The Welch Responsive Temperament Assessment (WRTA) is unlike any other psychological assessment on the market. There are many assessments that measure and describe a person’s temperament (“Temperament Description”). There are others that focus more on the expression of one’s temperament (“Temperament Expression”). The WRTA combines these two types into one, comprehensive and robust assessment measuring involuntary reactivity to provide users with a more complete and nuanced picture of how they interact with their world and others through their temperament.

The Temperament Description portion of the WRTA uses the DISC model for categorizing a person’s temperament into one of four. The DISC model, created by William Moulton Marston (an American psychologist) and described in his 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, is based on the 1921 book Psychological Types written by the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. The DISC model is public domain (not copyrighted) and, therefore, regularly used in a variety of proprietary assessments, including the WRTA. It has been used extensively by businesses as a means to gauge job performance and fitness, although this particular application of the DISC model has been criticized for lack of validity.

Marston employed the acronym DISC to describe the following four temperament types using central traits:

• Dominance: active use of force to overcome resistance in the environment

• Inducement: use of charm in order to deal with obstacles

• Submission: warm and voluntary acceptance of the need to fulfill a request

• Compliance: fearful adjustment to a superior force

In order to make the DISC results from the WRTA more easily understandable, the Welch Family Therapy Institute adapted the acronym to incorporate names that describe the primary way each temperament expresses or behaves in most circumstances:

• Director – ambitious, competitive, self-confident, forceful

• Influencer – spontaneous, influential, sociable, adaptable

• Stabilizer – helpful, caring, peacemaking, sensitive

• Contemplator – independent, rational, organized, self-sufficient

The Temperament Expression portion of the WRTA uses nine pairs of traits defining opposite conditions which are collectively referred to as Dimensions of Expression. This is what makes the WRTA unique. The analysis of the nine Dimensions of Expression provides the user with important information about how they respond or react during interactions with others.

We term and report these dichotomous conditions as responsiveness vs. reactivity. Through years of observational research with clients in clinical counseling settings, Dr. Don Welch, the creator of the WRTA, discovered that the health and success of one’s important relationships was directly correlated to the relative dominance of responsiveness (voluntary, deliberate, and controlled expression originating from the “thinking” part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex) vs reactivity (involuntary, unplanned, and unregulated expression originating from the “feeling” part of the brain known as the limbic system) exhibited during the person’s relational encounters. The WRTA increases the individual’s self-awareness so they can employ practical methods to reduce reactivity and increase responsiveness.

The WRTA was formulated and developed with thousands of hours of research and testing. It has been used in both a clinical and classroom setting with over 1,000 clients by a licensed marriage and family therapist with over thirty (30) years of counseling and college-level teaching experience. Empirical evidence gleaned from these real-life situations suggests a high level of reliability and validity for the WRTA to accurately describe a person’s temperament and provide them a comprehensive profile of their responsiveness (voluntary, deliberate, and controlled expression originating from the “thinking” part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex) vs reactivity (involuntary, unplanned, and unregulated expression originating from the “feeling” part of the brain known as the limbic system). Ninety-eight (98)% of clients who took the WRTA have experienced self-reported improvement in their well-being and relationships as the result of becoming more aware of their specific reactivity and employing practical methods to reduce it.

In the future, the WRTA will be subjected to a prolonged, longitudinal study to determine the statistical reliability and validity of the instrument.

In most cases, we recommend not retaking the WRTA for a number of reasons. First, most psychological assessments generally contain a disclaimer that the assessment should only be taken once. This is because self-assessments are most accurate and helpful when the person answers with little or no deliberation or analysis. In other words, first “gut reactions” are best and most reliable. When a person thinks too much about their answer before answering, they risk skewing the true picture by pondering pros and cons and talking themselves into a particular, preferred or more favorable answer. This tendency increases dramatically when a person revisits the questions and retakes the assessment.

Another reason we recommend not retaking the WRTA is due to the structure of the assessment and what it measures. When a person is presented with their results and unfavorable reactivity is present, the person immediately wants to improve their situation and have less reactivity and more responsiveness. This may cause the person to erroneously conclude, “If I work on having less reactivity, my WRTA score will improve.”

The WRTA measures the intensity of each category of the DISC model within a person’s temperament as well as the tendencies this mixture of intensities generates in the individual to lean toward one end or the other of a particular dimension of expression. The DISC intensities and Dimensions of Expression tendencies are generally enduring and not likely to change significantly over time. What does change, with focused effort and intervention, is the person’s ability to manage and dilute their reactivity in any given relationship situation. The tendency will always exist, and will likely be captured in future WRTA results, even though the impact of a person’s reactivity is softened and muted, thereby making their relationships more productive. The Welch Therapy Institute may assist individuals to reduce their reactivity using professional varied somatic and brain reprocessing trauma therapy treatments.

Understanding how we are made allows us to become more comfortable and at peace with who we are and who we aren’t.

As we embrace our natural temperament, we are then in a better position to also accept and embrace our spouse’s temperament rather than try to change them into someone they aren’t.

As we learn more about our temperament, we can focus on enhancing our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses.

Dr. Welch defines reactivity as involuntary, uncontrolled, relationship-impeding behaviors that originate from the feeling part of our brain known as the limbic system.

Because they originate from the feeling part of the brain rather than the thinking part, they are largely outside of our conscious awareness.

This is what makes reactivity so insidious. We are often not even aware we are rolling our eyes, sighing in exasperation, turning away from our spouse, or acting in other ways that tend to create distance.

Every heart longs for intimacy. We crave it and search for it because it is a longing that emanates from the image of God within us.

The Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, have an intimate relationship and God created us to have intimacy with Him. He also created us to seek intimacy with others.

Unfortunately, this quest for intimacy can cause us to pursue counterfeits to try to get it.

God designed marriage as a place for us to experience an abundance of intimacy and this book is all about how to get it, or restore it, in marriage.

Genesis describes how God created Adam in His image before He created Eve.

Since God has both male and female attributes in His character, Adam must have had a mixture of male and female in his character.

God apparently worked with Adam to find, what Genesis calls “a suitable helper,” among the animal kingdom but none could be found because none of the animals were like Adam.

So, He created Eve by extracting the female attributes from Adam and crafting a female version of Adam so that Adam could experience intimacy with his own kind.

Many people believe that their past is in the past and it doesn’t affect them today. Others may believe that their past can affect them, but they think they have dealt with it, and it is now irrelevant

The truth is emotions never forget.

When our reactions to a present situation are out of proportion to the circumstances, we are likely being triggered by wounds from the past. This reactivity escalates conflict, especially when both the husband and wife are being triggered by past wounds.

One of the goals of this book is to train couples to recognize this reactivity, identify its origin, and work together to reduce it so that they can repair quickly when conflict erupts.

I define intimacy as a close relationship that does not operate at the expense of the self, with a self that does not operate at the expense of another, and in which each is fully known and faithfully loved.

In other words, intimacy consists of closeness, choice, curiosity, and cleaving.

To unlock this kind of intimacy, I recommend that couples focus on infusing Kindness, Empathy, and Yielding into their relationship. These 3 goals form the acronym KEY.

Like anything worthwhile in life, The Responsive Marriage takes considerable time and effort to develop and maintain.

Most of us want the quick fix, the 5 steps to follow, the overnight transformation. This is simply not possible if you want to develop a Responsive Marriage that lasts a lifetime. There will be ups and downs, mistakes and missteps as a couple starts to embed the practices outlined in this book into their marriage.

Dr. Welch and his wife have been married for 28 years and have been using these practices for many years. They still don’t always get it right. But they have learned to be patient with each other when they have to reboot and go back to step 1 after conflict has started to escalate.

Each time they purposely follow the principles and practices laid out in The Responsive Marriage book, they move farther along on the journey to a Responsive Marriage. But Dr. Welch doesn’t think there will be a time when they are able to say, “We’ve arrived at the destination, no more forward progress is needed.”

In The Responsive Marriage, Dr. Welch outlines 3 types of romantic relationships. Those that are casual, those that are contractual, and those that are covenantal.

The difference in these 3 types is the level of commitment the parties have to the relationship. Commitment can be thought of as the level of investment. The more commitment, the higher the investment and vice versa. And the level of investment is directly correlated to the amount of perceived value something has.

The more valuable something is to us, the more we are willing to invest in it. One of the aims of this book is to increase the amount of investment each is putting into the relationship. And this is one of the places where Dr. Welch can confidently guarantee a significant return on the reader’s investment.

Whether we realize it or not, or are willing to admit it or not, we all go into marriage with a set of expectations for how we think the marriage should operate and what we want from it.

Unfortunately, we often don’t discuss all of these expectations with our future spouse before marriage or take time to examine them in any detail. Then when the marriage and our spouse don’t meet these expectations, resentment and bitterness starts to grow.

Often the conflict we experience with each other in marriage is due to unmet, unspoken, and unprocessed expectations. Dr. Welch encourages couples to examine these expectations together.

Part of this examination should be determining the capability and willingness of the spouse to meet those expectations.

When we have unmet expectations, we have a choice. We can try to promote or advance the expectation more, we can alter it (perhaps lower it), or we can discard it altogether.

It is never healthy for the relationship to simply let the expectation go unmet without proper processing.

Dr. Welch makes a point in The Responsive Marriage that everyone loves variety. It is the spice of life.

But often, after we are married for a short while, we start to shun variety and try to force our spouse to be more like us.

The fact is that God put us with our spouse precisely because we are different. For example, Dr. Welch’s wife’s strengths help temper his weaknesses and his strengths help temper her weaknesses or blind spots.

The best business teams are composed of people who think differently. Henry Ford once said, if everyone is thinking alike then someone isn’t thinking.

One spouse needs to be different than the other so that they can accomplish more together then if they were operating separately. Dr. Welch’s hope is that his readers will start to embrace that idea as well.

Let it first be stated that God would not tell us to do something if it were not possible to do, even if supernatural assistance is needed.

Anxiety is actually a God created brain mechanism used to focus our attention on something important. It’s the classic fight-flight-freeze response triggered when our brain’s limbic system perceives a threat, which then causes our sympathetic nervous system to sound the alarm.

The problem is that we often perceive threats where none exist, or we elevate relatively minor adversities to the threat level. Over time, we develop patterns that train our brain to react with anxiety more often and with more intensity. Early life emotional traumas also cause our fight-flight-freeze to trigger more often.

Fortunately, God created a braking mechanism for our sympathetic nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system. Using various methods Dr. Welch outlines in The Responsive Marriage, we can train our parasympathetic nervous system to kick in faster and more efficiently, thereby bringing calm to our brain and our bodies.

Certainly, one of those methods is prayer which is the remedy proposed in the famous “be anxious for nothing” Bible verse. But there are other methods that are quite effective as well at engaging the parasympathetic nervous system including deep breathing, grounding techniques, progressive muscle relaxation, and visualization, all of which Dr. Welch explains in The Responsive Marriage.

Dr. Welch has asked couples he is counseling countless times to adjust their schedules and make time for each other, only to be told by them that it is just not possible.

This is one example of couples who are experiencing problems in their marriage but are not willing to take specific actions necessary to improve the marriage. Many couples he counsels have lost all motivation and settled into inactivity.

In the Epilogue of The Responsive Marriage, Dr. Welch includes some important information about the concept of grit.

Grit means persevering through adversity, to continue taking action when it feels like you want to give up. One of Dr. Welch’s hopes for the book is that it will reignite a drive in every couple who reads it to move forward, to take action and reject inertia. Their marriage, and their spouse, are worth the effort.

Genesis 3:6 records in vivid detail the passivity of Adam. He was with Eve when she ate from the tree that God told them not to eat from, and he took no action other than to eat with her when she offered him the forbidden fruit.

Every man after Adam struggles with this tendency to go passive, or to shift to the opposite end of the spectrum and become aggressive. Both extremes are detrimental to marriages, families, and society in general.

God created men to take action, to tend the garden, to take care of what needs taking care of. Dr. Welch doesn’t think this tendency for passivity is any different today then it was back in the time of Adam. But he does think there are cultural shifts that have caused it to be more pervasive and obvious.

The statistics on the number of boys growing up without fathers in the home have certainly deteriorated over the last century, and it only seems to be getting worse.

It is only when men step up and start to live out their masculinity in ways aligned to God’s original design for them as warriors, that their marriages, and their families, will improve.

Dr. Welch certainly understands and empathizes with this sense of hopelessness.

He has seen it hundreds of times on the first day a couple enters his counseling office and announces they are ready for divorce.

But he has also seen many of these same couples transform their nearly deceased marriages into stunningly beautiful unions.

It’s never easy. There is lots of work involved and lots of Jesus’s restorative power needed. But Dr. Welch has witnessed first-hand how the principles and practices he lays out in The Responsive Marriage have brought healing and wholeness to seemingly hopeless marriages.

The only way Dr. Welch can explain this is to point to the God of all hope who is described in Romans 4:17 as giving life to the dead and calling things into existence that do not exist.