Outskirts Press, INC.

Discover Your Personality Adaptations and How They Hold the Key to Success in Your Life and Relationships.

“Few books give readers so much ability to understand themselves and those they love. This book is a relationship treasure. Be sure to read it and share it with your inner circle. A deeper understanding will emerge.”
—Ellyn Bader, Ph.D. Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Couples Institute and Co-Creator of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy.

“This book peels back the layers of mystery about the source of suffering and offers a path to joy. After skillfully, brilliantly, and clearly connecting the past with the present as the cause of suffering and achieving insight into how the past creates the present, the author offers specific processes and tactics, that when used by anyone, will help them create a joyful future. We recommend Joines’ book as a resource to therapists and to the public as a guide to recovering our original humanity, the joy of being.”
—Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and Hellen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D. Co-Authors of Doing Imago Relationship Therapy in the Space Between.

“Insight Out is a self-help book that provides the essentials readers need to surmount personal limitations. Personality adaptations can be categorized and understood. Dr. Joines shows how the processes of the past lead to the programs of the present and the patterns of the future. Follow the steps in this insightful book and reclaim the life path you were always destined to have.”
—Jeffrey K. Zeig, Ph.D. Director, The Milton Erickson Foundation.

“In this beautifully written book, Vann Joines makes the complexity of the human personality and our relationships so clear and simple. His development of Personality Adaptations theory, based on Transactional Analysis, and his extensive experience as a psychotherapist, trainer, and teacher, give well-researched insight into our earliest needs, strategies, and adaptations to survive. He shows, with engaging illustrations and examples, how each of us develops combinations of personality adaptations, how we relate to others and their personality adaptations, and how this affects how we experience and perform in the world. The insights available in this book enable us to know more of who we are, how to be the best that we can be, how to understand and transform our relationships, and how to co-create our lives with our partners so that we live with more success and vitality."
- Adrienne Lee, TSTA, Director of The Berne Institute for Transactional Analysis. UK

“After many years of writing for psychotherapists and counselors, Vann Joines draws on a lifetime of helping others to offer here a book for the lay reader, in which he describes how a combination of temperament, family, childhood, and other lifelong influences shape us and make us the person we are. If you like information about personality types, you will love this well-written and thoughtful book. Joines describes how aspects of six basic ways of adapting to the world combine in individuals to create different personality types with characteristic ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving.  He describes their strengths and weaknesses, their patterns and preferences, and, importantly, how they can live more fulfilled lives by maximizing their qualities and avoiding their pitfalls – especially in their relationships.  There are chapters on understanding couple relationships and also on enhancing one’s own life. Joines has a real talent for describing complex ideas and processes in an accessible and engaging way.  The book is packed with examples and vignettes as well as some self-help exercises, and the personalities are analyzed incisively and yet with such compassion and naturalness that you never have to start feeling ashamed of your failings!"
- Charlotte Sills, Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst, Professor of Coaching, Ashridge Business School.  Psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice, Co-author of Transactional Analysis: A Relational Perspective, Routledge, 2002

“In this informative book, Vann Joines vividly portrays six personality adaptations that describe how individuals manage their lives. In non-pathologizing descriptions, the author presents several stimulating examples of how people have used the concept of “Personality Adaptations” to change their behaviors and improve relationships. The book amalgamates a number of Transactional Analysis concepts into an effective model that can be used by every person to transform how they problem solve and engage in relationships.” 
- Richard Erskine, Ph.D., Certified Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst and Licensed Psychoanalyst; Training Director of the Institute for Integrative Psychotherapy, Vancouver, Canada; Author of A Healing Relationship: Commentary on Therapeutic Dialogues, Phoenix Publishing House, 2021

We are born helpless and powerless into a vast, mysterious, and often threatening world. Struggling to survive, we grope for ways to adapt to our surroundings. But with little knowledge and less power to manage our environment, we are likely to come up with primitive, imperfect responses to life’s stresses. These responses are based on our physical and emotional needs (the need to be fed, held, consoled, seen, heard, protected, validated, loved, etc.) and instinct. They represent the best options we have available at the time. They also make good sense given the way we are interpreting things from our limited child perspective. But unless we learn more effective strategies later, whether from supportive families and communities or through therapy, we’re headed for trouble. Our childhood strategies, disguised as adult behavior, negatively influence us throughout our lives, snowballing into an amalgam of unhappy relationships, short-circuited careers, and unfulfilled dreams. While they enabled us to survive in childhood, these tactics don’t work very well in adult life. The problem is that they may be all we know. We are also all born with an innate sense of “okayness,” but we rely on our caretakers to keep us feeling okay and welcomed. They are our first mirrors, our first reflections of who we are. If we see them looking delighted as they gaze at us, we see ourselves as delightful. If we see them looking disgusted as they look at us, we see ourselves as disgusting. As infants, we have no other basis for evaluating who we are except what we experience, and our own internal feeling responses, for which we have no words. We may have an intuitive sense of ourselves being okay but that is difficult to maintain if we get conflicting feedback from our caretakers. In the first few months of life, we are rapidly learning and gaining a sense of ourselves and our primary caretakers, who for us at that time, represent the world. This book helps us develop an awareness of our unique adaptations in response to how we are seen and reacted to, and the emotional intelligence to change them. It further offers a step-by-step process to change our present-day operating strategies based on our adaptations and develop effective ones in their place.