As mentioned elsewhere, the Distribution Of Love in Families, or DOLF theory represents over 45 years of investigation gathered from the author’s doctoral education, psychology practice and her personal experience in raising children while paying close attention to their Emotional growth.
DOLF psychology is built around the discovery of a separate, elusive Emotional reality that children inhabit. It refers to an invisible and intangible LOVE force or LOVE energy within every family that travels between parents and their children. In DOLF this Emotional basis is a kind of holy grail in the study of the human mind in that it is the principal determinant of personality structure and behavior. The Mind of a Child is a new concept that refers to this Emotional realm in every child and works within the boundaries of the original familial LOVE force. It is intended to describe not only the way children think, but also help us understand how the human capability for feeling, thinking and behaving originates out of Emotion-based thinking and follows us into adulthood to form the final person.
The process of personality-building is eventually expressed in the form of what we see from the outside as observable human personality and behavior. It begins from the moment we enter this world and lasts at least until our early to mid-teenage years. While the effects of the LOVE force or invisible bubble of Emotion that governs the Mind of a Child continues to affect us throughout our lifetimes, unfortunately as adults, our awareness of these Emotional dynamics fades significantly after our teenage years since we become preoccupied with real-world concerns such as money, time and social propriety. This aspect of DOLF theory coincides well with the long researched theory of famous French psychologist, Jean Piaget. His theory designates four stages of Intellectual development: Sensory-motor, Pre-operations, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations. The final stage of Formal Operations is not reached until about 14-15 years of age, when childish ways of thinking and feeling are finally replaced by adult-style thinking. Imagine the process the way the soft bones of a newborn baby slowly harden through our childhood and teens, only to become increasingly solid, then brittle by our later life. In Jean Piaget’s theory the actual process of transition between the stages is unknown and undefined. DOLF theory attempts to bridge the intermediary gaps between these stages by focusing on the Emotions that are activated at each stage and explain how these Emotions can either help or hinder the movement of Intellectual development through Piaget’s stages. In much the same way as the double helix is intertwined in the formation of DNA. DOLF explains how human Emotions become intertwined with Intellectual capability.
Knowledge of DOLF helps us understand the motivations and long term social effects of the LOVE force that parents exert on the personalities and behavior of their children. So, rather than judge people the way we do now by their outward behaviors, DOLF attunes us to the Emotions that underlie people’s actions as they grew to become adults. It exposes a child’s feelings of either success and gain in self-esteem, or failure and loss of self-esteem during their sibling competition for their parents’ LOVE at the time when their personalities were becoming shaped. It then follows these same feelings into adulthood to explain adult personality and behavior throughout one’s life.
Due to the accuracy of the DOLF method and because of its in-depth understanding of the Mind of a Child, people’s personalities and behaviors suddenly begin to make sense to us. In fact, DOLF theory provides such a high degree of transparency that it even enables us to predict how a particular individual’s personality and behavior are likely to evolve over time, depending on their Favored or Disfavored status. Consequently, therapy or treatment for behavioral dysfunction is remarkably successful when we use the DOLF system to analyze families in our therapeutic and rehabilitative work with both children and adults with mental/Emotional/social problems.
However unfortunately, for several reasons DOLF is difficult for parents, professionals and most adults to accept intellectually. This is mainly because, having reached the Piagetian final stage of Intellectual development, adults base their thinking on logic and reason. Locked in their Adult Mind, they have lost touch with their Mind of a Child, which functions purely through Emotions. A drawback to comprehending DOLF is that it challenges parents’ instinctive feeling that they should use discipline to control their children’s behavior. Both traditional practices and Behavioral psychology support the use of discipline and regimented training methods in child-rearing through reward and punishment. Moreover, most parents are inclined to vehemently deny that they might love one child more than another. Offensive to parents and general social belief is that DOLF questions parental truthfulness about whether and how much they actually LOVE ALL their children. Unfortunately, to a great number of parents the idea that they may be partial or biased and might Favor or LOVE some children while Disfavoring others by comparison, is reprehensible or even repulsive. It conjures up feelings of Guilt and Anger in response to parents’ sense that they are being falsely or unjustly accused. Offensive as well and an area that becomes a competition ground for parents is the idea that one parent provides more of the kind of LOVE that children crave (PLG / ALG division), a new concept introduced by DOLF that is discussed in other blogs.
The origin of DOLF theory is not hard laboratory research, for example, such as Pavlov when he caused his dogs to salivate before they heard the sound of a bell. DOLF is entirely based on observational and empirical material involving actual dynamics with real children raised in real families. It evolved in large part because the author’s professional experience showed that current psychological theories and therapy were unproductive in practice. In fact there are many anti-psychology and anti-psychiatry movements that have been initiated over the years. For example, if we visit www.madinamerica.com, an organization that has come to extend over many countries, we find that most efforts at trying to figure out human behavior have dissipated because they were unsuccessful and failed to advance our current methods of treatment for mental health problems and common human aberrations. DOLF theory progressed slowly over many, many years as the author watched her own and other people’s families, and noticed that children were always vying for attention from their parents and regularly engaging in desperate SIBLING RIVALRY, when she could find no apparent reason for the strife. It occurred to her that there must be something children are responding to, but that adults are missing. This was soon followed by another baffling observation, that is, that the personalities and behavior of siblings were always diametrically opposed to each other. Yet she observed that the parents had not changed their parenting practices and believed they were treating their children fairly.
The author wondered: WHY are the children fighting so desperately? What could they be needing or wanting? Could their bitter struggle be over LOVE, for what else could be agitating children so young? She thought: Could their desperate SIBLING RIVALRY be due to parental bias or parental Favoritism? That is, are parents siding too much with one child and causing the other to become jealous of the positive LOVING attachment they have with the well-behaved sibling, while neglecting the Emotions behind their difficult child’s behavior? And as she observed an increasing number of families, another pressing question became: Could there be a causal connection between the children’s struggles for attention and the opposing personalities and behavior in the first two siblings, which she predict with 100% certainty? In other words, could it be that the SIBLING RIVALRY, competition, fighting, behavioral and personality outcomes we see are actually an expression of the children’s underlying battle to procure more LOVE and become more Favored than their next born sibling?
Confirmation of this Favoritism paradigm came when I peeked more intimately into the families around me – those of my relatives, friends and neighbors. I discovered that in every family I could clearly see a disparity in the way one child was treated as compared with their sibling. I observed that the first two children in the families were always diametrically opposite: one was compliant and docile, while the next born one, whether older or younger, was more difficult for the parents to handle, and generally less “likeable”. I asked myself: Could the problem be starting with the parents’ attitudes, and could the disparity in the way that children perceive and evaluate their parents’ LOVE explain why the children’s behavior and personalities are SO different, even usually diametrically opposed to each other? To tell the truth, it eventually became clear to me that many a child was obviously being treated poorly by the parents, or Disfavored. But in other cases the difference in parental attitudes was not so obvious, and yet the difference in the children’s personalities was still very obvious.
After some months, to my amazement, I began to tap into an alternate world of pure Emotion. I realized that ALL children are absorbed in this alternate world of SIBLING RIVALRY and parental LOVE-seeking and at ALL times. Unfortunately though, in our social world, adults are 100% decidedly blind to it, and strenuously object to the idea that an Emotional realm even exists. I could see that in this mysterious world of children and their preoccupation with SIBLING RIVALRY, there was intense strife and Anger at play. This Anger was accompanied by compelling Anxiety, and deep, cutting sadness or Depression associated with the extreme feelings of LOSS of LOVE. I could also clearly view the elation and euphoria that came about from WINNING the SIBLING battle. This Emotional dynamic was casting a long shadow onto every child’s behavior and developing personality every minute of their lives. In fact, the children seemed to exist entirely, and be obsessed with, a completely separate realm, a world beyond our own which I eventually came to call the Mind of a Child because of its distinct properties and because it is so starkly different from our familiar Adult Mind.
By tuning in to the children’s sheer intensity and compulsion, I soon concluded that the only possible reason that their rivalrous behavior seemed so nonsensical was that it had to be driven by raw human instincts. That is, based on the intensity with which they carried on their fights and rivalrous concerns, their competitive behavior must be as vital and compelling as birds flying south or bees collecting pollen. It seemed there was absolutely no room for compromise! I reckoned that this urge toward SIBLING RIVALRY is a type of territorial instinct that is exclusive to humans, and that it forces every child to fight tooth and nail to stake their claim to ALL the parental LOVE they can muster through whatever behavior they deem can attract attention to themselves and help bump out their opposing sibling. From there on I constructed a diagram. I theorized that there must be a precious, Circle Of Love or social realm to which all children desperately seek to belong in order to obtain access to their beloved, chosen PLG parent and become the Favored one.
This meant that while we might feel that SIBLING RIVALRY is childish and nonsensical and needs to be dismissed since it erupts so often for so many silly, frivolous reasons such as fighting over a toy or racing to the front seat of a car, the Emotional compulsion behind the RIVALRY, and the behavior associated with it is not only exercised with extreme seriousness, but actually completely automatic, reflexive and entirely outside the children’s control! That is:
THEY CAN’T HELP IT – THEY HAVE NO CHOICE!
Clear as day I began to be reach some basic conclusions. First, we are grossly mistaken when we offer a child a “CHOICE” simply because, due to the exclusively human instincts that drive them, they have NO CHOICE in the way they behave or in how their personality develops when they are immersed in a SIBLING RIVALRY with a neighboring sibling. Next, I found a standard pattern that takes place in ALL families consisting of two fixed rules that are NEVER broken.
The first rule was that in every family with two parents, much like their children’s natural opposition, the parents also ALWAYS have opposing parenting styles. Though at times this diagnosis among parents was equally difficult to make as detecting and diagnosing sibling personalities. The division among parents began with my feelings about my own Prime Love Giving parent. Without a doubt my PLG was my father, toward whom I felt the deepest Emotional devotion and who was the PLG for the three children in our family. I felt that I also loved my mother, but not with the same fervor as I LOVED my father, and nor was I as deeply Emotionally connected to her. I therefore decided she was the Additional Love Giver in my Family of Origin. At the same time, it was obvious to me that in my own Family of Procreation, I was the PLG to my own two daughters, and their father was their ALG.
The first rule is that, regardless of the birth order of the siblings, whenever there are 2 children in a family, the first two siblings always divide into opposing personality types. These two personalities are divided more or less along the lines of (A) one who is gentle, compliant and soft-hearted, whom we can call the Favored child because of their strong Emotional connection with the PLG. Then there is (B) one who is either: 1. tougher, more socially savvy, self-indulgent and hard-nosed, in line with the standard Emotions of Anger-plus-Anxiety, or 2. more reclusive, anxious, self-effacing or depressive, in line with the standard Emotions of Depression-plus-Anxiety.
As I continued to observe the families of others, this pattern seemed to be standard and to cut across families of every race, sex, color, religion, mental ability or other human differentiating factor. At the same time, when I focused intently on those families around me with whom I was intimately familiar, such as my extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins, I was miraculously able to track the same model through four generations of families. They all exhibited the standard pattern. I could see that there was always a split between the parents, who played separate roles as PLG + ALG. Then, Child 1 and Child 2 would always turn out with either Favored or Disfavored characteristics, and successive children would break up into their respective subgroups that included Favored and Disfavored personalities as well. I looked at my own Family of Origin with my parents and two siblings and observed the pattern again. I looked at my Family of Procreation with my own two children, and later at my children’s families with their children, my grandchildren. And not surprisingly, I witnessed exactly the same pattern repeated. On stacking up all these experiences in the back of my mind I became wise about the children’s motivations and this simple classic formula. Then finally, upon expanding my views to include all of society, I began to clearly see this same typical pattern repeated among all my friends, neighbors, patients, and in fact, everywhere I looked!
My thoughts slowly took the shape of a universal format in which (a) one parent tends to be soft-hearted and indulgent (Prime Love Giver), and (b) the other parent is either more realistic and socially tougher-minded, or passive and withdrawn from the family’s life (Additional Love Giver)!
Insert diagram
I first described this model of psychology in my book of 1995 “They Love You, They Love Me Not, the truth about the family favorite and sibling rivalry“. But now I faced the uphill battle of convincing parents and professionals of the veracity and validity of my thoughts, which were not based on hard research but had been conjured up out of my historical analysis over my lifetime, my curiosity, creativity, emotional and empathic understanding, attentiveness and astute observation. Added to this was my extensive education and experience as a professional in the field of psychology, which allowed me to appreciate the enormous significance of these principles, apply them to all our understanding and interpretation of mental health, and want to pass them on.
Now I am able to identify this same pattern everywhere I look, and when you catch on, you will too!
In time I found that no family, and no human being, escapes the DOLF formula. I can decipher the same play of Emotions – the children’s instinctual search for their parents’ LOVE, the subtle division of familial roles, the endless variety of opposing behavioral and personality outcomes among siblings – and trace how this exists in every family and culture. I uncover it unmistakably in storybooks, novels and movies, and going back throughout the time and history of humankind. And you will do the same too because, given the serious consideration it deserves, the DOLF method should change the entire course of our knowledge and practice in the field of mental health/psychology/psychiatry. We can use DOLF to understand, treat, reverse, cure and even anticipate and prevent mental illness as well as antisocial and criminal behavior as we never have done before. DOLF undoubtedly places us in a position where we can be in charge and actually avoid negative and socially disruptive outcomes. The 4 phases of DOLF are described in detail in the sections titled The DOLF Formula.
(See next: The Pursuit of Parental Love, Part 2)