All in the Family......... and elsewhere

I knew I should not have picked up the Wall Street Journal before my walk this morning.  I love this section and usually learn so much in a few short pages.  The temperature's quite cool  today after a terribly hot week last week and I've opened all the doors as well as the one to the screened porch.  Our cat is in heaven and hasn't come back into the house for a couple of hours now.

As usual, the Personal Journal's Health and Wellness section that appears on Tuesdays is crammed with interesting information about Sleeping Types (are you a short sleeper?), other options besides bypass surgery, food addictions (I hope folks pay attention to this study because as I've said previously here, I do think there's a genetic link to all of this), and especially the article titled, "Do You Get an 'A' in Personality?" 

In an earlier post I talked about Family Week at a residential eating disorder facility, communication,  and the value of the exercise that uses Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages.  Along comes an article that delves even deeper into the entire subject of co-existence and family relationships.  

One of the neat things about people is we can be related and yet be so different!  One family member might crave peace and quiet while another just loves to crank up the latest rap recording.  (The solution here might be headphones.)  Another might want everything to be "just so" while a supervisor might find "organized chaos" to be the answer in his/her office.  I'll never forget one summer when, having not too much to do while my three professors were on vacation, I "straightened up" one of their offices, placing books in alphabetical order and so on.  Well, although I did not get fired, I did get a dressing down.  Before I did this, he knew exactly where in each stack or where on the desk or table a specific article or book was related to a paper he was working on.  When I was done, his entire orderly (so to speak) world was upside down.

In this latest article, Elizabeth Bernstein grabbed this reader by noting in the first paragraph, "In the never-ending quest to help people co-exist peacefully with their spouses, children, siblings and in-laws, therapists are turning to tools used to assess the psychological stability of pilots, police officers and nuclear-power plant operators: personality tests."

Bernstein focuses on the family, especially one with a teenage daughter who moved back into the household and who has an entirely different lifestyle from that of her parents, who are goal-oriented - mom's an accounting consultant and dad's an attorney.  Their daughter, Maggie, "....is an introvert, a feeler who craves harmony and needs time and freedom to discover what she wants to do."

Bernstein then notes that mom, after she and her husband and Maggie took the test and heard the results, said, "It helped us see that she is a different person and will have a different path."

Key words.  Important words.  Our children are different people on different paths.   

I think this article is especially important for families whose son or daughter (or both or all) struggle with perfectionism, anxiety, and an eating disorder.  As many specialists will note, particularly those who are up-to-date in the eating disorder field, for progress to be made in a family whose member is struggling with an eating disorder, there needs to be a calm and nourishing (pun intended) environment.  If the family members do not understand each other on a much deeper level, it's more difficult to create that environment.

For years this tool has been used in the workplace.  Perhaps the MBTI could be considered another window into the activities of a family, now that family members are increasingly -- thank goodness -- being accepted as members of the team.

Time for my walk!