Lesson 4 – COMMUNICATION IS CONNECTION
TEMPERMENT • PERSONALITY • LOVE LANGUAGE
Understanding your and your partner’s temperament, personality, and love languages gives you the blueprint to shift from reacting to your differences to appreciating them. It prevents misunderstandings in communication, and allows you to nurture each other's emotional needs in ways that feel meaningful and authentic.
Your temperament is your innate, biological foundation (e.g., introversion vs. extroversion, your baseline energy, how you recharge your battery, and ultimately how you down-regulate your nervous system), your personality is the learned thoughts, habits, and behaviors built on top of your temperament (this is where intentional or unconscious masking can show up), and your first and second love languages are how you prefer to give and receive care and affection.
Masking/camouflaging occurs when you intentionally or unconsciously hide your true personality or natural tendencies to fit in, avoid judgment, or protect yourself in social, professional, or familial settings. For example, you might force yourself to make eye contact, suppress natural emotions like sadness or anxiety, or an introvert might act overly extroverted to succeed in a corporate environment. While it is a helpful and sometimes necessary survival mechanism to navigate the world, chronic masking is exhausting and can drain your mental and emotional energy, it can, over time, cause physical blockages that prevent down regulating your nervous system, and can give faulty cues to authentic communication.
The internet is brimming with resources to help you explore your temperament, personality, and love languages, but these are the few that I have found most helpful:
- I Said This, You Heard That by Kathleen Edelman
- The 16 Personality Types: Profiles, Theory, & Type Development by Dr. A.J. Drenth
- Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers
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The 5 Love Languages®: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman
