Survey Says ...

There are two things I remember from Hubby's and my pre-marital counseling. 1.) the stress of organizing the sessions while we lived in two different states, and the counseling session was held in a third location. 2) we took a personality test and it deemed both of us as "anti-social."

My apologies to all those hardworking pastors and therapists who conduct premarital counseling sessions. They are important, I was just too stressed to register what was being said, see number 1.

We kept those personality tests, the Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis Profile. This is the description of the test, found on their website:

The Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis® is one of the most widely used assessments for individual, premarital, marital, and family counseling. The T-JTA® measures 18 dimensions of personality (9 bipolar traits) that are important components of individual adjustment and interpersonal relationships. The T-JTA® has been used for more than 40 years by thousands of counseling professionals in a wide array of settings in the U.S. and around the world to help people understand themselves and significant others in their lives.

I don't know about you, but defining anything as "bipolar" makes me have second thoughts about using it.

When you take the test you analyze yourself and your significant other. The scores are then charted, on an Excellent to Improvement Needed scale, comparisons are made in reference to yourself and what you scored for your significant other, and percentiles are given. Looking over these pages I'm still trying to figure out what the percentiles mean; 95% of the population is nervous, or 95% of those emotions place you in the nervous personality trait, or ...?

There are a lot of "Improvement Needed" marks on our charts, hence the anti-social diagnosis.

It is funny looking over the scores, 13 1/2 years later, and how we saw each other, and saw ourselves.

• Let's see, I saw myself as rather "Nervous" (as opposed to "Composed") and placed him closer to the middle of the two. Where as Hubby placed me in the middle and saw himself as "Nervous."
• I rated myself as "Depressive" and rated Hubby more "Light-Hearted." Hubby placed both of us rather high under "Depressive."
• I placed both of us highly "Active-Social" and Hubby placed us highly under the opposite personality, "Quiet."
• I saw both of us as "Inhibited" and Hubby saw himself as "Inhibited" and me in the middle of "Inhibited" and "Expressive-Responsive."
• I rated Hubby highly "Sympathetic" and me more "Indifferent." Hubby saw both of us as "Sympathetic."
• Both of us saw ourselves as "Subjective" (emotional, illogical, self-absorbed) as opposed to "Objective" (fair-minded, reasonable and logical.)
• I rated Hubby as highly "Dominant" and myself more "Submissive" ... stop laughing ... Hubby saw both of us as "Submissive."
• At the same time we both saw ourselves as highly "Hostile."
• I placed us near the middle between "Self-disciplined" and "Impulsive", while Hubby placed me high under "Self-Disciplined" and rated himself more "Impulsive".

Lord have mercy, how have we survived 13 1/2 years of marriage?

If we took it now I wonder where we would place ourselves, and each other?

And I confess, I was more concerned about my dress ... or the lack of a dress one month before our wedding, then I was of our per-marital counseling sessions. But, that is another story for another day.

What do you remember from your pre-marital counseling days. Please say you felt counseled and enlightened from those sessions, give all the therapists out there a little hope.