The Lie of Personality
Perhaps the one question everyone has asked themselves at least once in their lives is, “Who am I?” A very common response is something along the lines of, “I am someone who likes X.” From example, “I am someone who enjoys writing.” That kind of response is a good shorthand method to develop a foundational identity of sorts. However, it doesn’t properly answer the question. After all, it is based on our relationship to things, things which exist outside of us. That response doesn’t answer the self-reflective question of ‘the person’ who ‘likes’, as much as it describes a relationship.
Dr. Gabor Maté, author of the book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, wrote a few interesting things about the relationship between the self and personality. I’m not sure that I am fully convinced, but at the same time, his ideas are new to me, and I thought they were worth thinking through.
“The personality is an adaption. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and conditional coping styles, including some that do not reflect our true self at all but rather the loss of it. Each personality takes shape according to how one’s particular temperament reciprocally interacts with family, community, and culture. It may not express our real needs, deepest longings, and truest nature, but rather our attempt to compensate for our estrangement from them.” — pg. 409
According to Maté, personality is not only not the self, but a coping mechanism based on our estrangement from real needs. Or, in other words, rather than express our selves, personality helps express what we either lacked or what we are lacking; its focus being on what is absent from the self. To go back to the example of writing, Maté might argue that I am not someone who enjoys writing as much as I am someone who might have struggled with self-expression as a child and have compensated by focusing on writing, to better express myself.
And those personality traits are not just developed based on an individual-to-individual relationship, or an individual-to-familial relationship, but also ones based on our relationship to society.
“In other words, our character and personalities reflect the needs of the milieu in which we develop. The roles we are assigned or denied, how we fit into society or are excluded from it, and what that culture induces us to believe about ourselves …” — pg. 198
If anything, this makes personality, rather than a form of self-expression, perhaps more of a societal expression acting through the individual. I can’t deny, I find this all a bit disconcerting. Worse yet, a personality is not a constant of our identity, but is something reviewed and constructed by ourselves in order to find meaning.
“But it is closer to the truth to think of the personality as a recurring phenomenon than a fixed or permanent one, much like the way individual movie frames projected at rapid speed create the optical illusion of a single, continuous narrative.” — pg. 110
So, the reason that I say that “I enjoy writing,” is not because it is a defined character trait, but because it is something that I have looked back upon in my life and using memories of myself writing, I construct the narrative that I enjoy writing. Therefore, it might not be that my statement, “I enjoy writing,” comes just from a coping mechanism of self-expression, but rather, my desire to convey myself as a someone who enjoys writing is the coping mechanism itself.
But we have tread far from the original question, as interesting as this tangent has been. “Who am I?” If we can’t trust our personality, our relation to things which either attract or repel us, what’s next? For me at least, I get an answer through meditation. When you realize that your ‘thoughts’ are not you, then you are left with something subtle, something which resists description, and yet, when you breath and focus your attention inward, you sense something grounded, lying beneath the surface. We hardly think of the land beneath our feet. We walk and live without really noticing it, yet it’s depth to the Earth’s core is immense, much like our ‘self’. It exists even when we distract ourselves with thoughts.
That self that we find in meditation is as grounded as everything else in life. Perhaps even more grounded than everything else. This answer probably feels so unhelpful that it feels like the tangent itself, rather than the discussion on personality, but if you are ever in existential doubt, practice meditation, and I think you will be surprised by just how solid you are as a person.
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Knopf Canada, 2022.
