Here’s an important question that needs an answer: Can like personality types have great difficulty understanding and accepting each other?

Why Like Personality Types Have Difficult Relationships

The short answer to the thorny question above is yes!  Here are some reasons why.

1. Similar temperaments in close relationships unconsciously (and sometimes consciously) compete. Having similar strengths, when one uses a strength, the other does so, too. Competition is the result. We constantly have a tendency to want others to feel we are okay.  We also tend to feel we need to prove our worth all the time. This is particularly true where a low self-image is also a factor. So, responding to competition or sinking further into our low self-esteem (if we feel we can’t compete with the other person) likely results. In both cases, the relationship suffers.
2. Similar temperaments or personalities have weaknesses in common. We make our own weaknesses by nonuse, overuse or misuse of our strengths. When one misuses their strengths, the other quickly detects the misuse. Even if there is no correction or admonishment, the one who has displayed the weakness feels the other knows their failure and they get angry or hide. Knowing each other so well can be a recipe for relationship trouble if one party has a low self-image.
3. There’s an old saying, “Opposites attract; like personalities repel.” Like personalities may not stimulate each other to the degree opposites often do. The relationship can then lack “excitement,” thus placing a strain on the relationship.
4. If age, social status, experience, competency or some other factor that makes one seem more secure or more worthy than the other is also in the mix, the above “irritants” are exaggerated.

What To Do When Like Personality Types Are In Conflict

1. Getting to know ourselves better will, when willingness to improve is present, certainly help. In fact, understanding of our temperament is essential to a real and lasting change. Each of us needs the self-knowledge that brings understanding.
2. Respect for each other can begin in earnest when there is self-understanding, particularly when both parties to the relationship possess it.
3. Secret ways of communicating when an “irritant” is felt can draw the two people closer and create an intimacy that is unique and deeply rewarding to the relationship.

As in all relationships, understanding, respect, and love, packaged in a willing forgiveness of our intentional or unintentional failures spells success.

Do You and Your Partner Have the Same Temperament?

If you and your partner haven’t already discovered how each of you is made on the inside — the drives and urges that make you who you are — it is imperative that you make that discovery now.  It will reveal the key to your conflicts.

How am I made “on the inside”?

Does the Person With Whom You Tend to Have Conflict Have a Similar Temperament to Yours?

How can you identify whether similar temperaments is the likely cause of the conflicts you have with someone with whom you are more or less casually related?  That would be helpful, would it not?  There are some ways to tentatively identify the temperaments of others, giving you a way to sort out and improve relationships and give an organization or work environment a better atmosphere.  Just click on the link to access my article that will help you to Identify the Temperaments of Others.