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INTRODUCTION

In each generation, millions of Americans spend years grappling with the misunderstood inner workings of maladaptive personality that shape marriage, divorce, social ties and traumatic events. This tortuous journey is complicated and prolonged because many well intended individuals have such a poor working knowledge of what is normal and abnormal in relationships. Throughout history, great thinkers have interpreted volumes of mythology and resistance with evolutionary courage.

A similar courage is found among maturing adults in psychotherapy as they make sense of their lives and relationships. These maturational curiosities are linked to enhancing one's adaptive potential and the perceptual accuracy regarding the health of their relationships. However, asking too many questions can be dangerous since it may lead to domestic violence or political exile. Adults who actively or passively act out when their relationships die have no interest in understanding personality, especially their own.

Divorce is a psychological stress test that exposes recurrent variations in personality. Degrees of misunderstood resistance, needless aggression and malignant opportunity are linked to degrees of maladaptive personality. Individuals have been knowingly and unknowingly abusing the institution of marriage throughout history. Parallel abuses are found in other institutions such as parenting, journalism, politics, business, etc. Adults who manufacture chaotic divorces rarely know why their marriage has died and their hostile elitism prevents them from understanding why anyone would ever leave them.

Many younger and older Americans have forgotten that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. challenged us to improve the validity of our social judgments. I have often contemplated whether or not he underestimated the painful resistance adults encounter when they attempt to examine the character of a fiancé, parent, sibling, friend, leader or file for divorce.

The informational divide between what clinicians and clients know regarding personality is far too large. This prolongs questionable treatment and increases consumer vulnerability. Volumes of questionable remedies are found in advertising today intended to help Americans deal with their medical or psychological challenges. Many are appealing since they skip over the relevant aspects of maladaptive personality and go straight to treating one's unique symptoms.

Trying to treat symptoms and avoiding the contributions of maladaptive personality in life are usually related to partial or failed recoveries. Many naïve adults fail to understand that perceiving and managing individual and interpersonal psychological health are functions of personality, not intelligence. By skipping over or not understanding how personality shapes lives, fewer opportunities emerge that help individuals improve or recover from complicated relationships.

As we live longer, more time will be spent processing maladaptive personality that limits liberty and adaptive potential in life. Just about anyone can fall in love with someone or some ideology with ulterior motives. This is why pre and postnuptial contracts are becoming normalized. This adaptive or healthy suspicion was a basic tenet of President Reagan's foreign policy where trust was related to verification. Maladaptive relationships are mysterious, healthy ones are not.

Maladaptive personality has links to misunderstood stress reactions, chronic marital dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, unknown anger and decreased work performance. Most individuals want to give partners and others blank checks regarding interpersonal health when their relationships begin. Prolonged recoveries commonly involve accepting the painful reality that so many years were invested loving someone you never really knew.

Well intended adults underestimate the maladaptive motives of individuals who take their interpersonal secrets to their graves. It becomes easier to accept this dynamic when you consider the motives of decent Americans who avoid paying attention to their chest pain or blood pressure.

In terms of human evolution, we have discarded many myths with the angst of scientific reasoning and curiosity. Individuals with maladaptive reasoning are stuck somewhere in medical history when physicians judged psychological traits by the shape of one's skull. The point to remember is the premise that adults with maladaptive personality thrive upon fictional accounts of who they are and why they need relationships. Most will never evolve in their lifetime. They are dedicated to repeating the dark sides of opportunistic history and they reside in every demographic group in our nation.

Young and older adults trying to resolve complicated relationships and premarital anxiety may find this book useful as a resource to clarify or validate their adaptive instincts. Adults who are afraid of talking about difficult subjects with their teenagers may value information in this book. This book is a starting point for individuals who want to enhance their own maturational potential or move beyond the restraints placed upon them by the ulterior motives of others. Individuals with ulterior motives want life to be overly mysterious and at times too frightening.

This book is very comprehensive. Each chapter addresses recurrent individual and relational struggles in life. Basic terms and principles are discussed which will increase a reader's reasoning skills. Personality disorders and defense mechanisms are defined in ways that help the reader understand their unique interpersonal properties. Just as great thinkers have processed volumes of misinformation, maturing adults also find themselves separating fact from fiction which is a normal developmental task in life.

The maladaptive dynamics you find in divorce also challenge the health of other relationships. These universal tensions are clearly illustrated in Chapter 8, Types of Divorce-Types of Personality. In this chapter, I introduce my model of personality that demystifies interpersonal conflict. It illustrates why adults vary in terms of what they need in relationships and how they perceive reality. In subsequent chapters, this model clarifies variations and misconceptions regarding trust, self esteem, intimacy, dissent, procrastination, grief and racism.

Many Americans may not know that our founding fathers established the first model of personality with their tripartite model of government. They were anxiously preoccupied with the stability of their fledgling union and the generational emergence of evil.

Maturational tensions and discrepancies between partners may either improve a relationship or threaten its stability. These maturational discrepancies have not become part of our day-to-day understanding regarding marital or other interpersonal well-being.

Most individuals need relationships and it can be difficult accepting the reality that people dramatically differ in terms of interpersonal integrity, intimacy and awareness. Maladaptive perceptions regarding reality fuel the needless chaos, fear, guilt and confusion found in dying relationships.

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