Does Birth Order Matter?

For generations, family members have noted the differences that naturally arise in children raised in the same family. How is it that John, the first born and only boy, seems to have such different personality characteristics than his younger brother, raised in the same house by the same parents just two years apart? Good question!


Theories of personality abound. You may be familiar with some of the more popular models, often used in work or educational settings. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on the four major personality styles described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a favorite. The Enneagram, a model developed in religious communities and often used in spiritual direction, and other forms of personal discovery, is another. These are models that seek to describe common types of personalities. Other models, such as the Big Five theory, attempt to describe personalities using the idea of common traits shared by human beings across the world, such as extraversion or neuroticism.


Whichever way makes more sense to you to describe human beings, by types or common traits, we have a collective curiosity about how people become who they are, and how much we can or should adapt ourselves to others and our environment.


How did I get to be the way I am? When my clients ask me this question, I answer this way: our personality is constituted like a recipe, with three primary ingredients. The first main ingredient is our individual nature. We are born with a particular style of personality, inherited from our parents and our larger family system. It’s part of our genetic code, and forms the basis of who we become. Our general sense of the world, our innate optimism or pessimism, our sense of humor; this basic personality is another thing we have inherited.


The second main ingredient of our personality is formed by the way we are cared for by our parents; it’s the nurture part of the recipe. Was our mother well nourished, healthy, and ready to become pregnant? Were our parents free from addiction, major illness or injury? Was our birth relatively normal? Were we welcomed into the world with joy and cared for with love? The way our parents meet our vulnerability, suffering and growing sense of self makes up the great majority of our personality relationship style.


If our parents or primary caregivers have enough sense of self that they can sacrifice and respond to our needs consistently, we learn to trust that others will meet our needs, and that others are trustworthy. We offer ourselves to them, and get care and love in return. In the research done on this concept of emotional attachment, about half of us get just what we need to feel secure. The rest of us learn some combination of security, anxiety and withdrawal to cope with inconsistent parenting.


The third part of our personality is made up of all the unique, individual experience we have in life and what we do with it. It’s the fall you took in second grade from school jungle gym, the trip to the hospital, and the cast that you had to wear through the summer. How did that fall affect you? How did it shape the way you think, feel and respond to the world? What happens, and how you chose to respond, makes up a large part of your personality.


What about birth order? I think it fits in this third “what happens to us” category of personality development. While research is still battling it out whether first born children actually are more independent than their second born siblings, therapists and other social scientists have found a common pattern in family position that seems to fit many families, at least in Western cultures. In general, first born and only children are commonly more self determined and disciplined, having been born into an adult system and most closely associated to adults, even as infants. The second born child is less connected to the adults in the family, and if followed by a third child, may feel a bit lost in their parents’ strong relationship to the first born and emotional focus on the baby of the family. The farther away from the parent system, the more independent and even rebellious that child may become. (Sulloway, 1997) Additionally, the more older siblings a child has, the more accustomed they often become to letting other people lead, and can more easily go “with the flow” than those born first.


Family therapists differ in the amount of importance they place in this theory of birth order, but most will inquire about how a client’s family is constituted, and where in the family their client “fits.” Why it matters at all is that it may help people better understand some of their unconscious preferences for friendships, marriage partners, relationship styles, and even how they may connect to or discipline their own children. It’s all just part of our individual personality recipes.

Sulloway, F. J. (1997) Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York: Vintage.

(Originally written for GoodTherapy.org profile/topic expert page)

Do You Have Enough Friends?

            Do you have all the friends you need? Chances are that you are among the majority of American adults who recognize that they are struggling with fewer close friendships than they want. As emotional beings, all of us are biologically designed to connect to others in and outside our families of origin. While we may be surrounded by others at work, or sporting events, in our neighborhoods or churches, few of us feel that we have a core group of steady, supportive, mutually caring same gender friendships. We are friend hungry. And we don’t know how to fix it.

            This emotional scarcity can come on quite slowly. While we are progressing through school, the constant shifts from playgrounds to classrooms to new schools provide us with an ever-replenishing sea of faces from whom we may find sympathetic chums. But just as quickly as those people move into our lives, they can move out, as new environments and opportunities sweep our time and attention elsewhere. Our friends and we may marry. And right before our eyes, our emotional circle becomes instantly smaller and more fixed.

            It becomes harder and harder to stay in regular, meaningful touch with people. Phone calls help but don’t completely replace in-person conversation. Getting together can take enormous scheduling and financial efforts not everyone is able to sustain. When was the last time you hand-wrote a distant friend a letter? Many of us have tried to find less isolation in the connections we make on social media. They soothe us with easy digital connections to people across the globe. But unless those relationships are mutual and sustained, they won’t fill the emotional gap that face-to-face time with people provides.

            This scarcity of friendships seems to hit American men even harder than it does women. We have a culture that still assumes men need to be independent, stoic and in competition with one another. Generations of this gender ethic have led to families that raise boys to dismiss healthy emotional dependency and under-value one another, even within the same family. This places men in emotionally vulnerable positions, overly dependent upon their romantic partners for support. Women shoulder this by becoming the emotional centers of their families and becoming adept at managing everyone’s interpersonal relationships. It leaves men empty and women exhausted. While many of us reject these old models, they still shape the way we live. What are we to do?

            I don’t think we should give up on being and having good friends. The emotional cost of loneliness is a true mental health crisis for many, and there are no quick and lasting solutions. Over a lifetime, we need many real friends with whom we can share common interests, new experiences, shared struggles and spontaneous laughter.

            One of the most helpful resources I have found that helps to describe how we make good, close friendships is the 2016 book, “Frientimacy” by Shasta Nelson. Nelson has created an online community around friendships, speaks around the country to groups and corporations about her research, and was a featured speaker at TEDx in 2017. What she has to teach us about the qualities of good friendships is inspiring to me as a relationship therapist and someone who wants to be and have close friendships throughout my entire lifespan.

            The core qualities we must cultivate within ourselves and our key intimate relationships are Positivity, Consistency and Vulnerability. In other words, our key friendships should feel good, be mutually maintained, and let us be our real selves. These are high standards, and they take time, good boundaries and mutual intention to develop. Not every friendship can or will experience all three qualities. There are all kinds of people in our lives who may be able to sustain one aspect, like positivity, but can’t meet other aspects like consistency or real-life sharing. Or we may be more interested in someone as a friend than they are in us, and the relationship never grows. I’ll point you to Nelson’s book for more details about these key aspects, but you get the point. Real friendships take work and commitment to one another. When they work, they make us feel fully human.

            No matter who we are, we need good friendships. Perhaps the last good friend you had was someone you knew years ago but with whom you have fallen out of touch. What did that friendship teach you about how to recreate that small, essential, positive human community of two close friends? Perhaps it’s time to discover more about how you can be a friend and welcome new friendship in return.

(Written for/published 5/28/2019 The Savage Pacer)

Reader Response: Dividing Family Loyalties

Many thanks to M who took the time to write me about his experience with family loyalty. Here is his letter, in part:

“I am writing because I have been on the wrong end of this issue. That is, my wife has put the needs of her parents ahead of me and our marriage. We married in 1987. In 1995 we made the fateful decision to move in next door to her parents. Problems stared within a few months of moving in.

When a spouse puts parents (or really, anyone else) as a higher priority ahead of the needs of the marriage and their spouse this is the biggest domino that falls causing a cavalcade of other bad actions and decisions…The anger that is festered, self-doubt, damage to self-esteem causes so many poor decisions from how your money is spent, time and priorities are allocaated, how the children are engaged, infidelities and job effectiveness.

Unlike if this happens with friends or worse, a spouse has an affair, in these cases the offending spouse can make those people disappear from the relationship and the relationship has a chance to heal via distance, deeds and time.

When it is a parent or family member, in my wife’s case she was unwilling to stand up to her parents (mostly her mother) and say my husband comes first. When a spouse does not stand up …the family member takes full advantage of this weakness and manipulates the entire engagement. In my case, this continues to damage the marriage. The relationship with the in-laws only worsens and cannot heal or improve. The constant conflict is beyond exhausting.

You may ask why did I not see this before we got married. We met and married and started our life together 2000 miles away from her hometown. Consequently, I did not have the opportunity to witness this enmeshed relationship prior to 1995.

My wife in 2017 moved in with her mother. And I am now at 60 years old alone, trying to put the pieces of my life together.”

Dividing Family Loyalties When You Marry

There is nothing like bringing home a close friend or partner to shine a spotlight on the unspoken rules by which every family, your family, lived and lives.

Every family that lives with one another for some time develops a set of patterns for emotional engagement that soon feels like the “family rules.” These expectations for behavior may start within a marriage and strengthen their grip as children are brought into the home. Once the children catch on to these patterns, they begin to live by them. Only family members know how that family works, even though no one may have ever spoken these powerful expectations out loud.

Many of these rules are quite helpful, and create a kind of emotional shorthand that members count on. Some rules families frequently live by are: this family lets one another know our whereabouts; this family goes to church/synagogue/mosque; this family values education; this family values friendship, and this family works hard. Others might be less helpful. They might be expressed as: this family avoids conflict; this family never questions mother/father; this family relies on men for money, women for support; this family doesn’t live outside our region; this family keeps secrets, and this family doesn’t trust anyone outside the family.

With these internal rules, members keep the connections of their family relationships, even unhealthy ones, intact. Once we bring another person into close relationship with this family system through marriage, the rules become more obvious; our new partner has no way of knowing or observing these internal rules except by bumping into them. Because they don’t have the years of unconscious training in working within the boundaries of these family expectations, newcomers invariably stir up distress and even conflict by disregarding these rules or even openly disagreeing with them. This is one way newcomers remain permanently on the outside of their partners’ family systems.

This is where the partner, whose family of origin is the one getting stirred up, has to bring his or her best self to the party or he/she will end up offending and damaging the new family and partner. If the rule is “no one can challenge the way Mom behaves,” Mom can run roughshod over the new wife of her son and her son gets caught between his loyalties toward his family of origin and that toward his partner. Because the loyalty to one’s family of origin is older and deeper, chances are that is the one that most easily wins.

In families where emotional connection has never been particularly intense or expected, this kind of division of emotional importance happens automatically. Parents have children, raise them, and expect that once their children marry, the old family changes. The new has come, and everyone has to adjust. In more emotionally intense, enmeshed, or distressed family systems, blending a new spouse and/or grandchildren into the mix may require an our-way-or-the-highway kind of behavior from the newcomer that can make for chronic distress for everyone.

I counsel couples who find themselves in conflict over family rules to think about loyalty as an emotional quality of relationships that can and must be shared unequally. One can be loyal to both one’s family of origin as well as to a new spouse, but the most successful marriages have partners who transfer their primary loyalties to their new partner. Mom or Dad may still be core relationships, but if there is any important conflict, decision, schedule, or issue to decide, the default must move to the spouse and couple.

If you and your partner seem to be in constant conflict over your visits back to visit your parents, your time spent with siblings, or the ever-present sense that you care more about pleasing your parents than you do your spouse, check in with yourself regarding that unequal balance of loyalty. If you feel miserably caught in the middle, it’s time to shift your focus. Unplug some of that urgency from your family of origin and give it to your new partner and children. And, of course, if it’s just not as easy as that for you, consulting with a local marriage and family therapist will help you more easily make that emotional transition.

(Originally written as a post for GoodTherapy.org, April 2013)

Netflix’s “The Crown” & Joy in Marriage

Netflix’s major release of the second season of “The Crown,” a lavish and brilliantly acted biography of England’s Queen Elizabeth II in her very first years of her reign, is worth every moment of your time. Writer Peter Morgan is creating a masterpiece of historical drama.

At it’s core are the conflicts that face a young woman whose father dies relatively young and has the British monarchy thrust upon her at 25. We’re witness to the parallel sacrifices of her husband, nuclear family members, and all those who serve the royal family. As her husband Prince Philip chafes under the demands of his marriage to the Crown, his roguish behavior brings increasing pain and anguish to Elizabeth. Despite the developing pressures, Elizabeth suggests a small party to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. And it is at this dinner party that Philip makes a brief speech that describes the core of marriage’s worK:

(laughter …) “Ten years has taught me,
The secret of a successful marriage is actually to have different interests.
Well, different interests, not entirely different interests. It’s a funny business.
One sees the whole of the other person. You see even that part of them that they don’t see themselves.
And presumably, they see that hidden part of you.
One ends up knowing more about one’s partner than they know about themselves.
And it can be pretty tough to keep quiet about it.
So you have to come to an accommodation, an arrangement, a deal if you like.
To take the rough with the smooth.
But the extraordinary thing is down there in the rough, in the long reeds of difficulty and pain,
that is where you find the treasure.

So I would like to propose a toast in the name of love, in the name of our beloved country, in the name of steadfastness, in the name of another ten marvelous years.
I give you mon petit chou, Lilibet, Elizabeth, The Queen.”

(The Crown, S2E4, “Beryl”; starting 19m.00s)

What brilliant insight – spoken in Philip’s voice – of the hard but joyous human work of living closely with another person, and knowing more about them than they do about themselves; and vice versa. And rather than using that knowledge as a weapon, the happiest marriages reach an accommodation, an emotional arrangement, to take both the best and worse of their partner and accept this as the wonder of what it means to be loved well by another human being. “It’s there were you find the treasure,” says Philip. Yes, indeed. This is what it really means to love another person. To know all about them, accept them, and be accepted and cherished, despite this deep knowledge, in return.

Thank you for saying it so well, Mr. Morgan. May it be so for all of us.

What is Structural Family Therapy?

I’m grateful to Sal Minuchin for helping us as family therapists understand, conceptualize and maneuver within the dynamic structures of families: the way that the emotional and legal connections of parents to their children over generations create fluid as well as fixed patterns of hierarchies, loyalties, rules, subsystems, coalitions and boundaries. While we may know these experiences instinctively, his theory gives us a vocabulary, structure and system of talking and thinking about these automatic family features.

I’m particularly glad for the way his ideas give us a way to talk about family power. How are marriages formed? How do parents use their power over children? What does it mean to be a grandparent, a sibling, a twin, a youngest or oldest child? Who creates the family rules? Who breaks them? Of critical importance is the way that this theory helps me to conceptualize children’s emotional dysfunction. I don’t have to think simply in individualistic, intrapersonal terms. I’m free to think, speak and intervene with children’s pain interpersonally by helping their parents better manage their own functioning, power, and relational well-being.

Every time I draw a new genogram, and hear about a conflicted marriage, a stressed child, or cut-off grandparents, and think about rules, power and family structure, I draw upon the core ideas of Minuchin and generations of clinicians after him who have helped us all become students of family structure.

1/2021: Here’s a great detailed look at Structural Family Therapy from a new counseling resource, Choosing Therapy: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/structural-family-therapy/

Racism and Trauma

For decades, family therapists and other mental health professionals and researchers have believed that trauma in one generation can be expressed in the genetic code and passed as psychological suffering and vulnerability in following generations. This fact has been demonstrated in animal studies for years, but few human trials have followed.

A research team at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City, studying the DNA and mental health of survivors of World War II Nazi atrocities and their children, have newly demonstrated genetic changes in the children of these survivors. The Guardian article of August 21, 2015 describes the changes in a specific gene sequence associated with the regulation of stress hormones. What therapists have seen in their practices has begun to be proven in the laboratory: when emotional and mental trauma happens to us in our early life, it can change our genes, and those changes can be passed down to our children.

It helps to explain the increased mental health issues in children of Holocaust survivors, victims of political terror, accidental trauma, severe poverty, famine and the progeny of African slaves in the United States. This “epigenetic inheritance” can linger for generations and effect the culture, as it has done in the Jewish communities around the world after 1945.

The continuing hurt, vulnerability, anger and rage expressed in Native American tribes and African American communities in the United States against the majority white population can be understood as both cry for justice in the present, and a echo of generational trauma that was endured for nearly 300 years on our nation’s shores.

We have a responsibility as a nation to be struggling to heal the racial injustice and majority privilege that still stains our daily interactions. And therapists need to recognize the layers of trauma that their clients of color may bring to their offices, seeking healing for individual pain that may have been generations in the making.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the mouse study with traumatic epigenetic changes in following generations : Nature Neuroscience, Volume 17, Number 1, January 2014:
https://tinyurl.com/y7zblcwe

Touching Home Base

Over ten years ago, during the most difficult part of my career as a parish pastor, I took a quick summer trip back East with my two young children to visit my family. We flew in, and my parents picked us up from the airport. Toward the end of that visit, I coerced my parents into taking the 100 mile trip from their home to the town of my childhood. Though we had talked about it weeks before on the telephone (and what seemed at the time, promises were made), it took several tries before I could get at least one of them to agree to go along.

I’d love to see Fairfield again, I said. I haven’t been back since high school, over 30 years ago. As I talked, I could see from their faces that my desire struck them as odd. Though my grandparents on my mother’s side had continued to live there long after we left, and lived in their home until their deaths many, many years later, the relatively close town of my childhood held little interest for my parents. I pushed. Finally we agree to go on the Friday before our departure home. No, don’t take our car, my father decided; I’ll drive us all.

In the flurry of that morning, I explained again to my children where we were going, and why. How I had spent the first 12 years or so of my life in a quiet town on the shore of Long Island Sound. That I remember long, humid days of summer spent on the beach. How I learned to swim in those salty waters, and how I watched the yearly fireworks in the growing dark, wrapped in a heavy sweatshirt with my feet in the still-warm sand. They weren’t all that interested, of course.

How long will it take to get there? What are we going to do once we’re there? How long do we have to stay? I knew the moment my father started the car that I was surrounded by obliging parents and resigned children. With my husband back in Minnesota, I was on this return journey more or less alone.

The miles clipped by with my lead-footed father at the wheel, dodging in and out of traffic as if he had a plane to catch. Time and again I closed my eyes in prayer as I saw how closely he cut some of his lane changes. I told him a couple of times that there was no rush; he snapped back that he was trying to get ahead of the traffic. My mother looked relaxed as she sat up front watching the miles go by. I smiled at my children, who were doing their very best just to fit into their mom’s plan ; we looked out the back seat windows at the passing towns.

When we arrived in town, I did my level best to Pay Attention and Remember. We drove by the post office, the high school, the railroad underpass near downtown. We had lunch at our family’s old favorite hot dog restaurant, still grilling dogs after 40 years. I shared greasy french fries with my children who hate relish, onion and mustard. We left there to find our old neighborhood. A place of sweeping mental vistas shrank down to a portion of town with tight, old roads and tiny Cape Cod houses. As we drove down a street, I was startled to realize my father, the man who was certain of everything, didn’t remember our old address. I did. We slowed, and looked.

We got out and even found our former neighbor at home, home bound, in a wheelchair. When she saw me, she called me by my mother’s name. I was amazed at her memory. We smiled together for a few minutes, marveling at the years that had passed.

Back into the car, the kids were asking me about the beach. The beach. We headed that way, passing by one of my elementary schools, and the site of the life-altering car accident my parents and their children survived. When we drove by it, I glanced at my parents whose jaws seem set against the memory. I took a deep breath. Here it was. And here I am again.

The beach road took us to a small, pot-holed blacktop parking lot in front of a old, but well-loved town beach house. The afternoon had heated up, and we climbed out of the car ready to just relax for a while. I had come prepared with my bathing suit under my clothes, and offered my children their suits. They declined. Suit yourself, I said with a smile. My mother, who had spent those countless days hauling her three children to and from this beach for years on summer breaks seemed unfazed. I was excited, and began to walk with our small group up the steps and through the sand-polished, gritty open deck to the stairs down to the beach.

Perhaps it was the trick of memory, or the natural erosion of water upon the land, but the beach was quite narrow, and comprised of more pebbles than sand.  We joined a dozen or so families of small children on the beach as I turned to look at the horizon, the view I had seen countless times before. A wide expanse of moving blue-gray water. Seagulls. A cargo ship. I walked down to the water’s edge and stepped in; it was warm. I stood still, and thanked God for the moment: touching home base.

My father stayed on a bench by the beach house with my first-born who refused to come onto the sand. My daughter and mother walked the shoreline for awhile, picking up shells and talking together as they looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. I dropped my hand into the water, and licked my fingers, tasting the old, familiar salt of the Sound. The moment was passing. I looked for the blurry brown of horizon where five miles out was another beach front on Long Island, New York. I breathed the salty, warm air. I could feel my family waiting me out behind me. I turned to take in the Connecticut shoreline, the houses, piers, boats and bathers I could see. I walked slowly out of the water, and turned once more toward the Sound. I liked what I saw. And it was time to leave.

We shuttled back to the car, ready for a couple more hours of driving back to the other side of the state. We’d be home before dinner time. As the conversation in the car turned toward other things, and what we saw and would see as we drove, I thought about what it means to go home again, to return to a favorite place in early memory. It’s not that you can’t go home again, I think. You just have to want to go and be able to see your memories, and the present, as two separate visions of the very same thing.

How to Become a Good Stepparent

While most of us who marry intend it to be for a lifetime, about half of all first marriages in the United States end in divorce. Divorce ends not only a couple relationship based at least initially on attraction, trust and commitment; it marks the end of a dreamed future as a family. Despite the pain that most divorces bring, the desire to be happily married doesn’t seem to end, since most of those who divorce will eventually remarry.

Marrying at any age or stage of life is a challenge and a good deal of personal work and adjustment, but choosing to marry for the second (or more) time brings with it some additional complications. The most prominent complexity involves entering into an already existing family system as stepparent to the new spouse’s children.

As a therapist, I have noticed that a strategy for entering into relationship with the new spouses’ children seems to always take a back seat to the excitement, distractions and stresses of a new love, moving into a single household, and planning a wedding. Many adults who blend families believe, with good intention, that settling in as a new family will be easy as pie. After all, most of them already are parents, and have come this far as a new couple. How hard can it really be?

Well, it can be really, really hard.

I don’t believe one can be too deliberate or mindful when joining an already existing family, especially one that has been stressed by divorce or the death of a parent. In my practice, I frequently consult with adults who are planning to remarry, but whose children, especially teenagers, have grown increasingly angry, sad, disrespectful, demanding, or even hostile to their parent’s new partner the longer they are in the family circle. What was once a ride of excitement and anticipation erupts into bitter conflicts about moving homes, changing schools, losing friends, shifting visitation schedules, add step-siblings, and confusion over family roles and responsibilities. It can become so divisive couples may consider calling the whole thing off.

What’s an excited but hopeful new stepparent to do? I’d like to offer some basic strategies that can help your new family system adjust, adapt and thrive through the necessary shifts that come with merging family systems.

  1. Slow down! Perhaps the most important thing any new couple can do as it plans to blend families is to take it as slow as possible. Every family, no matter how fractured or stressed, holds loyalties and patterns of relating and functioning that need time to adapt to new people. I frequently tell my clients that though marriages may begin and end, families are forever. Don’t assume everyone will happily embrace your presence without some time to adjust.
  2. Take an outsider’s position. While all of us know what it’s like to be part of our own families of origin, and the family of choice we created as adults, you have never been part of a family exactly like your new partner’s. Be curious, respectful, and observant. Learn about how this family works. Become a student of the new family you want to join.
  3. Don’t try to become Mom or Dad to your partner’s children. Always remember and respect the role your new partner’s former spouse has with the children. It doesn’t matter whether they are awful parents, in prison, or deceased: children are loyal to their biological parents, and will fight you tooth and nail should you ever forget it. You may one day be called Mom or Dad, but don’t ever begin this way. Strive instead to be a positive, new adult friend in the children’s lives and a respectful, tactful partner in the eye’s of the children’s mom or dad.
  4. Allow the bio-parents to discipline the children. Family rules, expectations, negotiations and limits can create serious, lasting difficulties for children and their new stepparents. Don’t try to discipline the children alone. Allow their parents to enforce the family expectations. Dialogue about the children privately with your new spouse, and in matters of discipline, defer to your partner. If you keep your distance, eventually you’ll be able to set your own limits. Just not at first.
  5. Build relationships with the children one on one. Don’t assume that joining the family at Chucky Cheese every month is going to create a close bond with your new spouse’s five-year-old son, or that attending a few of your new 16 year old stepdaughter’s basketball games is going to make her think of you as a loyal fan. Taking the time to talk regularly with each child privately, reading to them, listening to their stories, going out somewhere easy and fun together is going to help bridge that long divide between stranger and stepparent. Take it easy, let them set the pace, and you will become a new friend instead of an unwelcome outsider.

While these ideas can go a long way in helping you make positive, lasting adjustments to a blended family, don’t suffer alone if things aren’t going well. Family therapists are mental health professionals who can help when family relationships get strained or problematic. Going to therapy as a couple or family regularly for a while can give you the skills and courage to recreate a happier family experience. After all, that’s what getting married and sharing our lives as families is all about.

Personality: Does Birth Order Matter?

For generations, family members have noted the differences that naturally arise in children raised in the same family. How is it that John, the first born and only boy, seems to have such different personality characteristics than his younger brother, raised in the same house by the same parents just two years apart?  Good question!

Theories of personality abound. You may be familiar with some of the more popular models, often used in work or educational settings. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), based on the four major personality styles described by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is a favorite. The Enneagram, a model developed in religious communities and often used in spiritual direction, and other forms of personal discovery, is another.  These are models that seek to describe common types of personalities. Other models, such as the Big Five theory, attempt to describe personalities using the idea of common traits shared by human beings across the world, such as extraversion or neuroticism.
    
Whichever way makes more sense to you to describe human beings, by types or common traits, we have a collective curiosity about how people become who they are, and how much we can or should adapt ourselves to others and our environment.

How did I get to be the way I am? When my clients ask me this question, I answer this way:  our personality is constituted like a recipe, with three primary ingredients. The first main ingredient is our individual nature. We are born with a particular style of personality, inherited from our parents and our larger family system. It’s part of our genetic code, and forms the basis of who we become.  Our general sense of the world, our innate optimism or pessimism, our sense of humor; this basic personality is another thing we have inherited.

The second main ingredient of our personality is formed by the way we are cared for by our parents; it’s the nurture part of the recipe. Was our mother well nourished, healthy, and ready to become pregnant? Were our parents free from addiction, major illness or injury? Was our birth relatively normal? Were we welcomed into the world with joy and cared for with love? The way our parents meet our vulnerability, suffering and growing sense of self makes up the great majority of our personality relationship style.

If our parents or primary caregivers have enough sense of self that they can sacrifice and respond to our needs consistently, we learn to trust that others will meet our needs, and that others are trustworthy. We offer ourselves to them, and get care and love in return. In the research done on this concept of emotional attachment, about half of us get just what we need to feel secure. The rest of us learn some combination of security, anxiety and withdrawal to cope with inconsistent parenting.

The third part of our personality is made up of all the unique, individual experience we have in life and what we do with it. It’s the fall you took in second grade from school jungle gym, the trip to the hospital, and the cast that you had to wear through the summer. How did that fall affect you? How did it shape the way you think, feel and respond to the world? What happens, and how you chose to respond, makes up a large part of your personality.

What about birth order? I think it fits in this third “what happens to us” category of personality development. While research is still battling it out whether first born children actually are more independent than their second born siblings, therapists and other social scientists have found a common pattern in family position that seems to fit many families, at least in Western cultures. In general, first born and only children are commonly more self determined and disciplined, having been born into an adult system and most closely associated to adults, even as infants. The second born child is less connected to the adults in the family, and if followed by a third child, may feel a bit lost in their parents’ strong relationship to the first born and emotional focus on the baby of the family. The farther away from the parent system, the more independent and even rebellious that child may become (Sulloway, 1997). Additionally, the more older siblings a child has, the more accustomed they often become to letting other people lead, and can more easily go “with the flow” than those born first.

Family therapists differ in the amount of importance they place in this theory of birth order, but most will inquire about how a client’s family is constituted, and where in the family their client “fits.” Why it matters at all is that it may help people better understand some of their unconscious preferences for friendships, marriage partners, relationship styles, and even how they may connect to or discipline their own children. It’s all just part of our individual personality recipes.

Sulloway, F. J. (1997) Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York:
Vintage.