reflect an earlier struggle with a sibling. Are your feelings relevant to the situation today or are they a throwback to confrontations of yesterday?
If you are able to be aware of and change, if necessary, the way you relate to your own siblings and parents as a result of your birth order, you will have a better chance of also changing the way you relate to your children.
Sometimes each parent favors a different child, particularly in two-child families where each parent unconsciously takes one child for himself or herself. This is a danger when it creates parent/child allies rather than parent/parent allies.
Chapter 16 discusses in more detail how to use the information about birth order characteristics in your parenting.
e. Your Adult Siblings
Most of this book is about the relationships between siblings as children and how that affects your later relationships with others. How you relate to your siblings as adults is one of those later relationships. Chapter 17 goes into greater detail about how to use your current relationship with siblings as a resource in your own growth. For now, it’s only necessary to mention that it’s not unusual for childhood patterns to continue well into adulthood.
If your parents obviously favored one of their children over the others, that child may be resented and disliked by the others even as an adult. Some siblings continue fighting for the favor of their parents all their lives — even after the parents have died.
If you and a sibling were close together in age, you were more likely to have conflicts than if further apart in years, and those conflicts probably still exist. It may not have been possible to admit those conflicts openly or to deal with them as a child, so they may be hidden, yet still control the way you relate.
Siblings with a greater age gap between them often have fewer, but more openly acknowledged conflicts. Being more aware of the conflicts usually enables those siblings to deal with them and get over them. You are more likely to have fewer conflicts and a closer relationship with a sibling much older or much younger than you.
As you and your siblings get older and more settled and established in your own lives, the minor rivalries and competition from childhood are likely to recede. As older, more relaxed adults you may be able to enjoy sharing your memories and telling the different versions of your growing-up stories.
By learning about the pressures and difficulties facing each of you in your birth order positions, you can better understand why you reacted to each other as you did in childhood. When you see that your “privileged” older sister was undergoing her own sufferings from all the pressure on her, you may feel less angry about the way she bossed you around. When you see that your “spoiled” younger sister felt helpless and inadequate in relation to you, you may feel less resentful of her “easy life.”
f. People At Work
The kind of job you have or the level of career you pursue is determined to great extent by family background — what resources were available, the family’s expectations and attitude toward education and success, the options and opportunities available to you. But within that range, how well you fit into your role, how you function in your job, how you relate to co-workers, and how you do things such as give and receive supervision is influenced by your birth order.
President Lyndon Johnson developed his style of leadership as the oldest brother of three sisters and a brother. When given chores to do, he assigned them to his siblings. “He was a hard taskmaster with them.... If the younger children didn’t do the chores, they weren’t done, for Lyndon wouldn’t do them,” writes biographer Robert Caro.
Work situations often seem quite similar to family situations, but without the safety net of being bonded by blood and having at least the ideal of, if not actual, love between individuals. Since people who work outside the home spend half their waking hours in that setting, these work relationships can be a significant factor in determining life satisfaction.
Your boss may unknowingly fit emotionally into the role of one of your parents and your co-workers into the role of siblings, for good or for ill. You could have complementary relationships that make you a good working team or you could have non-complementary relationships that pit you against each other. You might react to these people, especially in times of stress, in the same way you reacted as a child to parents or siblings, without realizing where your inappropriate fear or anger comes from.
Gordon worked as a production manager for a large printing company. His boss wrote an article for the company newsletter announcing Gordon’s recent promotion. Gordon was furious about the article. He thought the article sounded as if it was about the boss’s abilities as a supervisor rather than about Gordon’s good work. When exploring this unexpected reaction later in therapy, Gordon was asked what his feelings reminded him of. He immediately recalled how he had often reacted the same way to his older brother. He had thought, as a child, that everything his brother did in relation to him was designed to put the brother in a better light and deflect Gordon’s credit to him. Even though his boss had praised him in the newsletter, Gordon’s old suspicions took over.
As a boss, the way you treat your employees may also reflect your experiences in your sibling position. An oldest brother of brothers who took charge of the younger boys in his family may be loath to give much responsibility to employees and may resent any questioning of his authority or attempts by others to get ahead. As the employee of this man, you may chafe more under his thumb if he resembles your own older brother and reminds you of your futile attempts to win your parents’ praise.
An oldest-brother boss who was a guide and mentor to his younger brothers may be eager to help a younger man get ahead. He may also think women have no place in management and subvert any attempt on the part of female employees to advance in their careers. The younger sister of a brother may be less inclined to fight against such a boss than an oldest sister who may either wonder what is wrong with her that she is not getting ahead or confront her boss with her lack of progress.
A male only child may expect to have the same attention, privileges, and advantages as an employee that he had as a child. The discovery that he is expected to fit into a different and less comfortable mold than he is accustomed to may come as a rude shock.
Knowing how birth order characteristics affect work relationships can help you be better prepared for what you might expect from yourself and others. You will probably find that you work best with or for some birth orders than others. You may also realize that you prefer people from certain birth orders as employees.
Gerard, an only child, had had a series of executive assistants who just didn’t live up to his expectations. They were capable women, but he kept being disappointed that they didn’t take on more responsibility for running his busy office and didn’t work hard enough. Then he hired someone who turned out to be highly capable and also eager to take on more responsibility and do much of his work for him, which he appreciated. He couldn’t figure out what had changed in his approach to hiring until he found out, after the fact, that all the previous assistants had been youngest sisters of brothers (as was his mother), who were charming and clever, but not the workhorses he needed. His current assistant was the oldest sister of brothers and sisters and very willing to run things and give the credit to Gerard.
Keep in mind, however, that it is probably illegal to discriminate in hiring on the basis of birth order, even though it’s not officially on the list of questions you’re prohibited from asking in job interviews!
3
Finding The Description of
