Types are fascinating patterns that are best discovered holistically.

Welcome to Beyond Personality Types, the original interest strengths podcast. Every week we provide you with the better ways to use and talk about personality theories. I am your host, Olivier Codron, a self discovery facilitator. With me is Doctor Linda Behrends, internationally renowned for her innovative typology approach. Come with us beyond the indicator results to rethink what you know about personality types. Have you ever caught yourself expecting others to think, act and react just like you do, only to feel frustrated when they don't? Hello, and thank you for tuning in. In this episode of Beyond Personality Types, we dive into what Doctor Linda Behrends calls the Be like me syndrome a universal human tendency that can sneak into our type work relationships and even our professional practice. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or an enthusiastic learner, today's conversation will challenge you to recognize unconscious biases, deepen your client work and better honor the beautiful complexity of individual differences Get ready to expand your self awareness enhance your understanding of typology frameworks and walk away with practical insights to help you support others more compassionately and effectively.

Let's discover how overcoming the Be Like Me Syndrome can lead us beyond personality types. We are billions of humans on Earth and most, if not all of us, suffer from a very special disease. It passes from generation to generation. It is not easy to eradicate it. When preparing this episode, I bumped into Erik Erikson's quote. The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others. It can be a clue to better understanding this sickness we suffer from. Linda, please explain to us what this condition is about.

Well, I have to give a little history first as I tend to do in my older years.

Sounds good.

Yeah. Because in the beginning of my career, It was also the beginning of the association for psychological type. One of my colleagues and I, we had just gotten our master's degree. We had also gotten our PhDs and she was looking for what to do. She wanted to change her career or whatever. We talked about working together. Her name was doctor Sukupa. As we were doing this, she came up with this phrase that people have BLM syndrome, be like me.

That just took off the whole idea, and we were using the acronym then, which we don't use now because of some other very important things that it stands for. It is still the foundational understanding we have of one of the reasons that just learning about your own personality patterns and recognizing that other peoples have different patterns that we can get out of this syndrome. It's like we go around expecting people to be like us even in everyday things. I remember I was talking to a counselor when I was in my master's program. At the time, it was the beginning of the women's movement. I was experiencing some complaints about my husband. She said, it's like the dishwasher syndrome. Some people have the way that they load the dishwasher, and then they expect other people to load the dishwasher in the same way.

And when they don't, they wanna redo it because that doesn't feel right to the person. And so I started using that thought myself about the dishwasher, and then Sue came up with this phrase, and it just really, really struck home. I do wanna say that we've been married fifty five years or fifty six or something like that. So that was not the end of the marriage.

Are you still the one loading the dishwasher?