#temperament

#temperament

The amount of often conflicting advice for parents and caregivers available on social media can feel overwhelming. How does one even begin to sort through this overabundance of advice, much less figure out what is best practice for building healthy relationships? The Spirited Child Approach has been developed over decades of working with families of spirited children who are typical and yet more intense, persistent, perceptive, sensitive, and energetic. It interweaves findings from the fields of temperament, secure attachment, sleep, development, resiliency, neurobiology, and self-regulation.

It's hard in stressful times to truly know ourselves, apart from habits, transitory feelings, and reactions to other people. Emotional pain and relationship discord result from losing touch with the core self. When that happens, we're likely to try, in vain, to regulate our emotions by controlling other people. If you or your partner ever felt needy, enmeshed, manipulated, or controlled, you can benefit from strengthening elements of your core self, including your:

Think about the last time you ran into someone you hadn't seen in years, maybe a school friend. You remembered them a certain way, maybe loud, always joking, the kind of person who filled a room. But when you met again, they seemed quieter and more thoughtful than you remembered. For a second, you wondered if time had traded them out for someone else.

When my oldest son Edwin first started preschool, it was incredibly stressful. He was about 3, and it was the first time in a big classroom for him. As a sensitive, quiet child, he was very upset on the first day. He cried and clung to me, and it broke my heart to see his little hand reaching for me with tear-soaked eyes as I left him there. Needless to say, I cried too.

Humans have a strong tendency to overcorrect. Perfectionists, in particular, overcorrect by forcing themselves to become different versions of themselves, or fundamentally different people. Disdaining weakness in general, they often enter treatment to attempt to eliminate all of it. In my experience, one of the more glaring and repugnant weaknesses is people-pleasing, the tendency to go above and beyond to make others feel comfortable and/or happy.