Personality Style TWO: The Loving Person
Core Value Tendency: TWOS value and are attracted to love. They want to be generous persons, seeking to make the world a more loving place to live in. Harmonious intimate mutual relationships are what life is all about.
Adaptive Cognitive Schema: The proper understanding of freedom enables TWOS to live within the natural laws and limits of reality. Interdependence, which lies between the extremes of dependence/codependence and an exaggerated independence, is the mature stance of adults. Being free means TWOS can give or not give, receive or not receive.
Adaptive Emotional Schema: The state that accompanies TWOS’ objective paradigm is humility, the virtue which realistically estimates what kind and what amount of love another needs in contrast to giving whatever is believed will bring approval to the giver. Acting as a reality principle, humility acknowledges limits and sets boundaries, enabling TWOS to say no as well as yes.
Adaptive Behavioral Schemas: The actions that follow from an understanding that love involves an ebb and flow of giving and receiving along with the habit of humility include an exquisite empathic attunement not only to the needs of others but also to their own needs. TWOS have an intuitive sense for what others need and are feeling. They are naturally giving, generous, and helpful. They feel fulfilled being able to give to others and are supportive, nurturing, considerate, and appreciative. TWOS are sociable, friendly, and approachable. They naturally move toward people with love and affection. They praise others and build them up, giving compliments easily. TWOS are natural listeners and counselors. They also speak up for others, especially the underprivileged and handicapped.
Maladaptive Cognitive Schema: When TWOS exaggerate their loving qualities, they over-identify with the idealized self image of I am loving; I am helpful. To compensate for their maladaptive belief that others will not meet their needs, they turn their attention toward meeting other people’s needs, hoping that what they do unto others will be done unto them. They believe it is only after meeting others’ needs that their own will be taken care of.
Maladaptive Emotional Schema: Perceiving themselves as helpers in a needy world, TWOS believe they have unlimited resources for serving others that never need replenishing. They are not needy, but they are needed. The resultant disposition is pride. TWOS are proud of their giving nature and seek to be important is people’s lives in order to feel worthwhile.
Maladaptive Behavioral Schema: Perceiving the world as needy, and feeling proud of their self sacrificing nature, TWOS become compulsive helpers, trying to please others to get them to like them and meet their needs. TWOS give strokes to get strokes, doing for others what they hope others will do for them. Habitually moving towards people, it’s hard for TWOS to move against people in anger or confrontation. It’s conflictual for them to give negative feedback because they don’t want to hurt others. It’s also difficult for TWOS to move away from people, leaving them alone to stand on their own two feet, or fall flat on their face. The TWOS’ task is to rescue.
What is Avoided: Because they strive to be loving, TWOS avoid their own needs. To think about themselves or to express their needs would be selfish. They are reluctant to heed their own agendas, feelings, and desires.
Defensive Maneuvers: TWOS avoid their needs by repressing them so that they are not even aware of them. Or they may be aware of them, but choose to suppress them since their job is to lighten other people’s burdens not encumber them with their own needs.
Childhood Development: TWOS got approval for helping and giving and not asking for much in return. They learned how to be sweet, funny, cute, and charming to get attention and win affection. They became the parent in the family to hold things together. They learned that being pleasing and altering themselves to meet others’ needs was a good way to survive and get their needs met. Directly expressing their own needs met with indifference, disapproval, or abandonment. TWOS came to believe that their own needs wouldn’t be met until they first met other people’s needs. They are very vulnerable to rejection and not being appreciated for what they do for others. You’re nobody unless somebody loves you and you’re somebody when you’re needed.
Non-Resourceful State: When TWOS are under stress, they do more of the same, that is, they become more helpful and travel around the “rescue triangle.” On this non-resourceful journey, they first assume the role of rescuer. When they don’t get the affirmation they need and believe they deserve, they feel victimized and play the martyr, reproaching others for not appreciating and caring enough for them. They then lose touch with their gentleness and compassion and become hard and tough to protect their self-esteem. They become bitter, jaded and distrustful of others and become a persecutor, making others feel guilty and desiring to get even with them.
Resourceful State: When TWOS are in a resourceful relaxed state, they get in touch with their own needs, wants, and feelings. They put their needs on the table and negotiate getting them met. They allow others to give to them freely without doing anything to earn their love. They can say “no” even though they feel guilty. They allow others to be more autonomous and don’t foster their dependence on them. They find other ways of expressing themselves besides giving, such as developing their creative, artistic, cultured self and capacities. Now able to say to themselves I am special, they believe they are lovable just because they are. I am therefore I am loving replaces I give in order to be accepted.
