How Personality Impacts Relationships : The Ugly , The Bad and the Good
On Tues ., Nov . 8 , the Cato Society met to hear from speaker Dr . Christine Adams . Dr . Adams is a child , adolescent and adult psychiatrist who has devoted her professional career to trying to understand how the nurturing we receive as infants , children , adolescents and adults determines our behavioral responses to others in our world . She has studied how these responses lead to relationship difficulties , impaired judgements , misunderstandings and emotional illnesses . She has practiced psychiatry here in Louisville for many years and teaches in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Louisville .
In 1977 , as a resident at UofL , Dr . Adams met Dr . Homer Martin who became her mentor . He assembled the concept of “ emotional conditioning ,” which he and Dr . Adams went on to study for many years . Emotional conditioning is classical conditioning of people ’ s emotional responses to one another in relationships . This comes about because parents emotionally shape their children ’ s emotional responses to other people .
Imagine how children learn to walk . One child may hang onto the coffee table , tentatively trying to take first steps while their parents encouraged them and held out their arms . They took their first steps ,
by KATHRYN VANCE and everyone was excited . Another child may be hanging onto the coffee table , ready to take steps when the parent decides to pick up the child so that they don ’ t fall . These are two different messages that convey to the child how the parent sees them . Early emotional conditioning is constantly reinforced throughout childhood and adulthood , so we become more and more fixed the older we get .
Dr . Martin observed that there are patterns in emotional conditioning that lead to two different roles or personalities . In their study , they looked at data over an 80-year span of almost 4,000 people engaged in dynamic psychotherapy . Dr . Adams studied mostly children and adolescents while Dr . Martin looked at mostly adults .
Emotional conditioning takes place very early in life – the first three years – and is unconscious , neither the child nor parent is aware it ’ s taking place . It creates robotic relationships with automatic responses to others , not thinking about what the other person needs from the relationship and simply going “ on autopilot .” It also creates emotional illnesses such as anxiety , depression , substance abuse , eating disorders , suicides and more .
Through their research , they discovered two roles : omnipotent and impotent . The omnipotent person unconsciously behaves and
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