included being present, attending to one’s breathing, and learning to be peaceful, Allison merely talked about her intentions to be present, be peaceful, and be available to others, too. No one who knew her could say that she had improved and could actually manifest her intentions, though Allison sang her own praises to heaven.

There wasn’t a single problem that led to Ned and Allison’s divorce. Rather, he explained, it was “a thousand little things, and the feeling that she was always just acting like a wife and mother but was never really in it.” She created chaos and tension out of thin air, particularly causing conflict with other women. She couldn’t seem to get along with her female bosses or with Ned’s mother or sisters, and regularly seemed to fabricate division in the workplace and family. I told Ned that she had probably been unable to confront her inner “bad mother” and so had to manifest it outwardly, demanding division, fractures, and abandonment in every intimate relationship because she had to externalize her ongoing self-abandonment.

I told Ned about research done by sociologist Jan Yager, who writes that healthy interpersonal relationships are unlikely to be had with people who grew up abused, neglected, or intensely criticized, for they are likely to act out the negative patterns of childhood and adolescence in all their subsequent relationships. People thus treated in childhood must get and act on good therapy or everyone around them will suffer the consequences, consequences the bewildered personality disordered never fully appreciate.

The courts gave Ned and Allison joint custody of Gabe, who hadn’t been well served by the traditional custodial arrangement of seeing his father only four days a month and on summer vacations. Steeped in Allisons’s chaotic, intense environment, Gabe had problems of his own.

We could see why estrangement was the nearly inevitable outcome of Ned’s relationship with his son. The question was, what (if anything) could we do about it?

There are psychological preferences as expressed through type, and then there are moral behaviors. A person’s type may determine how she expresses her values, but it does not determine the values themselves. A person’s type contributes to how he gives his gift, but the decision about whether or not to give the gift is a moral one.

Psychoanalyst and author Alice Miller writes that people who grow to adulthood without ever having been truly loved as children are similarly unable to truly love. In that case, “we can only try to behave as if we were loving. But this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love,” she writes. Only “a loved child learns from the beginning what love is.” Others have to learn what love is in adulthood if they learn it at all.

A person’s psychological type doesn’t determine whether she makes the choice to learn love in adulthood, or instead follows her natural but hypocritical inclination to act as if she were loving. Making decisions about whether to learn to love or not, whether to search for God or not, whether to seek out and develop one’s own true self or not, and whether to keep one’s word, commitments, and obligations or not are all moral choices. Not one of these choices is determined by personality or psychological type.

excuse me?

I think that growing up unwanted and unloved are good excuses for being a psychological mess upon reaching adulthood. But there’s no good excuse for failing to really learn to love rather than acting as if you love, no good excuse for failing to love someone with all your heart, with passion and sincerity, by desiring and acting in ways that serve the needs of the beloved in addition to serving yourself. I see no good excuses for receiving good in one’s life and hoarding that good rather than sharing it. There’s no good excuse for being given the chance to heal–perhaps many such chances–and refusing it or betraying your healer, as Judas did Jesus.

Jesus told a story about a wealthy landowner who prepared to go on a long journey. Calling three of his most trusted servants to him, he explained that he’d be gone for a very long time. “I’m leaving you three in charge,” he said, “so you’ll need this money I’ve budgeted. Make good use of it and when I return, we’ll have an accounting.” The first servant received one talent, which was worth nine years’ of skilled work–$20,000.00 in 2004 dollars. The second servant was given two talents, equivalent to $40,000.00, and the third servant was given five talents, equivalent to $100,000.00.

When the master returned, he learned that all but the servant who’d been given one talent had doubled his money for him. The one-talent servant had buried his $20,000.00 in the ground and returned it unharmed to the master. The master was shocked! “What?! You buried my money in the ground when you could have at least put it in the bank and earned me interest?! Why did you do that?!”

The servant replied, “Oh, it’s your fault, sir. Everyone knows what a hard-hearted man you are. I was afraid of your anger; it’s your fault I buried the money.”  Not fooled by the servant’s blame, the wealthy landowner considered the fact that two of his three trusted servants had valued something greater than their own skins. They’d been willing to overcome their excuses and fear to profit from the trust and generosity their boss had showed them.

“If you had really believed I am the hard-nosed bastard you say I am,” the rich man replied, “You would have put that money in the bank rather than risk having it dug up and stolen. You would have at least earned me the interest that money would have earned had I never placed my trust in you. As it is, you used me to excuse the smallness of your own heart. You’ve broken my trust and failed to return anything on my investment. You’ve just proved that you’re not the sort of servant I want in my business.”  The boss then took the $20,000.00 back from the hoarder and gave it to the servant who had doubled his $100,000.00. “Get that lazy servant who buried his money in the ground out of here!” he cried.

And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

love gives

Love is not a Scrooge McDuck. Love is a giver. Isn’t that the gospel? “For God so loved… that He gave…”. Love is a constant yielding in the back of one’s mind, all the way to and beyond the boundaries of one’s heart. Love makes me always aware of the yield sign.

It’s not easy to love. Love doesn’t come naturally to us. If love came naturally, we’d all do love like we do whatever else comes naturally: urinating, defecating, fornicating.  That love with its giving, yielding, believing, hoping, patience, and kindness isn’t natural to us is obvious. People are natural-born takers, doubters, demanders. We’re impatient and unkind. We give up, we don’t run the race to the end; we let people down.

It’s all so jolly as we go along loving those who are easy to love, our friends, the ones similar to us, those who agree with us and think our plans are just grand. But just let a disagreement occur, a difference of opinion. It stops being such a fine, jolly frolic when our differences draw blood. Then the stakes are serious.

When people are willing to give up their right to have their own way, I know that they are truly awake and alive to love, regardless of their psychological type. Extraverts and introverts alike are able to love. Extraverts may do it with a lot of words and production, and introverts may do it quietly without drawing much attention to themselves, but the character of the love will be constant.

love yields

Love yields. Because love yields, it’s not possible for love to have its way in a conflict in which one person wins at the other person’s expense. When my loved one demands his own way and I yield to him, one of us has loved and one of us has not. Love has a concern for each person in the exchange, each person in the relationship.  

“Love hurts, love scars, love wounds, and marks,” Nazareth sang, but love doesn’t have to achieve its ends through suffering. A person can always try to choose the path of love, a path that says, “I don’t want to win at your expense. I’m more than a vampire, sucking your blood; I’m more than a leech or a parasite, always taking and giving nothing in return. I hear that I’m causing you pain, and I’m sorry. What solution can we arrive at that will serve our mutual interests? What can we do to achieve peace between us?”

That kind of caring doesn’t arise from personality type; it is rooted in good character.

I’ve written briefly before about temperament types, but Father’s Day had me thinking about them again. One of Carl Jung’s many contributions to the field of psychology was his theory of psychological types. After Jung published his work on psychological types, psychologist Katharine Cooks Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, developed a psychological type test, or indicator, called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI is a most handy tool. It can help you understand yourself better, as well as help you understand others. I always urge those who haven’t taken the MBTI or (or some facsimile thereof) to take it and learn more about themselves and others.

We had the whole family, and then some, over at the house for most of the day on Father’s Day. Four generations of people who have been connected for as long as half a century provides much room for observation and discussion later to two intuitive types like my husband and me. Intuitive types want to analyze, dissect, and understand everything. We find connections and patterns, or make them when we don’t find them, preferring fancy to fact, the gut feeling about a situation or person to the evidence staring us in the face. He’s an ENXJ, and I’m an INXJ, meaning that we are evenly balanced between our Thinking and Feeling functions. Although my husband and I are a matched pair, it’s statistically unlikely for like psychological types to marry one another, except when one or both parties are intuitive-thinking types, as we are. NTs tend to be principled in everything they do; they somehow instinctively know that marrying one’s opposite doesn’t effectively support the principle of marital harmony, so tend to marry someone similar to achieve that end. 

opposites attract

Intuitive-Thinking types are the exceptions, for research indicates that over 75% of people marry an opposite psychological type. Some theorize that opposites attract because if you marry your opposite, you can externalize your need for a balanced personality. Your spouse, in effect, exemplifies and carries everything you’re not. The organized person marries the slovenly type; the person who’s always late chooses a partner who’s punctual to a fault, and so on. Then, once the rosy hues of idealization wear off, the harsh light of day reveals that we married someone we were bound to rub the wrong way, and vice-versa. As it says in Proverbs, “as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” It should come as no surprise that the first five to seven years of marriage are the most difficult; it takes that long for people to either “get” one another, or give up. By year eight many couples divorce.

An interesting side effect of the law of opposites is that, when opposites attract and marry one another, they tend to have children with temperament types similar to one spouse or the other, but not both. Thus, an introverted child may have a quite extraverted mother; the intuitive, dreamy mother may have a child who’s more practically grounded than she. My husband and I were both raised by mothers who were our exact opposites temperamentally and who were  mysteries to us. Our siblings who were similar to our mothers naturally understood them, while we were like fish on bicycles when it came to insight about what would please our mothers. I think in retrospect that our mothers found us equally incomprehensible, and used our differences as excuses for the emotional distance they maintained. Rather than working at understanding us, they tried to change us. These efforts only resulted in our feeling unacceptable, unworthy of love. We grew up alienated in many ways from our own parents; from this, we had to heal.

true love

I don’t think that being different from one’s child is an excuse for emotional estrangement. With such a wealth of information about children’s psychological and emotional needs available, it seems inexcusable that parents would fail to help their own child feel comfortable in her own skin. Being told you’re somehow misshapen psychologically or temperamentally can be a terrible injustice and heartache to a child.

It’s also hurtful when we give the adults in our lives this message of unacceptability. The Christian ideal of loving your neighbor as yourself is, in the context of temperamental dissimilarities, particularly compelling. Jesus taught that it’s easy to love your friends–those with whom you choose to associate, those you tend to like–but divine to love your enemies. Our enemies are those who wrong us, misuse us, who are dissimilar to us in belief, custom, race, temperament. An enemy is odious, hateful, an adversary. The Greek word used in the Gospels, in fact, has as its root the words adversary, adverse. One who is adverse is one who is opposed, opposite, or acting in a contrary direction. This certainly must apply when we’re dealing with temperament types; we’re admonished to love those who act in ways contrary to our ways, too.

“Love does no wrong to a neighbor,” it says in Romans 13:10; one can find this same teaching about love’s behaviors in all true religions, even among humanists. In the sciences, physicians adhere to a  ”do no harm” ethic. We all know what love is when we think about it; we just don’t think about it often enough. Many times we wait for our feelings of fondness to surface before we’ll act in loving ways. We may fail to act lovingly absent any positive feelings. We confuse sentiment for principle, phileo for agape.

In his book, True Love,Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes that the four elements of true love are:

• Lovingkindness or benevolence, the desire and ability to bring joy to another person.
• Compassion; the desire and ability to ease the pain of another person.
• Joy; if there is no joy in your love, it is not true love.
• Freedom; love in such a way that the person you love feels free outside and inside.

 True love is a moral choice, a philosophically ethical stance. We choose to love. It’s not an easy or natural choice; if it were, we wouldn’t need religion to teach us how to do it.

What comes naturally to us is easy, and it’s easy to assume that others see and experience life as we do. It takes a great deal more maturity and wisdom to care about and understand others as they are, to love them as they are. To love ourselves as we are. All this applies to psychological types.

Father’s Day

At our Father’s Day cookout yesterday, with four generations of our clan milling about, all our temperamental differences and likenesses were on parade. As adoptive parents, we never assumed that we’d be like our children temperamentally or vice-versa. In fact, the emotional distance we experienced with our own mothers prepared us to become better parents because it drove us to do for our children what our mothers did not do for us, which was to love us unconditionally. We never wanted to encourage in our children the same emotional distance we experienced with our mothers, the alienation from our very selves that their subtle and not-s0-subtle rejections engendered.

The tree frogs bawled as we lingered over our beers on the porch long after everyone had left. We talked into the night about how we had learned how to love every child of ours as he or she was and is, how precious and valuable each one is in this peculiar family system. We noticed how disconnected this relative or that one is from the family, from the way things really are, from us, even though they’re in the middle of everything, chatting, letting the energy bounce around them. They show up physically, but bring no self with whom anyone can connect, no real life.  They say and do all the conventional things, use their manners, can talk for hours, but they rarely ask a question. If they ask a question, they don’t wait for the answer. If asked questions, they cannot seem to answer in emotionally or intellectually satisfying ways.

 We talked about how sad we feel about this, especially as intuitve types for whom meaning and connection are essential. Where is the meaning of this person’s life? we asked. How can that one be so shallow, with all this abundance ’round about? How is it that when we ask, “How were you changed by this experience you had?” we receive only a blank stare? Is this what all the love and support this person has received have come to? Is this what all those years of living has meant to these people?–Endless debate about politics, religion, shoulds, oughts, musts and shalls?

We talked about how we had finally come to a place of acceptance with our own parents, understanding their needs and giving according to their needs, not just demanding what we want, what we need. When we gave our parents what they ought to have first given us, we discovered we were repairing not only our own hearts, but tears in the fabric of the universe, too.

hell, no! we won’t go!

Because of who we are, though, we sometimes come away from family gatherings feeling depleted and dissatisfied. Because our temperament types exist in only 1-2% of the population, we’re the oddballs, not our more conventional relatives. We naturally prefer depth to breadth because we’re intuitive. Perhaps the idealized, fake selves we perceive in some of our family members are the result of differences in type; maybe they’re not as dead as they seem.

As we mulled this over, we realized that within our very large family are members of every single different psychological type, and then some. We’ve been able to be emotionally close to and intimate with every single person who made him- or herself available for loving relationships. We’ve learned that not every person has a real self or is willing to give it. Sometimes people develop only enough of a self to relieve their suffering, and then they stop. They don’t learn to truly love; they come to the place where they might have something to give, and then they withhold it. They refuse to die to themselves, to put it in Biblical terms. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, by itself; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Nobody bears fruit until he first goes down, down, down into the dark, cold, lonely earth and germinates. That’s what Jesus taught. Buddha didn’t sit under the bodhi tree for no reason. He was dying to himself.

We all know we have to go there; but most will not go. We see this in our family. We see what the refusal to go any farther looks like. It looks like an anti-war protest: “Hell, no! We won’t go!” It feels like a tear-jerker, like a tragedy, like a train wreck fixing to happen. We lay our hands on our mouths, appalled, our eyes opened wide with consternation. Do you see that?! we gasp. Look what she’s refusing! Oh, no! Oh, my!

Some people’s selves have been so wounded, so compromised, that they live on virtual life support. Like vampires, they use the life in others to energize themselves. They’re willing to live “as-if” kinds of lives, rather than pressing on to grab hold of an authentic life of their own. They refuse to become balanced, to grow, to yield, to “become all things to all men,” as Saint Paul admonished, “so that the many may be saved.” They refuse to love. It’s OK with them if other people suffer. It’s OK with them if they cause suffering. They go blank and limp when you say, “I am in pain because of you.” This is because they are still suffering on some level, because they are in pain because of themselves, too.

I’m going to be writing this week about true love and temperament type, about how each and every person, no matter what his personality type, can love with all he has. We can learn to step outside our comfort zones and give what’s needed, once we’re full up.  We can even give before we’re full up, if we’re brave enough. We can give what we have. That’s the sacrifice, the laying down of one’s own life for the sake of the beloved. I don’t think we’ve really loved until we’ve done that, until we are more than just recipients of constant blood transfusions.

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