Personality

One of the most obscure concepts in psychology is personality. We all know what that means and at the same time, it would probably be hard to define it in psychological terms.   https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-personality-2795416    Transcript: you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page at psych with mike now here's psych with mike personality 0:22 i don't know if that got caught welcome into psych with mike library this is dr michael mahon i'm here with 0:27 mr brett newcomb and intern michael hello good morning how are you both of you yeah yeah i'm so used to 0:34 saying extroverted how are you and now when there's more people in the studio then i don't know i don't know what to 0:39 say when you don't know what to say say nothing at all that's what they advise crickets missouri says uh you and all so 0:48 how are you all is how that works out yes yeah colloquialism 0:53 yeah we're gonna all go wash our clothes and get on the way right next to 1:00 illinois where they drink milk you are just too sensitive oh man all 1:07 right we got to stop because that's going down a dark road so uh 1:14 i remember a long long time ago you and i brett 1:19 were playing golf and i don't know why 1:26 but for some reason i was really 1:33 worried about this idea that somehow i was being fake because i 1:40 would act differently when we would go to the golf course than when we were in the office than when i was teaching 1:47 at the university and i remember having this conversation with you 1:52 about is it are you are you being real if you act differently in different 1:58 situations and do you remember what your answer was no but i know what it should have been 2:04 what what do you think it should have been you are different in different situations that's exactly what you said you said not only is that real but if 2:10 you act the same in every situation that's probably pathological yeah yeah okay yes okay okay yeah so yeah we all 2:17 do that i mean i used to teach psychology classes in high school and college and one of the things that i would talk about is we all have 2:23 different vocabularies we use for different settings when i worked my way through college working on a factory 2:29 floor on an assembly line the guys that i worked among were you putting tires on cadillac's 2:35 okay i worked in a bicycle factory the the guys on the factory floor 2:42 all cursed as they breathed so i found myself doing the same thing 2:48 but as a classroom teacher going into a seventh grade classroom i can't talk that way and when i go to church on sunday 2:54 morning i don't want to talk that way so i present myself differently depending on the context cues and the agenda and 3:01 the goal you do too and everyone does so if you recognize that that the trick isn't are 3:07 you consistent the trick is there enough consistency that the people who know you will recognize you in multiple 3:13 environments yeah so i i know who that is right yeah and and i think that that was what the 3:21 crux of my dilemma was that day is that i'd always prided myself i didn't recognize you on the golf course 3:28 i had prided myself on thinking that i was the same person in every situation 3:35 because you know i just i found that to be hysterical yeah and and they're j and they still do it just wasn't true and 3:40 then when i came to realize oh no i'm a different person depending on the context 3:45 i felt like i was betraying myself and then you said no that's just the way that everybody said 3:52 don't be pathological they have drugs for that and shock treatment yeah yeah so then 3:58 you've taught personality theory i've taught personality theory um 4:03 for you what is personality well you know it starts with the birth of an infant baby so i believe some 4:10 babies are born with personality orientation yeah to be more open and 4:16 gregarious or to be more closed and watchful some of them avoid contact and some of them 4:23 seductively embrace content and then as parents how do you interpret 4:29 what your child is doing i mean the whole thing about mother child bonding uh if the mother is not emotionally 4:35 available then the theory is a child panics and feels disconnected and is in dire 4:42 straits if the mother is emotionally available then the child is pulled into that warmth 4:48 those things impact the way the child then evolves from that point but i believe there is a starting point 4:56 of predisposition or orientation so uh it's biologically encoded into the 5:01 individual i think so okay but i i couldn't prove that scientifically that's just no no yeah but i'm just yeah so it's 5:09 interesting from there to say well how does your personality develop and i think a lot of it is fundamental orientation 5:15 impacted by training and experience how do your parents train you to handle 5:22 anger you see a one-year-old who's so frustrated because he can't have a piece of candy that he bites somebody or he 5:28 hits somebody uh how do the parents respond to that i know parents just said well i'll buy 5:34 you back teach them not to bite well i think that's just among the stupider and more abusive things that you've heard 5:40 but that's what they say proudly i teach my child uh i don't know the right answer i just 5:46 know a lot of the wrong answers i wonder if they say oh that's not working if they train their dogs the same way 5:52 probably my dog bites them but i'll just bite him back yeah okay well then the dog's probably gonna bite you 5:59 yeah yeah yeah so for me i would say that in 6:05 my view of psychology that personality 6:10 is really if not equivalent to very much ingrained 6:16 in emotional regulation so i think that those things are somewhat 6:21 synonymous so your personality is the way that people experience your personality is based on your emotional 6:29 regulation capacity does that make sense yeah but so then i wondered is 6:36 stubbornness and oppositionality is that ingrained or learned 6:43 do you learn to be stubborn are you just stubborn think you learn to be stubborn 6:49 i think you respond to your environment for the most part and i think i do i do think you respond to your 6:55 environment in that in that regard so what about resilience 7:00 i think you can change these things okay yes yeah so we are educable yeah i think 7:08 we are we are generally responsive to different things right we talk about um so pavlova stuff disorders right and 7:16 how do you treat a personality disorder when you introduce other tools or you 7:21 introduce other methods to uh lean on instead of whatever that undesirable person otto kernberg 7:28 contends that you can't really modify personality disorders until the personally disordered individual is 7:34 between 40 and 50 and wants to work hard enough to change the only thing that you can do he says and he and masterson the 7:41 two main voices in this field that i studied he says what you have to do is 7:47 supportive expressive psychotherapy you have to give them ways to vent and relieve their emotional cycles 7:55 but try to encourage them to be stable and sometimes that takes medicine sometimes that takes training sometimes 8:02 it takes discipline whether it's exercise diet sleep patterns whatever it may be but you 8:08 teach them over time the crash and burn phenomenon 8:13 is less frequent but the rhythm is still there uh until they hit that age where 8:20 potentially they could change but they can't do it until then yeah and and you i i agree with that and and you and i 8:27 really studied kernberg and and and heinz kohut and all of those guys uh which are not necessarily as 8:36 rigorously today um but i absolutely agree with that and because before i was 55 8:43 i would have said because i think of personality as synonymous with emotional regulation i think emotional regulation 8:49 is seated in the attached or lack of relationship with the primary caregiver 8:55 attachment theory yeah that it's that it's all about the security or insecurity that you learn in the first 9:01 two pre-verbal years of life and i would have said before i was 55 that that was 9:06 immutable you couldn't change that that if you were that way you would be that way you could find compensatory measures 9:14 to be able to be less reactive but you couldn't change the foundation of that 9:19 since i've been 55 and i i have a different view of that i think that i have been working on my own 9:27 intrinsic sense of security but i don't think i could have before then so i 9:32 absolutely agree with kernberg i think that there is something about that and i 9:38 don't know that there's an age range that i would identify but there is a point at which in life 9:45 i think there is somewhat of available to that yeah yeah i wonder if that's 9:50 correlation and not causation right i wonder if it's not so much that you are between 40 and 50 but that the vast 9:57 majority of people who were who cranberry studied and who he was able to successfully 10:04 work with and personality changing um happened to be at a stage in their 10:09 lives when they were 40 or 50. and if that if that is actually shifting right we look at like actualization of 10:15 identity and different identity crises and we found that people 10:21 are starting to have their identity crises earlier in life and i wonder if that 10:26 is a focus on self-improvement i wonder if that's a focus on entering into dialects with 10:33 oneself so what you're in life i think i mean that's a really intriguing question 10:38 um to which i don't have the answer but what i was about to say is i think some 10:45 of it i was having a conversation earlier this week with a friend who has a family member that's diagnosed as 10:50 borderline and this friend was talking about the kind of aggressive anger that happens 10:56 uh when the hypomania occurs and how frustrated she is that this is 11:03 happening again with this individual and you know she this individual will not have 11:10 someone in their life that will put up with that and i just laughed and said yes they will they have a radar that 11:15 lets them find them if this person gives up they'll go find another one that will take that crap and they will find another one that takes crap yeah and so 11:21 they just keep replicating that persona to bounce against but 11:27 the question that you raise is is it possible that they could discover 11:32 earlier a different way to do it and invest themselves in trying to do it differently and i think that's one of 11:38 the goals of doing therapy is to try to create that matrix right but i think it really occurs well so but but for that 11:45 to be salient i think we have to then explore what michael said about it could 11:50 be correlational but is it causal so then we have to say okay well then what is 11:56 causal because you know when i think about my own looking at me 12:01 um i think that part of the reason why there was an opener an open window after 12:08 the age of 55 is i think it's partly biological i think it's hormonal i think it's partly because i had lived through 12:17 the process of industry the the stage of industry according to piaget where i had built a career that i was feeling good 12:23 about and successful which gave me a different understanding of myself than was based 12:30 on my early experience so i think that there are a lot of dynamics that go into 12:35 that i don't know which one of those is the cause or if it 12:40 is a myriad of things or if neither one of them even is impactful and i'm just 12:46 you know whistling across the through the graveyard but but i think that they're 12:52 what what is the causal if we could identify what the causal 12:58 factors are then we could more directly so there are studies that attempt to do exactly that yeah and 13:05 categorize the responses uh character traits right are you agreeable 13:11 are you conscientious are you eager to please are you an extrovert are you an introvert or you're neurotic 13:16 find those clusters uh and that's exactly though you know that part of the article is exactly what i say why i say 13:24 for me personality is equal to emotional regulation because i think all of those things are about how well you're able to 13:31 what we used to call self-soothe yeah 13:37 you brought up an interesting point around an individual with bpd finding others 13:43 who will well dance the same dance the same dance right and what i've always heard i when you said that 13:50 the attachment theory bit clicked for me because i always think anxious avoidant right anxious finds avoidant avoidance 13:56 finds anxiousness and they and they end up in these situations um and that that really draws a parallel 14:02 for me so i think there might be some merit to what you're saying about but the anxious avoidance deal slides into a 14:07 concept called the isolator and the pursuer right and the isolator chases the or it runs from the pursuer until 14:14 they get to the extreme end of the pendulum swing then the pursuer finally says screw it this didn't work and i give up and in that exact instant they 14:21 reverse rolls then the pursuer becomes the isolator starts to go back and and the isolator chases them 14:27 and said wait wait wait they get to the other end of the pendulum so they just their relationship is a cyclical history 14:33 of role reversal so uh harper hendricks is the guy that uh developed that there yeah i know that 14:39 from uh the american whitaker and and judith uh 14:45 i'm blanking on her last name divorced no um uh 14:53 anyway i'll think of it eventually hopefully but but and and they talk about this idea of they call it 14:58 dismissive and preoccupied instead of pursuer and and and yeah and isolator um but exactly that dynamic 15:06 that that and that that it has to do with the way in which that they utilize conflict in the concept in the context 15:12 of the relationship so one person's going to use conflict to try and initiate intimacy the other partner is 15:18 going to use conflict as a way to gain distance and that yes they're going to use that at cross purposes until the 15:26 pursuer yeah then feels frustrated stops and then yeah then they switch roles so 15:31 we do a lot of couples counseling marriage counseling in our career okay before we do that let's go to the break 15:36 and then uh we'll pick that up on the other side no i'm gonna pound okay hey guys dr michael mahan here from cyclic 15:42 night and do you think that you have a story to tell 15:48 i know that when we started psych with mike the things that we really wanted in 15:54 a podcast hosting company was that they knew what they were doing 16:00 and libsyn has been around since the very beginning they're the oldest running consecutive 16:06 still existing podcast hosting company in the entire world i think but certainly in the united states so 16:13 they've been around since people started uploading things to the internet and so they have a lot of 16:20 experience but we also needed a service that was easy to use and 16:26 libsyn is just so intuitive and even though they've got all of this experience they just keep on upgrading 16:33 so they just recently went through a major renovation a major upgrade to 16:39 libsyn5 and made the service even more intuitive and user friendly than it was 16:44 before and it was so user friendly before that i was able to figure it out 16:50 and get site with mike up on the surface so we've been using uh libsyn since the very beginning of 16:57 psych with mike for over two years now we love them and as a friend of the show 17:03 if you go to libsyn and start a podcast right now you get your first month free 17:09 so you go to libsyn.com and use the code 17:14 f-r-i-e-n-d so friend of the show friend that's l i b 17:20 s y n dot com and use the code f r i e n 17:26 d and you get your first month free and as always if it's friday it's cycling 17:33 are you still pouting no okay i'm over it go ahead in doing a lot of couples counseling 17:38 yeah you have to have a way to explain why does this always happen to me why you're like the alcoholic female 17:45 again the females married to an alcoholic male won't statistically divorce him just because 17:51 he's an alcoholic however should that ever happen then she says i've washed my hands of 17:57 that i'm going to go find somebody new right she goes and finds another alcoholic nine times out of ten and she swears 18:03 he was coming that wasn't visible and what you work on this thing it was 18:08 visible you have and we use the radial band theory frequency band theory you have certain 18:15 frequencies of attraction that you both send and receive like a radio 18:20 transmitter if we sent you to the convention center there were ten thousand people there there'd be a thousand people or 500 people 18:27 on your frequency those are the ones you would notice everybody else would just be a blob walking by but your radar says 18:33 target target target and you choose from among those targets and that's an 18:38 unconscious process yeah you're unaware oh yeah but but then you replicate the dance of relationship and get to the 18:44 same place and so if you want two chains one of the things you have to work on is 18:50 learning what your frequency modulators are and change them so that you then go out i mean how many conversations have 18:55 you had with somebody that says i don't find so and so to be attractive and i said well that's exactly i know that way exactly you know and they're like oh 19:02 that would be horrible well that's if you go find what's attractive to you right now it's going to get in the same 19:08 boat you're going to exactly there's a great um very approachable couple sets of books uh by 19:16 catherine woodward thomas uh one is called conscious uncoupling it's really good about how do i 19:22 end a relationship without a whole lot of drama and angst yes yes how what's the 19:29 best way to what's the best way to do a divorce yeah got a lot of attention like glenn paltrow and a few other 19:34 celebrities a while back the other one she has is called calling in the one um and it's talking exactly about what 19:40 you're talking about here setting your frequency dial to what you want in a partner and what you're saying you want 19:46 in the partner not just what you've had and what you say is not necessarily what you want because you gotta learn how to be honest with yourself who am i what am 19:52 i looking for let's say the average what is the the average distance between marriages right 19:57 between divorce and second marriage or next marriage is about nine months right and how much growth and personal 20:04 reflection can you really do in those nine months well there are some patterns there too i mean typically uh 20:10 men won't ask for a divorce unless they've already found a replacement 20:15 women will ask for divorce because they feel unfulfilled violated frustrated empty and they say 20:23 you're not doing it for me so i want you to go away they haven't even begun to look for a replacement at that point but they're 20:29 able to say this is not good for me men typically are not they they're like little kids on the jungle gym they won't 20:35 turn loose to this bar until they have this one in hand 20:40 so i think you have to look at the sex of the person uh as you have those conversations what 20:46 language can you hear which is one of the clinical challenges you face as a therapist how do i hear the language of 20:53 neurolinguistic programming the the usage of the person sitting in the chair 20:58 ops at me as i try to learn who they are and how they reveal themselves to me because when i want to make an 21:04 intervention i'm much more successful if i can intervene with terms that resonate with 21:11 them yeah well and so you know then 21:17 i think let me start a different way based on the conversation that we're having 21:24 i would ask you guys would you agree with this that we started this by talking about is personality 21:30 indelible across the lifespan is it is it is it consistent from the money that you're born until the minute you die and 21:37 i think what we're all saying is that may not be that's what i was taught when i was an undergraduate at st louis university 21:43 back in the 1980s that personality was pretty fixed that there wasn't a whole lot you could do to really 21:50 change that you could learn write different behavior modifiers but the personality was pretty consistent but i 21:57 think what we're saying is maybe that's not as fixed as 22:02 people used to say that it was is that fair yes okay so would you agree i don't i do 22:08 agree i do agree i remember i'm trying to look it up because i don't remember who did the study 22:14 uh but there there was a really controversial study that come out maybe 10 years ago that says you get a new 22:21 personality every five years or so that would be interesting and i i thought about 22:27 my my 10-year high school reunion is supposed to be next year and i thought about how excited i was and like most people 22:33 aren't very excited for their 10-year reunion um well unless they did really well in life and want to go show off 22:39 but how excited i was to meet some of the people again and and meet who they had become 22:46 because i i'm really viewing it through the lens of not catching up with old friends but rather meeting new people 22:52 where they are at now right okay so what i would though my my reaction to that 22:58 would be just because so like all of us are clearly very different than we were in 23:05 high school is that do we have new personalities because of that or 23:10 is that just a function of the developmental process we have more and 23:15 better clothes we have more money we present ourselves with some of the better cosmetic 23:20 presentations right i've been to high school reunions where the high school stars the star athlete 23:27 the cheerleader you know are they never moved beyond those days their best days are behind them and they were behind 23:33 them at 17. they're stuck they're frozen in time 23:38 but i would say that you know and and even before i was almost 60 23:45 you know let's say even 40. at 40 years old i represented every single thing 23:50 that i despised when i was 16. and was my personality different 23:56 i don't know so if you want to you want to make your wife upset say to her that you hear her mother's 24:02 voice coming oh no i would no my god no i would never say that because we all 24:07 say that i don't want to hear my dad's voice come out of my mouth but my children have heard it and he's been 24:13 dead all their lives but they've heard his voice saying his words 24:18 because he never met him so right so infuriates me yeah you know he's dead he's supposed to stay dead 24:24 why is he talking to him well i wonder if the question that you're getting at here is where do we draw the line between personality and environment 24:31 or or just reaction or evolutionary development yeah 24:37 yeah and are those are are they different i mean are they the same thing right because if personality 24:43 is a function of development well then obviously yes it should evolve over the 24:48 course of the lifespan but if personality is different from emotional development if it's a separate thing 24:54 like you said we were talking earlier and we were talking about that a lot of 24:59 people say that as you get older you return to a 25:04 lot of childlike behaviors right and you had said that uh brett you had said that if you were a curmudgeon at in your old 25:11 age you were probably a curmudgeon as a child and i said oh well that's great because i was a delightful child which 25:18 may or may not have been true there are those among us who would disagree yeah but but if you do return to a lot of 25:25 those same characteristics childlike behaviors as you get older that would actually be 25:31 a a plank in the in the in the board or in the the 25:36 platform that says personality is consistent well all i can say to that is people who 25:42 are listening if they have those questions come back next week and see if we were saying see if we're saying the same thing 25:48 yeah well we probably won't be because we'll forget what we said because that's a function of old age yeah right so uh 25:55 you know i don't know if i am after this conversation if i'm more 26:02 on the side of personalities consistent or more on the side of the personality can change but i will say 26:07 that i do have very different ideas about the consistency of that 26:15 at you know 58 than i did when i was 40. certainty is a problem 26:21 and for clinicians you have to understand you live in a land of smoke and mirrors constantly evolving constantly changing 26:28 i wish somebody had told me that when i was starting out somebody did tell you when you were starting out i was there 26:36 but you are so right that that uh everything is an evolution and it you 26:42 know you if you have an opinion that you feel like you are absolutely wed to that 26:49 is the core of your identity that will never change 26:55 i mean i i would not i would not encourage anybody to hold fast to those things 27:01 because you may find yourself at a point in your life where that no longer applies i've gone to the place where i 27:07 don't think donuts are nearly as good as i used to think donuts were amen yeah well i used to say the same thing 27:14 and now that i'm older it's it's changing yeah it's funny we face the same problem in engineering um so i don't know if 27:21 people remember was speaking last time on the show my day job i'm a i'm a software engineer and we talk about 27:29 the level of risk and reward between putting out new features so every time 27:34 you you release a new feature you carry some level of risk with that feature because there's a process going from in 27:42 development to in production and in whenever you run through that process you always run the risk of 27:48 introducing a bug or introducing a problem into the system and so we really hit at the dichotomy between reliability 27:55 engineers and feature engineers who say reliability engineers say i never want 28:00 this thing to change i've got automatic processes that spin it back up if it goes down or if there's a bug and 28:07 feature engineers who say well nobody's ever going to get any value out of this thing if there are no new features 28:14 and so it's one of the challenges for microsoft word yeah they they don't add new features but they change features around right yeah under the illusion 28:21 that there has been change and so then you have to figure out how the hell does this work now mm-hmm so i wonder buy an apple it's so interesting to see to hear 28:28 the parallels between between um psychology and engineering and clinician 28:34 work and all of these things it always my family is diverse my wife is a 28:40 microsoft person and i'm an apple person i hear her cussing her computer much more often than she hears me cussing 28:46 mine i wonder if that's because she cusses more than i do i don't know 28:52 [Laughter] she has more reason that's i know your wife a little bit and i find that 28:57 difficult to believe oh well but uh yeah i know i the the day that i took the job 29:04 running the graduate program at webster there was an apple on the desk and i 29:11 said to myself i'm going to figure out how to use this because the whole campus was was apple um and i and it and it's 29:17 familiar enough if your pc apples are familiar enough that you know you should 29:23 be able to do a thing and that you can do it but it's dissimilar enough that it's hard to figure out how to do it and 29:29 i got so frustrated i called after about 20 minutes called i.t and said look you're not the same person yeah 29:38 i i was going to throw it out the window they came and replaced it with a pc thank god let's end this thing yeah okay 29:44 all right so hopefully uh that was elucidating for somebody out there um 29:50 elizabeth okay yeah what what what's it's elucidative not a lucid dating 29:57 elucidative why one's a process if it's a process it's elucidative 30:05 okay so what is it if it's dating it's uh adverb 30:10 okay i still don't understand the difference it's a verb oh okay then but 30:15 okay fine yeah you can be both okay yeah but elusive 30:28 there you go so uh the music that appears inside with mike is written and performed by mr ben we'll miss you next 30:33 week uh who's going to be not be here 30:40 any of us apparently uh we really would like it if anybody 30:46 would go to uh the websites find us on apple podcasts 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