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45 YEARS OF KNOWLEDGE
This website represents 45 years, or almost half a century, of knowledge. It was gathered from my education, psychology practice and personal experience raising children. I discovered a new, elusive factor in psychological development that casts serious doubt on our intuitive beliefs about human nature. It defies our deepest instincts as parents because we are all spontaneously inclined to punish our children when they misbehave. It even challenges our truthfulness about how much we actually LOVE our children! DOLIF theory provides a new basis for the study of human psychology where people are no longer judged by their overt behavior. Rather in DOLIF both children and adults, are judged, assessed and treated according to the underlying drives and EMOTIONS that motivate them. When appropriate treatment techniques are devised therapy has an astonishingly high degree of success that is attributable to the accuracy of DOLIF theory!
The etiology, or origin of DOLIF theory, is simple. When I watched my children and those in other families, I noticed they were always vying for attention and engaging in desperate Sibling Rivalry, when there was no apparent need for it. It occurred to me that there must be something children are responding to that adults are missing. To my great surprise, this observation was soon followed by another discovery. I noticed that the personalities and behavior of my first two children turned out diametrically opposite! Yet, I had done nothing different when I raised them. The only difference was that there was now another child in the picture!
Reaching deep into my gut feelings I thought: What could they be needing or wanting? Could it be that their bitter struggle is over LOVE, for what else could possibly be agitating children so young? Then I thought: Could there be a causal connection between their struggle for my attention, and the opposing directions their personalities and behavior were taking?
To my amazement after months of pondering, I suddenly came upon an entire underworld of Emotional conflict we commonly refer to as SIBLING RIVALRY where children are fully absorbed at all times, but to which parents and adults are completely oblivious, and even vigorously deny! I had inadvertently fallen upon a world governed by pure instinct, one that continually casts its influence on children’s behavior and personalities, and whose effects will last a lifetime.
It is a secret world in which children are on a mission to constantly pursue parental LOVE, and will fight tooth and nail to stake their claim. Once identified, I suddenly became attuned to why their rivalrous behavior seemed so nonsensical. Simply by observing the intensity of their strife and putting two and two together, I realized they are driven by a force that is completely outside their control, an insurmountable inner compulsion or instinct to claim ALL the family LOVE , that is, my own LOVE in particular!
Then clear as day, I began to see a standard Distribution Of Love in Families pattern of interaction in every 4-person family. I observed that whenever there are 2 siblings, they always have opposite and opposing personality traits. To my further amazement, I soon began to observe that there were also always 2 parents with opposite parenting styles! I documented this universal finding first in my book, and you will find this pattern described here under DOLIF Formula or DOLIF Theory. However, my biggest job came when I HAD TO CONVINCE PARENTS AND ADULTS THAT THIS UNDERWORLD OF CONFLICT ACTUALLY EXISTS!
After observing the DOLIF pattern in my family with my children and looking around at the families of friends, neighbors and clients, I began to look at my own extended family, and swiftly tracked the same pattern down through four generations. I analyzed: (1) my parents’ generation with my aunts and uncles. My father had come from nine siblings and my mother from four. Next was (2) my Family of Origin with my own parents and siblings where I was the middle child of three. Third (3) was my Family of Procreation with my two daughters, and most recently I was able to watch (4) my children’s families with their children, my grandchildren. Once I became attuned to children’s clandestine motivations and the shocking, typical classic formula of DOLIF, I clearly began to see this same standard pattern repeated among my friends, neighbors, patients. Now I can easily identify the pattern with whomever I meet, whomever I talk to and whomever I observe, whether it be in a playground, a shopping mall, a party, or anywhere else I look!
To my amazement, I found that no family escapes the DOLIF formula! To date, after nearly 40 years of implementing the method, I can identify the same play of Emotions – this desperate, instinctual search for LOVE, and its endless array of behavioral and personality outcomes – in every family in the world, in story books, movies, and even going back through history! And I will teach you to do the same because the DOLIF method can change your life, and can be used not only to cure, but to anticipate mental illness before it sets in. I will instruct you in how to take steps to prevent it and/or reverse it once the problems begin. The actual model is described in detail in the section titled The DOLIF Formula.
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More Explanation of DOLIF
In the Family of Origin, our first family with parents and siblings, there is a world of conflict that centers around LOVE. It is LOVE that children “see”, feel or perceive as exuding from their parents. It is LOVE they DESPERATELY compete to WIN, and worry about ALL the time. The overwhelming instinctive thought that occupies the mind of every child every waking moment of their life is: WHO IS GETTING THE LOVE IN OUR HOME? AM I GETTING IT OR IS MY SIBLING WINNING OUR RIVALRY FOR THE LOVE?
Although parents do not perceive or respond to it, from their children’s point of view, LOVE in every family emanates from the parents like an invisible cloud. Although it may be hard, just imagine this aura of precious, intangible, gold-like LOVE dust floating around freely in every family. The first two children are obsessed with searching for it, constantly competing over it, sniffing it out like animals, and clamoring to grab it for themselves. However, while the siblings are so desperately preoccupied with this haze of LOVE every moment of their waking lives and fighting so bitterly to claim it, parents and adults find it extremely difficult to detect or even believe it exists! This is the reason why it has never before been discovered in the study of human psychology!
There is another shocking discovery that concerns the ability of two parents to commit their LOVE to their children. Although both parents are integrally involved in supplying LOVE to their children in their own way, and whether or not adults are willing to accept it, an integral part of DOLF theory is that there is always one parent to whom the children respond with MORE Emotional warmth and become MORE attached, while they respond with LESS Emotional warmth and become LESS attached to the other. This is a comparative process in that there is more and less of the desirable commodity of LOVE that is supplied to the family by one of the parents.
Once children identify where MORE LOVE is situated in their family, that is, from the one parental source as compared with the other, they are poised to do whatever it takes – sacrifice everything, that is, literally move heaven and earth to obtain that LOVE for themselves alone! This includes adjusting all their behavior and personality traits and doing whatever their little minds tell them – just to capture and claim that LOVE, attention and human warmth. And they seek to WIN and possess ALL this LOVE for themselves to the exclusion of their next born sibling!
As it turns out, this pot of LOVE that rests with one parent, the Prime Love Giver or PLG is the holy grail, the life-giving resource that children struggle to grasp, and are likely to either retain or lack and crave for the rest of their natural lives! So just how far are they willing to go to seize this precious LOVE? Parents must believe that their children are willing to fight literally to the bitter end, sacrificing ALL their Emotional wellbeing, and often even their physical and mental health and strength, to lay claim to this LOVE. Moreover, they are poised to try to HOG it ALL for themselves alone, to the detriment of their next born sibling, and fight to the finish for what they perceive as a life and death contest, a struggle for survival. And there is little anyone can do to dissuade them!
So what is their motivation for being such HOGS over a single POT OF LOVE? Why can’t they just share the LOVE, as adults continually beg them to do? The reason children are so eager is simply due to their inborn INSTINCTS. These INSTINCTS DEMAND THAT THEY MUST WIN THIS BATTLE! DOLF teaches us that every child is born with a fixed, unalterable INSTINCT TO COMPETE TO OUST THEIR NEXT ADJACENT SIBLING! It is an instinct as basic as birds flying south or salmon swimming upstream!
Note that because it is instinctive and fixed into their psyche, BOTH CHILDREN CAN NOT HELP THEIR DESIRES! This means that they are not in control of their rivalry because their inborn instinct COMMANDS them from birth to search around, locate LOVE, lay claim to it, and STRUGGLE WITH ALL THEIR MIGHT TO POSSESS AND KEEP IT ALL FOR THEMSELVES, shoving aside all others whom they perceive as competitors. From a child’s point of view, IT IS OUTRIGHT WAR! THEY FEEL INSTINCTIVELY ENTITLED TO THE LOVE, WISH TO KEEP IT ALL FOR THEMSELVES AND WANT TO DESTROY ANYONE ELSE WHO WANTS TO CLAIM IT, MOST NOTABLY, THEIR ADJACENT SIBLING! This instinct toward rivalry with competitors for LOVE dominates every child’s mind, thoughts and behavior. Moreover, EVERY HUMAN BEING BORN TO THIS EARTH IS PROGRAMMED TO BEHAVE EXACTLY THIS WAY!
When I demonstrate this in stark reality to parents by pointing out the behavior and personality patterns of their children, they snarl at me, buck and vehemently resist acknowledging their children’s competitive frenzy. They are entrenched in the edicts of current psychological teachings and too busy with their own lives to consider that they are biased, unaware and unsuspecting of the Emotional intensity of the all-consuming Sibling Rivalry that is going on under their noses. Yet they are in awe of the acute, bottomless energy that empowers their children’s struggles. So they continue to engage in confrontations with their difficult child, or sit by and watch helplessly as their children argue and fight bitterly, and end up draining a good deal of the mental, Emotional and physical energy from their family. Alternatively, when parents see no outright visible conflict in the form of fighting, but just the typical enormous divergence in their children’s personalities, they watch with anguish as one child loses the Sibling Battle for LOVE and gradually becomes anxious, depressed and withdrawn, or angry and rebellious. They just ignore it and let it ride. And if they go for help, there is none to be found since, with the support of uninformed professionals, these exasperated, emotionally spent parents are not clued in to the seriousness of their children’s plight. They chalk it up to the frivolous competition of childhood, label it “just Sibling Rivalry”, pray for ‘siblings without rivalry’ consider it part of their unlucky fate in life and hope it will end soon. And while they try to get on with their lives, many couples will never realize that they will end up divorced because of the discord in their lives that actually started with their children’s rivalries!
Sometimes there is an artificial harmony among the siblings, which parents want to believe indicates there is NO rivalry in their home. “No. This doesn’t happen in OUR family”. “No. OUR children don’t fight. They don’t even interfere with each other!” Yet every parent will readily agree that their children are “very, very different characters!”. Challenged about what they believe caused the differences in their children, they either attribute it to good luck, the fact that the children are of different genders, or quote the standard reason that this is a difference in genetic inheritance.
But based on my extensive observational and empirical experience and studies, opposing personalities and behavior among the first two siblings is too standard a protocol to be a chance occurrence. It is prescribed by nature. It MUST happen and is entirely predictable. The phenomenon of disparity among neighboring siblings was first documented by Birth Order theorists who reckoned that “If you have a child of one type, you can bet that your next child will be the opposite!” But they mistakenly concluded that the firstborn is always the Favored one, but I realized that either the first or second could turn out to be Favored. Moreover, the Birth Order theorists did not realize the repercussions for personality development, that is, that the Favored one will have an easy-going, gentle personality as opposed to the Disfavored one who will suffer from Anger, Depression and Anxiety. Nor were the Birth Order theorists able to explain the personalities of future children, who compete within clusters of twos and threes, as explained in my book and illustrated in the analysis of the Kennedy family of 9 siblings. Most salient of all, there is no predictability of personality in Birth Order theory as there is in DOLIF. The theory absolutely affirms that if you have a first child of one temperament, to your great amazement, the second will appear to be born with an entirely opposite temperament.
I developed my thesis because I observed that the first two children in every family I looked at were glaringly opposite. When I look at babies or small children, I always see that if one is very active, the other is invariably slow and passive. By later childhood at the age of about eight to twelve, their personalities take more shape as they begin to display mental/emotional characteristics that become increasingly entrenched as their personality traits. The general direction of those characteristics becomes more clear as time passes, so that by adolescence one can have a good sense about the Emotional stability of any child. Having made these observations numerous times, there is little doubt that there is no other possible conclusion that can be reached but that these differences are initiated by the children themselves!
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Explanation of DOLIF Continued
But there is more. If I tell parents that they themselves might be playing a critical role in exacerbating these dynamics, or that they may even be accomplices or instigators of the Sibling Rivalry conflict among their children, they become outrightly indignant. Convinced about the impact of genetics and DNA, nature over nurture, they are adamant that their children were simply born different: “One takes after me, and the other takes after my spouse”, they repeat. Or, they might conclude they are just victims of bad luck with children who happen to hate each other, or that one child is just of bad temperament, the “devil”, while the other is a heaven-sent “angel” who has, as one parent put it, “a heart of gold”. In short, parents find little recourse but to attribute any differences in the personalities and behavior of their first two children either to genetics or random distribution.
When I suggest that the differences in their personalities and in style of behavior may be due to the attitudes of the parents themselves because they may be directing more LOVE toward one child than the other, I repeatedly meet with belligerent rejection! If I attempt to explain that the ANTICS their children are performing, or suggest that their behavior and personalities are merely designed to attract their parents’ LOVE and attention, they begin to unabashedly fight with me! Supported by professionals who fear they might be seen as blaming parents for their children’s bad behavior, many parents insist that BEHAVIORAL CONTROL, DISCIPLINE AND TRAINING are the only answer to their family’s problems. Because they hear the experts advising them to act as “a team”, they band together to scold, punish, and deprive their naughty children of pleasures, isolate them, escalate the battle, and in short, pit their will against that of their irrational, instinct-driven child! Little do they realize that when children are addressed as a ‘team’ by their parents they perceive their parents as bullies and themselves as the tiny, vulnerable victims, escalating the problem! The child thinks: “YOU TWO GROWN-UPS ARE GANGING UP ON LITTLE OLD ME? POOR LITTLE ME!! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!! I DON’T DESERVE THIS AND EVERYBODY HATES ME!!
NOW THE CHILDREN, WITH THEIR LIMITED INTELLECTUAL UNDERSTANDING, THE SUPREMACY OF THEIR EMOTIONS OVER THEIR INTELLECTUAL POWERS, AND THEIR DRIVING INSTINCTS, ARE PREPARED TO GO TO EXTREME LENGTHS, DISPLAY UNTOLD NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR AND UNRULINESS, AS WELL AS ALL MANNER OF EXPRESSION OF THE 3 NEGATIVE EMOTIONS: ANGER, DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, TO GAIN THEIR PARENTS’ AFFECTION AND ATTENTION, IN THE HOPES OF CAPTURING AND HOGGING 100% OF THAT INTANGIBLE POT OF PRECIOUS LOVE FOR THEMSELVES. THEIR INSTINCTS TELL THEM THEY MUST DO THAT!!
In the end, my findings indicate that every child’s attempt to obtain LOVE from their parents indelibly marks their personalities and behavior. I discovered that the outcome of this battle is so deep as to become THE KEY DETERMINANT of all their present and future psychological development. You see, we adults perceive OUR hard lives in terms of our own socialized reality in an intellectually-driven world, with our main preoccupations such as daily events, schedules, proper social behavior, financial and legal obligations and more. But if we picture life as an ocean, we might say that adults conduct our lives above the water, observing our own social and political reality, while children live down below the ocean, surrounded by a wealth of foliage, exquisite colors and wildlife that is foreign to us. This is a secret, Emotion-driven world, where feelings and perceptions are guided by that invisible, intangible cloud of LOVE.
Given these differences, in order to understand mental wellness and illness we must recognize that children’s blindness to our world and their drive to claim their parents’ LOVE exclusively for themselves is so compelling that it CONSUMES every child’s entire reality, and influences all of their behavior and personality development, now and for all their future!
So why bother to understand this world of a child? First, because there is no adult was never a child. Since every person’s life starts in childhood, in order to understand your adulthood, your personality and the reasons behind your current behavior and your mental wellness or illness, you need to begin by understanding how life felt for you when you were a child – how you sensed the world treated you, and how you responded to it. Secondly, in order to build a better future for our society, we need to understand the motivations behind our children’s behavior, and why some go astray while others, raised in the same environment, do not. Any new insights will give us a clue about mental balance and imbalance, criminal behavior, substance abuse, suicide and more. Thirdly, given a proper understanding of the development of personality and behavior, we will be better able to treat, or even reverse, certain character traits or mental problems purely by changing the emotional dynamics in Families of Origin. When we work with adults too, we should be able to accomplish this by referring to one’s early life.
Bear in mind that the DOLIF pattern of personality development in siblings is very deeply entrenched in every human psyche. Because it is founded on pure human instinct, it is as fundamental, inescapable and as predictable as salmon swimming upstream to spawn. It is fixed and universal and never fails to appear in every human offspring, cutting across all social barriers such as socioeconomic status, color, creed, gender, intelligence and even ability or disability. It is entirely pervasive, obvious beyond reproach, and quite foolproof once we tune in and start to decipher its effects. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this behavior pattern exists in every child and in every family, and has been the standard course of human development throughout time and history.
Now, having honed DOLIF theory and built a concrete, easy-to-follow model, I offer it here to the public. Not only is the model universal, but to my great surprise it even turned out to be quasi-mathematical, mainly because of its reliance on pure, unalterable human instinct. That is, it ABSOLUTELY MUST TAKE PLACE. This might seem strange in the context of psychology, which is seen as an inexact science because human nature emotion is considered to be necessarily “fuzzy” and unpredictable. I have found on the contrary that human behavior is in fact very predictable. Famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, said that all of life can ultimately be brought down to pure mathematics, and perhaps this is just one more example.
