At What Point In Your Life Did Your Personality Get "Set" (If Indeed, It Ever Did)

Agreed, Beth.

Excepting a few lifetime hobbies/traits ('I like swimming.' 'I like books.' 'I love dogs.' ' I write for money.') and something of a soul-based ethical command center, I'd like to believe in constant change. Most people I know are like this, except they carry trappings (apartments, photos, stories) from other phases of their lives to keep them connected with their former selves. I can't quite get on board with the shell metaphor, but I'd endorse a hermit-crab alternative.

PS: Once I found a hermit crab on Martha's Vineyard. I brought it home, and it moved into a lightbulb. A year later he grew out of it, so I gave him a Dinty Moore can. Then I lost him but found him dead in the piano bench a week later. He smelled like canned stew.

This is very very important. Behaviour can sometimes change, but never by trying to change someone.

(Though my fear is that my deep down personality is that I *am* just a permanent asshole, and everything else is just not very well learned social graces.)

?? Did you break off the end so he could climb in? Wasn't it jagged?

I think we do have a certain *constant self* but we are able to change the outside layers. It's very hard but possible, notice it when going in therapy and/or entering a new relationship.

Though, I do think personality is fluid, and that people do 'change', just not me.

Which is definitely a trap or can be. It seems to be fitting in more and more with my belief of process over product.

xxpost MsMisery: the light bulb was from my grandma's station wagon, it had (kind-of) a natural opening from where it had been not-too-gently removed from the car. Not too jagged. As the year went on, it got cooler-looking because bits of sand and food would get trapped inside with the crab and scratch patterns on the interior.

(Though my fear is that my deep down personality is that I *am* just a permanent asshole, and everything else is just not very well learned social graces.)

YOU ARE A WARRIOR QUEEN!!!!

When I look at a newborn baby I get a specific "feel" from them that remains as they grow up. Some core is there, watchful and detached, or open and bemused, whatever

Maybe this is U&K, that I'm trying to discuss personality on the basis of a rather too limited sample base. Mainly mine own, because that's the only personality I've known intimately through the course of its whole course. And one is always too intimately involved in one's own personality to see it, and its changes, clearly.

When you have a child, and watch them grow up, and their personality become established, grow, change or not, that must be a far more useful lesson in the actual roots and origins of personality - why I included parenthood as one of the list of life-changing things that really can permanently alter your outlook.

There is definitely a layer of my personality that was set and laid down by the time I was 14, 15. Another fairly permanent layer got set down at 22, with the decisions and experiences I had then. Since then, behavioural-wise, I'm not the same person at all, due to learning from experiences and hopefully growing. But in terms of interests, patterns of thinking, quirks, tastes, the way I move through life hasn't changed a bit.

This is really resonating with me. I like this idea/image a lot.

Which is why I try to avoid looking back at them! Obviously I write and receive a lot of letters and take thousands of photos now (thank you digital age) but in both cases they're not things I recheck much if at all. Something like Flickr is handy because it gives me a space for photos that others might find of interest, but I'm not bound to look through them myself. I'd rather look through others'!

This I don't agree with. People do change, but only with extreme self-motivation and lots of time. Always intrinsically. It's a rule of thumb of mine to trust people to what I call (and is probably more eloquently titled elsewhere) 'the law of minimal effective action.' As I've observed, people will set inconcrete goals for themselves, and do as little as they can to achieve them. Goals are so specific and idiosyncratic 'I want an antique Beemer' or 'This year I should become the greatest linotypist in the world' or 'I'd feel more complete with a Zoroastrian girlfriend' that people are forced to change themselves, sometimes, in pursuit of these things. When they reach their desires they change mostly back to the way they were. Mostly. But some of the new self they tried on in pursuit of their X sticks to them. Over time, the accumulation of all these little adjustments, possibilities, makes them/us wider people, with a stranger band of possible actions, a broader selection of selves to use, and a more global personality.

i see the change when i'm with my parents. now i'm staying with'em in tokyo and i already became "someone else." ;-)

I'd like to think that the former is a fixed quantity: we, by and large, always believe X is right and Y is wrong. With some jiggling. But the latter? Personality? defined in my world as an individual set of most-probable actions, responses, and patterns for behavior. Mutable, and in flux, but with defined likelihoods and wheel-ruts from constant travel.

The 'deep layer' you talk about, Beth, seems more like a soul to me than a personality.

I'd like to think that the former is a fixed quantity: we, by and large, always believe X is right and Y is wrong. With some jiggling. But the latter? Personality? defined in my world as an individual set of most-probable actions, responses, and patterns for behavior. Mutable, and in flux, but with defined likelihoods and wheel-ruts from constant travel.

No, see I see those core values as the core personality. The other stuff is pretty much the behaviour. The personality is the thing that doesn't change. Everything else gets tossed in the whirlwind of manic depression, that's behaviour, moods, changing things.

I have to believe that the core is the real thing, the immutable thing. Because the behaviour outside bit is so mutable - if I were to go by that, living on 3 continents by the time I was 10, 14 schools in 12 years, dozens of jobs, possibly 50 or more lovers - my god, I wouldn't exist if I called all that my personality.

(xpost) I think personality is an expression of core values, but I also think the tools we use, and the modes of expression we access are unchanging.

Example: SomeZ is on a deep private level unsure of her personal worth. Early in Z's life, there's a lot of bragging, brash adolescent silliness. Even some bullying. But Z grows out of that. As a twenty-something Z feels constantly depressed. Maybe seeks some therapy?? 30s? Z's clinging to a loveless marriage. 40s? Kids, new career, workaholic, making herself indispensible to her clients. 50s? Burnt out, feeling unappreciated, drops out of life a little bit. 60s? Joins a hippie church... doesn't love it, but the people are kind., etc. Always the same person, same drives... but two to people who meet her twenty years apart she might seem 100% different, though always with the same center, same ideals, same core of conscience.

thanks CJ. Yes, not to hurt others is urgent and key here.

**why I included parenthood as one of the list of life-changing things that really can permanently alter your outlook.** said Kate.

It's probably the biggest life-change. Suddenly you are totally responsible for them, they totally depend on you. You're responsible for everything from the basics like warmth, shelter, food, safety etc to making provision for their future, teaching them how to navigate their way through physical and emotional changes.

Thinking about it, and going back on what I said before, maybe that does change your personality. You can't act it out, but I guess for the vast majority the bond is so instant and strong that you don't need to. I became more patient, more empathetic, probably more 'gentle' after having children. These maybe go deeper than just new behaviour.

I think this prospect alone is enough to make me never want kids, to a large extent.

I think personality is an expression of core values, but I also think the tools we use, and the modes of expression we access are unchanging.

Example: SomeZ is on a deep private level unsure of her personal worth. Early in Z's life, there's a lot of bragging, brash adolescent silliness. Even some bullying. But Z grows out of that. As a twenty-something Z feels constantly depressed. Maybe seeks some therapy?? 30s? Z's clinging to a loveless marriage. 40s? Kids, new career, workaholic, making herself indispensible to her clients. 50s? Burnt out, feeling unappreciated, drops out of life a little bit. 60s? Joins a hippie church... doesn't love it, but the people are kind., etc. Always the same person, same drives... but two to people who meet her twenty years apart she might seem 100% different, though always with the same center, same ideals, same core of conscience.

This actually makes some kind of sense - to an outside observer it would appear that Z is changing her personality like a fashion accessory, but there is a deep core level personality which is not changing, but finding different expressions. Gives me more understanding of why a person would *be* like that.

But this goes back to the same friend I was having the discussion of "falseness" with. My life has been constant flux, I am always looking for things that are the same. Other people, whose lives have been stable sameness are often looking for the differences, the exceptions, the things that change.

But when I read things like you, Dr. C, and Beth Parker have just written, I am kind of awestruck that people manage to do it. Respect.

And when the kids are older The REAL humbler is the realization one what a one-way street parent-child love evolves into. My love for my kids is so devouring and greedy—no way they can love me back that way. They're going to love their own lovers and kids that way. They love me in their way, and certainly want me to BE there, but I still can barely keep my hands off them. It's not useful love for them—that smothering thing, so I'm always curbing it. Stopping myself from asking constant questions, etc. They need some separation!

You're right Beth - I see that distancing starting in my son (aged 14).

I'm a bit of a wreck today. The emotional floodgates that I referred to way upthread may well open wide unless I get off the thread and do something constructive.

Anyway I don't have children, but I think I understand.

It's good you feel that way about your kids Beth. B/c I'm not sure all parents do.

Yes, pretty OTM once you get past the traumas of adolescence and the necessary separation.

Sometimes I can't stand my mother, sometimes she drives me insane, but I still love her so much I just can't contemplate ever being without me. So much it scares me sometimes. And that's when I get cranky and distancing, maybe. Because I'm scared of losing that love.

I think most parents love their kids massively, even if they're incompetent at putting it into practice. The desire for touch is a very animal thing, the licking of the cubs, regurgitating of food into their mouths, etc.

And Laurel's right: I adore both of my parents. Complicated, sure, but without reserve.

I don't gush about them much

Oh don't worry, please, I wasn't complaining at all! I have so many friends with kids and I love them all -- it's great to be an unofficial uncle to so many around here in particular. But as was noted, it takes a certain kind of person to be a parent -- I don't think I am, though I've been told otherwise. In sum: Dr. C, feel free to talk about yer kids whenever. :-)

But I also know, from my too brief experience of being pregnant, that it's not really something you get a choice in, that it's very powerful and primal and hormonal. You can express that love badly, you can mingle it with resentment and other emotions, but it's something that happens on a neurotransmitter level, not a logical level.

Oh, this is making me very sad now. :-(

I wonder about this often in the case of abusive/neglectufl parents. You can chalk their actions up to their own emotional/mental issues but when that treatment of their children never changes. . .when they never acknowledge it, fix it, own up to it?

I can't say I have any massive love for my parents. My mother, yes some, but largely out of obligation. I'm not sure what I'll feel when she dies, probably some guilt, not sure. Overall I've made peace with keeping her at arm's length and disenganging her from my emotions and life as much as possible. She seems to have no problem with this and has never had much to do with my life anyway. I wish my father was already dead.

I now look back on childhood memories of dinner through a much different viewpoint.