Understanding your personality is one key to understanding your vision strengths and weaknesses.
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) divides humanity into five types, based on the five elements:
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- Wood: The Controller
- Fire: The Performer
- Earth: The Peacemaker
- Metal: The Critic
- Water: The Thinker
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When personality types are in balance, they function well, but when out of balance, related health and eye conditions can ensue.
Understanding Personality
As people begin to identify their personality type, they attain a new understanding of patterns in their lives and how these patterns influence them and those around them. They better recognize their own strengths and weaknesses and can set a pathway of reasonable goals, based on a more complete understanding of their own nature. The five basic types as they pertain to persona is not only a tool for self-examination but is also a tool for building bridges toward others. Patients discover that both their vision and their well-being depend upon living in increasing harmony with the natural world. As a result, they learn tolerance and compassion for others and gain a deeper appreciation for the various components that determine their basic nature. Importantly, patients learn who they are and how to be true to themselves.
Many of our problems—physical, emotional, and spiritual—come from trying to be someone or something that we are not. When we live in situations and relationships where we are constantly struggling to fit in, we develop illnesses of all sorts. For this reason, we include information on the five personality types, based on the five elements of TCM. The categories have been developed over many years from a synthesis of observations made in Dr. Grossman’s clinical experience in behavioral optometry.
Wood Type: The Controller
Energy pours from the eyes of The Controller. Their eyes are penetrating and almost aggressive in their glance. They walk into a room with a true entrance, never slipping in unnoticed. After that entrance, they demand total attention. The Controller has a firm handshake and a forceful voice. The Controller has a hard time containing his/her energy and sitting still. Controllers tend to talk with their hands and to tap their feet while sitting.
In terms of vision, Controllers tend to display over-convergence and a turn in one or both eyes. This creates a tension in their eye muscles and in the muscles of their neck and back. The Controller, like The Critic, displays a tense and rigid visual pattern that manifests in their body structure and their persona.
Wood Type Food Recommendations
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- Favor: Sweet (such as apples and pears), mildly sour (such as lemon/lime, oranges, fresh tomatoes, and olives), and salty flavors. Enjoy lots of leafy greens, green beans, and avocados.
- Limit: Deep fried and fatty foods, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, highly sour foods, highly sweet drinks like sodas and fruit juices, as well as dairy products, wheat, barley, yeast, red meat, peanut, banana, artificial sweeteners and flavorings.
Fire Type: The Performer
Performers are warm-hearted people who fill their lives and the lives of those around them with excitement and emotion. They love to be with others and connect emotionally and very easily. They love being the center of attention and enjoy art forms such as singing, dancing, and acting. Performers are highly intuitive. They seem to know how others are feeling before the others know themselves. They are given to emotional highs and lows.
For the Performer, chaotic forms of communication and forms of energy output can confuse the other, making learning especially difficult. Poor focusing, poor eye teaming, and poor eye movement skills further hamper their learning skills. Visually, nothing comes easy for them. Because of their verbal and visual difficulties, and because of their desire to move, both physically and emotionally, children of this type are often diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.
Fire Type Food Recommendations
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- Favor: Eat more bitter flavors. Include leafy greens like kale, argula, and lettuce, and other foods with “bitter” flavors such as asparagus, celery, and parsley. Eating red foods also help, such as tomatoes (fresh tomatoes, not concentrated sauces), carrots, strawberries, raspberries, and red-skinned apples.
- Limit: Rich, fatty, and greasy foods, dairy (cow), red meat, refined sugars and sweets, alcohol, caffeine, wheat, yeast, very spicy foods, and artificial flavorings and sweeteners.
Earth Type: The Peacemaker
The Peacemaker is often associated with those that tend to sympathetic and caring, and supportive of other people. What Peacemakers have in common is that their primary focus in life is being helpful to others. They gather their feelings of self-worth through their love and concern for others. The Earth Type takes on the role of the “good mother” for all those around them. They are likely to enter the helping professions, such as teaching, social work, therapy, nursing, and the clergy. The message they present to the world is “Let me take care of you,” or “Don’t worry about that, I’ll worry for you.”
Peacemakers have a unique visual style. When out of balance, the earth type can often over-worry. Just as they question things verbally, so too, they question visually, and are often prone to myopia. Peacemakers have weak joints, especially ankles and hips. They have functional disorders like chronic fatigue and hypoglycemia.
Earth Type Food Recommendations
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- Favor: Naturally sweet flavored foods such as whole grains, sweet and white potatoes, pumpkin, peas, and some fruits (especially cooked fruits). Yellow foods are also helpful, such as lemon, soy beans, barley, and summer squash.
- Limit: Iced drinks and chilled desserts, raw vegetables and fruits, dairy, alcohol, caffeine, refined sugar, fatty foods, processed and refined foods, wheat, yeast, pork, melon, artificial flavorings and sweeteners.
Metal Type: The Critic
Critics are precise people. These are the new patients who become upset when the doctor is behind schedule, as usual. They are polite and speak with clear and courteous speech. After they announce the fact that they have arrived for their appointment, they sit up straight in a chair with their hands folded in their laps. These are people of direct and strong eye contact, whose eyes send the message, “Why is this world so out of order?” Their eyes miss nothing and judge everything. They are the natural critics of world order.
Critics have eyes with patterns every bit as rigid as their personality. Because of a lack of flexibility in both their being and their visual system, Critics are almost universally nearsighted. They also tend to be overly convergent, with their eye muscles locked and tight.
Metal Type Food Recommendations
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- Favor: Pungent and aromatic flavored foods such as onions, chives, garlic, fresh ginger, chili peppers, and cinnamon. Naturally white foods (not white processed foods) like cauliflower and potatoes are favored. This does not include processed foods like white bread and white sugar.
- Limit: Mucus-inducing foods such as dairy, sweets, and fried foods as well as highly spicy foods, iced drinks, and cold desserts, caffeine, refined sugar and wheat, red meat, and dehydrated foods.
Water Type: The Thinker
No other type has as much going on in the eyes as The Thinker. From birth, their eyes connect with the world. They learn and communicate with their eyes. There is a certain softness and thoughtfulness to their gaze, as if they were seeing each thing, especially you, for the very first time each time they see you. The message in the eyes of a Thinker is “I am here to learn the truth.” Thus, there is great power in their eyes.
Thinkers’ most common vision issue has to do with a lack of ability to focus. When they feel interested, their focus is strong. But when they are in a state of confusion, their eyes have the same lack of focus that frustrates their mind. Processing visual information can drain energy and they lose perspective on what else is going on around them. They have to work and work hard, not only to see what is in front of them, but also to understand what they are seeing. Thinkers often have a weakness in their ability to converge their eyes and in focusing. This means that they have trouble seeing and understanding the details of life. The energy they need to both converge and focus can drain them, leading to a sense of fatigue, not just in their eye muscles, but in their whole bodies and minds.
Water Type Food Recommendations
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- Favor: Naturally mild salty foods such as seaweed/kelp, miso, “dry” foods like millet, barley, naturally fermented foods, and bitter foods like parsley, and celery. Black or blue foods also help.
- In Ayurvedic medicine, a kapha-pacifying diet avoids overly sweet, oily, sour and cold foods, and favors warm, astringent, spicy foods.
- Limit: Overly salty foods, alcohol, caffeine, fatty and deep fried foods, iced drinks, raw vegetables, and fruits, dairy, refined sugar, deep-fried and fatty foods, wheat, and yeast.
More information on personality types is in our book “Natural Eye Care: Your Guide to Healthy Vision and Healing.”
Supplement Recommendations
Advanced Eye and Vision Support Formula – our whole food, organic, GMO free formula with lutein and zeaxanthin.
Dr. Grossman’s Bilberry/Ginkgo Combination 2oz – this combination of herbs help strengthen circulation, blood vessels and night vision.
ReVision Formula 2oz – this wild-crafted herbal formula is based on a classic Liver tonic used in Chinese medicine supporting circulation and energy flow in the eyes as well as throughout the body.
Blue Light Protecting/Night Vision Package (2-month supply) – this package includes nutrients focused on protecting the eyes from the negative effects of blue light from overexposure from computers and digital devices, as well as from sunlight.
Brain and Memory Support Package 1 – this package includes nutrients shown in research studies to help support memory and brain health, as well as nerve support.