Excellent questions, but some of them are hard.

I think that personality refers to the lifelong patterns and ways of being in the world that are particular to an individual and make a person unique.

Any mother will tell you that each baby is different from other babies, even siblings, from birth or even earlier. In fact. mothers have a sense of who the baby is as a person even before the baby is born. So much of what is personality is built in or comes from sometime before birth. Personality is also shaped by life experience, particularly during early childhood. Experience can change personality, but does it change who a person really is, or does it provide an opportunity to bring out qualities that are already there?

Yes, I think that personality can be suppressed. Behaviorists have asserted that they could take any infant and make of him anything that they choose. Maybe they could, but would anyone really think that it would be okay to do that? Carl Rogers based his theory on a belief that we are all born with the ability to know what is best for ourselves, and that mental health problems stem from conditional acceptance, which forces a child to disregard his own valuing process in order to conform to external expectations. Rogers thought that if we could learn to trust our own selves and our own valuing processes, we would recover. I think that there is some truth to that, but also that it isn't that easy.

I always wanted to have a stronger personality, and to be more confident to meet whatever life threw at me without hesitation. I think that we can change our personalities, or at least the outward expression of them, but it isn't easy, and can seem fake sometimes, especially trying to change too much too fast.

Rap