Personality

How the human personality develops

When we are born we are completely vulnerable, and we are dependent on our parents or caregivers for our survival. We could describe ourselves at this point as a Vulnerable Child.

To get our needs met and to protect our vulnerability, ie to help us survive, we instinctively behave in various ways, such as crying, smiling and gurgling. For instance, if you are hungry, you cry. When you cry, you discover that your parents pick you up and feed you. Sometimes, however, they might not come immediately so you cry louder. Then you discover that if you yell, they come more quickly, and so on. Then when you begin to smile at your parents, you discover that they are loving towards you and make you feel protected.

At first this is all spontaneous behaviour, driven by your instincts to survive, but you soon learn to smile to get a particular reaction from your parents. You start to look out for their reactions to your behaviour and you work out what to do. You create rules of behaviour for yourself that are in your best interests, at the time. This is the first stage of the development of your personality. (When you are born you also have a 'psychic fingerprint' which is your own, unique identifying way of being, which stays with you for life.)

We are all unique, and our parents are all unique, so the rules that you created in your unique situation are unique to you. However, the manner in which we all create these rules is the same.

The part of you that created your rules and decided how you would behave is a part of your personality that can be named the Rule Maker or Protector/Controller. The Rule Maker/Protector is different to the Vulnerable Child part of your personality - it has an entirely different nature. It is also entirely different to the instinctual part of your personality.

The Rule Maker observes your family and culture and creates rules for you to follow so that your vulnerability will be protected. It uses other aspects of your personality that develop in conjunction with it to play the roles it needs you to play. This protective part, together with the parts which evolve with it, become your primary self.

For example, if your Rule Maker decided that you should smile when your parents wanted you to, because this made them happy and therefore loving toward you, and if it decided that you will walk when they asked you to, and to eat your meals when they wanted you to, you would probably develop a Pleasing part of your personality.

Your Rule Maker worked out that if you pleased your parents and smiled, you would be loved and accepted and your vulnerability would be protected. The Pleaser then came into play whenever your parents wanted you to smile.

Remember, the focus for your developing personality at this stage is on your survival, which can involve pleasing your parents, making demands from them, being silent or whatever was needed in your circumstances. This works well during childhood - in fact is is essential. However, when you become an adult, your personality keeps doing the same thing - it controls your behaviour as it did when you were a child.

You may already be aware that at times your reactions to people are automatic, that you would sometimes like to behave differently, but feel you have no control over your behaviour. Perhaps you are always doing what others want you to do. If this is the case, then it is probably that in order for you to get what you needed when you were a child, it was necessary for you to develop that part of your personality which made you do what others wanted you to do. And this part of your personality is still acting in those same ways. It is not aware that the behaviour may not be good for you now, but it makes you act that way because deep down it believes this is necessary.

In childhood, your inner Rule Maker also decided that some behaviours were not to your advantage. For many of us these would include being aggressive and selfish. In some family situations, however, the Rule Maker might decide that being aggressive is necessary for a child's survival.

So the Rule Maker sorts behaviours into yes behaviours and no behaviours. This process continues throughout childhood and into adulthood and, in fact, for the rest of your life. And it largely determines what kind of personality characteristics you will have.

Following is an example of how we use this process when we begin to relate with others in childhood:

Mary is a two-year-old and she has a younger brother. One day they are playing together and Mary’s brother takes one of her toys and starts to play with it. Mary grabs the toy back and her brother starts to cry. Her mother tells Mary that she shouldn’t do that, but must share her toys with her brother. Mary says she does not want to share, that they are her toys. Her mother encourages her to develop her sharing, giving self and discourages her from developing her selfish self. The next few times her brother takes her toys, Mary is tempted to take them back but notices the expectant, disapproving look of her mother, and decides instead to share. She notices that when she does this, her mother approves of her. One day when her mother isn’t there, and her brother takes a toy, Mary grabs it back and hits him over the head with it. He starts to cry, her mother rushes in and is angry at Mary and punishes her. Mary’s inner Rule Maker takes note of the mother’s reaction, and decides that the sharing behaviour is better, if she is to be loved by her mother. As these kinds of experiences happen to Mary over and over again, she begins to develop a nice, giving personality, which, she has learned, enables her to get along with others and to get her survival needs met.

This process happens with the development of all of our personality’s aspects: We have experiences and our Rule Maker takes note of the rules we need to follow in order to survive (whatever survival means for us). Other aspects of our personality develop that can follow those rules. These aspects together form our primary self system.

Your primary self system is what you identify with, the ‘me’. You can separate out from this system the various components, your primary selves. For example, in Mary some of her primary selves are her Rule Maker, her Pleaser, and her Vulnerable Child which is the first part that exists for all of us because it is how we are born.

The behaviours that we discard become our disowned self system, which can be separated out into our disowned selves. For Mary these would include her Aggressive Self and her Selfish Self - because her Rule Maker decided that she should not behave in those ways.

What is interesting is that by the time we reach about three years of age, we have all behaved in almost every way possible and we have experienced almost every emotion known to humans. However, we all decide to use only some of our characteristics, and we label some as 'good' and some 'bad'.

You may be wondering why we have to divide our personality up into these selves, isn’t it just ‘we’ who decide what to do and then do it.

We can think of it that way, but the remarkable thing is that through Voice Dialogue, we can talk directly with the various aspects of ourselves. And we discover that all these aspects are complete personalities in themselves, with their own opinions, feelings, and needs.

To help you grasp this, think of how you function at work: you’re probably organised, rational, responsible. Yet when you leave work, and say, go to a party, you may be more lively, carefree and irresponsible. It may even be that you are always rational and responsible and that because you’re always like this, and don’t have access to your Party-going Self, you don’t enjoy parties.

A useful analogy is 'stew'. Stew has a whole lot of different ingredients that when cooked together are one homogenous substance we call stew. But if you took out the ingredients in stew, you would see that they all have their own characteristics. In this same way that you can separate out your selves from the one homogenous structure that is you and expand your awareness of what is actually going on inside of you.

The various selves you have access to will affect the nature of your relationships, your ability to express yourself, your spiritual experiences, and generally, how you experience life.