STRESS: THE E-TYPES

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E-types are so called because they want to be everything to everybody and burn themselves out trying to achieve this—you can’t please all of the people all of the time. E-types are the archetypal approval seekers. They crave praise and fear detractors.

E-type women

E-types want to be the best mother, lover, wife, hostess, daughter, friend, tennis player, committee member. They burn up a lot of energy worrying about whether or not they are measuring up to their own and others’ expectations. And they burn up a lot of anxiety energy over their perceived failure to do so. E-types burn out from running around doing things for others. They spend more time in the car and other people’s homes than at home.

E-types tell themselves it’s ‘horrible’, ‘terrible’, ‘awful’, if they fail to measure up or don’t achieve at a given task. These gross over-exaggerations, in time, produce significant emotional disturbances—stress. What E-types have to recognise and accept is that we humans are all fallible, we all make mistakes and we all fail to achieve at given tasks from time to time. That is the way we humans are and it’s OK. E-type career women strive in the belief that being the best will secure the approval of all others. Unfortunately, more often than not, others are jealous of E-type’s ability and success and withhold the acknowledgement she craves.

For those women who have committed themselves to full-time careers the comments about the E-type man will be appropriate.

E-type men

He is driven by the same guilts and insecurities as his female counterpart. E-type man tends to exercise his approval-seeking proclivities at work. The extrovert E-type male draws attention to himself by working hard and letting everybody know it. He moves quickly, acts dynamically and often boasts and whinges that no one works as hard as he. The introvert E-type gets stuck in and hopes he’s noticed.

Typically all E-type males seek to gain approval by doing more and better than their fellows through ‘application’ and ‘hard work’, and to gain security by holding to a stable environment and a given system of excellent performance, even at a high cost of energy. This work and lifestyle pattern brings the E-type male some admiration but little of the love he craves. Instead, it brings him increasing responsibility, and greater and greater resentment for the pace he feels obliged to maintain.

This sustained resentment associated with repeated frustration, in time, gives rise to prostrating fatigue, providing fertile ground for the severe headaches so many E-types suffer from. The work and lifestyle pattern of the E-type male gives rise to the easily recognised personality traits of inflexibility, conscientiousness, meticulousness, perfectionism and resentment.

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