A Dressing System Taught Me Something About Myself and Other People

The idea that choosing clothes could teach me anything about who I am would have struck me as odd not long ago. My first run-in with that kind of thinking came from a seasonal color method. It labeled me a "Summer," so I bought and wore what a Summer was supposed to wear. Nothing changed. No one complimented those outfits, and putting them on didn't leave me feeling any surer of myself.

So I dropped the whole approach and went back to buying whatever I actually needed and liked the look of. Somewhere in there I came across Carol Tuttle's Dressing Your Truth system. It pulled me in enough that I picked up one of her early books and decided I must be a Type 1, since I figured of myself as an idea person. Back then the system ran a shop that carried clothes, accessories, and makeup, and I bought a handful of Type 1 pieces. The thing that changed my mind was a photograph. Looking at myself in a Type 1 top, I could see it did nothing for me, and I started poking around the rest of the system.

Type 3 was where things turned. As I started building outfits and picking accessories the way the system described "the dynamic Type 3 woman," strangers began stopping to compliment what I had on, unprompted. I brought photos of Type 3 hairstyles to my hairdresser, and suddenly people were saying nice things about my hair too, which almost never happened before. The way Tuttle frames it, any woman can draw attention and hold it once she dresses in line with her own energy.

I already owned a copy of The Child Whisperer, also by Carol Tuttle, and reading it finally filled in the picture of my own type. The book walks through what a Type 3 child is like at various ages and how to parent that child as they grow. It also gets into how parents of different types and their parenting habits collide or mesh with children of different types. Boys and men aren't left out either. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Dressing Your Truth covers all four interacting styles for men and boys as well.

None of this is simple to grasp all at once. What helped me was working in order: pin down your own type first, dig into it online within the Dressing Your Truth material, move on to the books about the system, then read The Child Whisperer. By then you'll have enough footing to make sense of the rest. I'll add the specific book titles and web addresses here once I've gathered them.

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