Who am I?

Am I who I was when I was a child? PART 1 OF 3

I got thinking about this topic after reading a recent New Yorker article:

Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?

New Yorker, Annals of Inquiry, October 10, 2022 by Joshua Rothman (Staff Writer)

ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON YOU USED TO BE?

There is another version of Rothman’s story, more lengthy, less personal, much deeper and information-dense. It is the academic study of Personality; Continuity or Stability of Personality across the Lifespan.

As a student of psychology, post-doc, professor, international research scientist living abroad for years and years where I observed the manifestations of lifestyle and personality first-hand, a VA Psychologist, and now a full-time psychotherapist, I’ve studied extensively this topic. I also have my own personality that I reflect from, and whether I have personally changed (or stayed the same) with time. I know the Dunedin Study (in New Zealand) which is only one of many, many studies of individual personality and lifestyle all over the world.

Rothman (from the New Yorker) is a fine essayist. He puts a personal touch on the topic, but he only scratches the surface, and he focuses too heavily on the Dunedin Study. A substantial question remains for me after reading his essay. Do people, in a reliable and valid way, change or (stay the same) across the lifespan? If change occurs, what is the catalyst for change and are there biological roots or psychic undercurrents amenable to change or stability? What is “Change” anyway.

I can’t cover this topic in one entry (I apologize to those who don’t enjoy the multiple part entry approach) I can summarize some of it in three parts which is my maximum number of short-length entries on a single topic. If I wrote a book, I’m too old to write a book, it would be thick and dense.

Defining Terms

Personality: What is it?

Google defines personality as: (noun) 1. The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. 2. A famous person, especially in entertainment or sports.

This secondary definition make sense. Most people, at least my age, would recognize one of the faces above as that of Paul Newman. It is (or was - he died September 26, 2008) fair to say that Paul Newman is a distinctive individual by virtue of his entertainment celebrity status.

The Merriam-Webster definition of personality: 1a : The quality or state of being a person. b : personal existence. 2a : The condition or fact of relating to a particular person specifically : the condition of referring directly to or being aimed disparagingly or hostilely at an individual.

Merriam-Webster describes personality as the singular quality that makes an individual a “person.” In other words, personality is, in this definition, comprehensively, who a person is.

American Psychological Association states: Personality refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. The study of personality focuses on two broad areas: One is understanding individual differences in particular personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability. The other is understanding how the various parts of a person come together as a whole.

The APA definition lends itself to the “study of personality.” APA assumes that personality consists of individual differences (uniqueness: No one person is the same) and its study “understanding how various parts of a person come together as a whole."

If you look away from this entry, right now, and let your mind focus on you, and you ask: Who am I really?” You will think about: 1. How you feel at this very moment (anxious, relaxed, irritable, happy), 2. How you relate to other people (I spend most days all by myself, by choice). 3. Feeback people have given you over your lifespan about who you are (people have tended to avoid me; I don’t have any real friends; I’m not happy unless I am with other people). 4. Your likes and dislikes (I like working on things versus working with people, I am an adventure seeker, I value opulence, I feel safe when I am at home, I like to take risks).

Any parent who has had children, from the get go, are confronted (impressed at times) with the concept of personality. If you have two or more children you will marvel that no two children are the same (even maternal twins are different). In fact, if you’ve been on the front lines (assuming you’ve stayed around) of watching someone go from birth through childhood, through adolescence, and then to adulthood it’s still hard to imagine what, exactly, personality is.

These four features (above) of yourself

• How you feel

• How you relate to other people

• Feedback people have given you

• Your likes and dislikes

are probably manifestations of your in-born characteristics. One wouldn’t expect, under normal circumstances, these to change. If you prefer being alone right now, then you probably preferred being alone when you were 15 years old, you preferred to play alone when you were 8 years old. This is a stable feature of Who you are. There are exceptions to this I will describe later.

You don’t need to take a personality test to figure this innate part of yourself out. Just make a list of these four items above and, the more you write about them, the more you will describe the innate features of your personality. By innate, I mean the features of personality you were born with or genetically and physically hardwired (or endowed) with.

But there is another list. Can you guess what it is?

The other list is Experiences. By this word I mean much more than what happens to you while you live. It means what happens to you and how you interpret what happens to you and what you ultimately do or feel (or how you respond) to it.

Experiences are not easy to list or quantify. In fact, it makes me anxious to articulate this idea because such a list (if one wants to call it that) can become incomprehensibly unwieldy. Cataloging Experiences, for the person trying to understand personality, is a formidable task. I can never cover this domain adequately, even if I focus on one person. I will, instead, address features of Experiences that could be strong enough to alter the stable-innate-biological aspects of personality.

There are additional areas most writers of personality do not address; either, because the particular writer doesn’t believe in them or simply decides to deny their existence.

Can you guess what these are?

Probably not, because most people don’t think about them, at least I didn’t until I started doing therapy myself. After six years of seeing individuals full-time, (note: I usually don’t see people who are feeling great, on-top of the world, carefree, or otherwise perennially happy. “Dr., I’m seeing you today because I want to go from happy to very happy.”) and after spending time helping people struggling, really struggling, with deep internal issues of life sometimes for years at a time (deep enough to contemplate whether life is even worth living), that these domains surface with regard to personality.

This list fits within the term: The Unconscious. It would be difficult, in my profession as a psychologist and therapist, not to acknowledge that something is going on within people that neither they (or I) have easy access to (see my blog entry Transference and the Unconscious, July 16, 2022), . It seems to be archaic in nature. This feature seems to be stable versus varying across persons, a constant in the human being. It does seem to manifest based on an agenda of its own that is not always parallel to the individual’s perceived wants or needs. It comes out, at times, in dreams, in fugue states, in psychopathology of various forms. It appears from time to time in hypnosis. It appears in unusual stories when persons feel connected to another realm of awareness. It shows itself in “spirit” connections - connections with deceased loved-ones, in personal prophetic ideology, in déjà vu states. It pops out in instruments like the Rorschach and other projective tests where the person is entirely unaware that they are giving me this information. I could explain it away if it was rare, but it’s not. I’ve observed individual variation in it, but it is more common and the same across persons versus a point of difference or distinction. I will describe this more later.

Change: What is it?

Another pivotal term.

Google defines change as: (verb) 1. make (someone or something) different; alter or modify. 2. replace (something) with something else, especially something of the same kind that is newer or better; substitute one thing for (another).

(noun) 1. the act or instance of making or becoming different. 2. coins as opposed to paper currency.

Merriam-Webster defines change as: 1 : to make or become different changing autumn leaves I like how you've changed this room. 2 : to give a different position, course, or direction to I changed my plans. 3 : to put one thing in the place of another : switch… Our teacher made us change places.

I won’t define stability because the emphasis here is change. Change is to make something different. Change can imply better or worse, but it’s general purpose is to connotate difference.

One feature of change that is important in personality research at least is the “magnitude” of change. There are words that highlight magnitude including: change with valence (decline or improve), innovation, transformation, conversion and these additional words are important in understanding how much or in what way a person might change.

In an earlier entry, I discussed how a person might change in response to a “religious” conversion (see my entry: God and Mental Health (Part 1), Nov 26, 2021. The term “born again” has always interested me especially when I was engaged in the academic study of life-course personality development. What does it mean to be “born again” from a personality perspective.

Google defines “Born Again” as follows: Born again is a phrase used by many Protestants to describe the phenomenon of gaining faith in Jesus Christ. It is an experience when everything they have been taught as Christians becomes real, and they develop a direct and personal relationship with God. (see Bible reference: John 3:3)

“Born Again” in this sense suggests a comprehensive change. I would call this a clear example of “conversion.” The person was one thing before being baptized and then another thing after baptism. Like, Jesus turning the water to wine (see John 2:1-11 for another instance of conversion which is a complete chemical change of a liquid). Regardless of how this happened, Does it mean that the person had a complete change in personality? When I taught, for years, “Personality Theory” the inevitable question arose. (“Dr. Hill, if we figure out how to do a full “brain” transplant, What happens to personality?”).

It’s a trick question of sorts. No one can answer this question until it happens, right. This question can send a whole class down a rabbit hole of endless discussion. I usually reserved this question for a long-essay, and I got many interesting answers.

What Can “Change” Personality?

If a person’s personality is resistant to “change”, What kinds of Experiences are capable of changing a person’s personality?

It’s important to note here that personality change can be from within or without; that is, a person can be the same, but act differently (think of an actor on a stage who can fake an entire personality, but still have one’s own personality which returns once the play is done). Or, a full and true personality change where one thinks, feels, and acts differently. We come back to the transformation, “born again.” As an outside observer, it is almost impossible to discern these two at times.

Here is another point when you might try to create a list:

Would learning impact your personality, before and after a college degree, for example?

We graduate and now have an academic degree attached to our name (so-to-speak), sometimes even a title (doctor). Are people one way before they start college and another way after? We were also certainly younger before we start college, but were we different in any psychological way with the passage of time and experience in college? If you are “born again” into a religious ideology, do you become a different person? If so, Can you be born again as a college-educated human being?

What about a trauma? Some believe that trauma can impact global features of personality. A physical trauma? If it is to the brain, perhaps. Recall the earlier entry about Phineas Gage (the railroad worker who had his brain impaled with a railroad spike, see my blog entry on Mental Status, September 3, 2022). Gage was certainly different after the accident, by all manner of personality measures. What about a psychological trauma?

In one interesting study entitled, Lasting personality pathology following exposure to severe trauma in adulthood: retrospective cohort study, BMC Psychiatry, Munjiza et al., 2019.

Authors state: Early exposure to trauma is a known risk factor for personality disorder (PD)…We set out to investigate whether exposure to war trauma can lead to lasting personality pathology in adults and to compare the mental health and social functioning of people with late–onset personality problems with those with PD.

This study examined 182 Veterans who served in southern Croatia 15 years after the Croatian war. Not surprisingly, Late-onset personality pathology patients were three times more likely to suffer from PTSD than their PD counterparts.

This Flowchart shows participant groups based on IPDE (Internation Personality Disorder Index), exposure to catastrophic trauma and presence of personality disorder. IPDE positive participants score positive on IPDE; IPDE negative - participants scoring negative on IPDE. Catastrophic event (positive or negative) based on Harvard Trauma Questionnaire. PD positive – pre-trauma personality pathology present; PD negative – pre-trauma personality pathology absent. The PD negative group would be (no Catastrophic event and no lifetime symptoms of personality disorder). This graph indicates that the Catastrophic Event was linked to more lifetime trauma symptoms than an early diagnosis of PD (personality disorder) without a catastrophic event. The data support the idea that people who were exposed to severe war-related trauma developed personality-related pathology in adulthood.

What about other traumas in early life, child abuse in all its forms. Other life traumas which are pervasive in the United States.

Here, we have a case and evidence of an “Experience” that could shape, globally, an individual’s personality. Are there other “Experiences” of this nature. My answer to this would be “Yes” although early life trauma is a high-profile example of this category of “impacts on personality.”

Memory and Recollection

When a person recalls memories from the past about personality, How accurate do you think these memories are? If you think back over time, how accurate are your own early memories. Here, I will refer to Rothman’s New Yorker article:

“…Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?…”

STOP HERE, END OF PART 1