Crystal Andrus Morissette: The Emotional Edge
OMTIMES: You created something called the Empowerment Spectrum that helps us determine our Emotional Age. Can you explain it?
Crystal Andrus Morissette: The purpose of The Emotional Edge is to be a shortcut for the reader—a condensed, ready-to-use life stratagem or practical psychology based on Emotional 
Age. It offers a communication style, scale, and strategy called the Empowerment Spectrum that will provide readers with an edge or an advantage in all their relationships. The Empowerment Spectrum outlines the concept of our identities being formed by a combination of three Dominant Emotional Archetypes—the Child, the Parent, the Adult. Within these three archetypes, we communicate on a scale from passive (disempowered) to peaceful (empowered).
For years leading up to writing The Emotional Edge, I’d half-jokingly refer to these three Dominant Emotional Archetypes as my “Mother Energy,” “Daughter Energy,” and “Woman Energy.” The interesting thing was how everyone seemed to understand what I meant when I used these terms. They seemed universal—as if everyone had these same three personas that ran their lives, too. The Parent Archetype is the selfless part of us that gives, protects, and serves. It is the archetype that drives us to sacrifice our own needs for the needs of others. The Child Archetype is the selfish part of us that wants, takes, and desires. Fearful and gripping, this archetype drives us to take care of our own needs before the needs of others. The Adult Archetype is the integration and transcendence of the noblest qualities of each of these two archetypes into the fully empowered Self. This is the archetype that balances the Self in a way that expands outward without losing connectedness inward. Without realizing it, our behavior is usually dictated by one of these Three Dominant Archetypes, depending upon the person we’re dealing with; often one of these archetypes will dominant most aspects of our life.
OMTIMES: You obviously use archetypes to teach us about Emotional Age and empowerment. Why?
