There's a person who is very concerned with following rules. She strongly believes that respecting and obeying authority is extremely important. The number one concept in parenting is teaching your children to be obedient. Her motto is "first time obedience," meaning that if she has time to repeat herself, the child has disobeyed. Disobedience carries a harsh punishment. She has a chain of command set up... first she obeys God's law, then the government's law. Women are to obey and submit to their husbands. Children are to obey adults. Employees are to obey their employer. She also believes that parents should teach their children how to be independent and take care of themselves as much as possible as they grow up. She believes that men should initiate relationships. She has very strict morals against sex outside of marriage, alcohol, drugs, lying, and not working hard. She tends to be an extremist, going all the way when she decides to do something (often too far). Once something is absolute in her mind (and there is very rarely anything that isn't), she will not budge. She takes pride in how "stubborn" she is because she will not give into any amount of "peer pressure" and do something that she believes is wrong. She tries to hold the people around her to these values as well. She has a very poor sense of how to deal with people.

A few examples...

She is an accountant in for a small company. One of the partners in ownership died in a car accident. The remaining partner, the man's brother in law, told her to make it look like the man's widow had been employed there for 6 months so that she could have insurance. She refused to comply and could not understand why he would even request this of her. She absolutely refuses to lie. She couldn't understand why her boss would even want to do that, since the widow is a millionaire. I tried in vain to explain to her that it's most likely something he wants to do so he feels like he's helping her out somehow, showing his sympathy for her loss.

She went on a vacation with her children and husband, mother, sister and her family, and brother and his fiance. They stayed in a large condo, but there were only two private bedrooms. She automatically concluded that her brother and his fiance should obviously be the couple who does not get a private room since it is wrong for them to have sex outside of marriage in the first place.

She is faced with some health problems which would usually require medicine with pretty nasty side effects. She decided that she would not take the medications and decided that eating healthy and taking nutritional supplements her only option. She sees some sort of specialist who tells her what to eat and take. She maintains a very strict diet. There are frequent periods of fasting, consuming nothing but vegetable stock. Outside of those periods, she eats nothing but organic fruits and vegetables, though she recently told me that she is expanding her diet to include whey and nuts.



I have a really hard time seeing her as an ethical type because she's so oblivious to... well... people. Her values are not really *her* values because she is simply obeying everything the Bible says. She does not come up with any of her own values, they have all been taught to her. When someone tells her something, she carefully measures it against her current beliefs and if it makes sense to her, she adopts and if it doesn't, she refuses to give it consideration.

Any ideas?