What Your Child and Spouse Have in Common

When I wrote the book “The Temperaments and the Adult-Child Relationship” I wanted to focus on creating a handbook for parents working on a better relationship with their child. The two main keys to making this book successful was to make sure I included:

1. Specific guidelines for each temperament combinations so people didn’t have to “figure it out” – they could immediately start helping enrich and de-stress the relationship they have with their child. This book didn’t just talk about each temperament. It had to include a chapter on each temperament and 16 more chapters with each parent-child combination.
2. The assumption that only one person in the relationship would be working on the temperament issues in the relationship – because the child was too young to do so in an active way. So each of the 16 chapters assumed the person in the “parent” position was doing the main work and was simply guiding the child through subtle tips, stories and other tools.

So what does this have to do with your spouse, mother-in-law, parents, friends or co-workers? Everything! You may have been wanting to work on your relationship with them for a long time and you know using the temperament system will work but you can’t get them to “go along” with it and cooperate.

Using the book “The Temperaments and the Adult-Child Relationship” you can finally work on ANY of your relationships without having the second person participate. This method has been successful for hundreds of my consulting clients and even myself. Of course it is ideal to have both people in a relationship participate in any improvements but the reality is that this rarely happens. Usually one person has the “relationship improvement” idea first and the other one either participates after some time or never really wants to participate in a system of relationship improvement.

To use this book with anyone in your life all you need to do is put the other person in the role of the “non-participant” (called “the child” in the book) and put yourself in the role of the parent. This does not imply that your partner or friend is a “child” it is simply a tool you can use to improve your relationships when you are the person initiating the ideas.