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RPR
Application Areas: Personal |
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Lovers |
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One of the best uses of RPR technique is
screening or vetting of prospective
lovers. The usual assumption is that
“love is blind” and that therefore there
is little we can do to stay in control
and actually choose the other person.
Truth is, RPR lets us screen them quite
well, assuming we can step back from
sexual or romantic attraction long
enough to use our heads. If we don't,
often we plunge into relationships that
just don't make sense. That's fine for
one night stands, but not much else.
We can make many mistakes. We can
confuse sexual attractiveness with good
character, either as a first impression
or as the relationship goes on; fail to
gather data about how the person behaves
when away from us and/or toward others;
not look to see whether we might have a
blind spot about the person; or not
understand what the implications of his
or her particular personality are for
the long term.
The big gain from RPR here is that it
allows us to guide ourselves. We can
choose the lovers (or husbands and
wives, for that matter) we want, and
have a relationship with them just as
deep or shallow as we wish. We can be
in control.
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Friends |
RPR applied to friendships can save us
enormous amounts of time, annoyance, and
confusion. True friendship is actually
quite rare; because we wish
relationships to be uniformly wonderful,
we often confuse the real thing with
either “wanna-be” friendships, fake
friendships, colleagueships,
acquaintanceships, or genuine
friendships that exists in some areas of
the relationship but not others. Every
relationship is different, but we begin
our adult life believing that “a friend
is a friend. ”We don't stop to ask
whether the friendship is really
something else in disguise, and if it is
for real, whether there is trust and
understanding across the board, or only
in certain areas. The particular
characteristics of the relationship need
to be understood, and the RPR approach
is made to order for this.
Without a competent screening we may
well get something other than what we
bargained for, and it can be shattering.
It can waste time, too! People can spend
their whole lives attempting to nurture
a relationship that wasn’t what they
thought it to be, or really wasn't there
at all, and was therefore doomed from
the start. A shame!
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Families |
In the ever-changing landscape of family
life, it is difficult to understand what
the players are doing, even who they
actually are today, not last month or
year. The practical application of RPR
in families is keeping track of these
changes.
Traditionally, this task has been left
to the mother, who, again traditionally,
gets some things (“my daughter is
tired”) right and often other things
(“she is tired not from activity but
from drugs”) wrong. In fact, it profits
everyone to be able to read other
family members as fully as is warranted,
beyond either their natural ability or
narrow self-interest.
Note that this excludes being a
busybody, or prying, e.g. trying to know
everything a teenager is feeling,
thinking, and doing (the whole point of
that time of life is to become an
individual, partly by becoming invisible
to one’s parents). The people-reading we
do must be careful and respectful of
people’s boundaries. Nevertheless,
family members should be aware of each
other’s changes, needs, moods, etc.,
within reason, so that they can help
each other out and keep each other safe.
Without reading each other in a
conscious way, busy people don't
necessarily know how or when to do this.
Despite our wishes to the contrary,
people are not mind readers. This said,
they can see what family members need,
how they appear to outsiders, whether
they show any gross signs of
psychological or personality problems,
and many other things. They can correct
problems before they become too big.
Done right, this is not snooping; it is
observation in the service of each
other’s wellbeing. It's what good,
cohesive families do.
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