Just exactly how does a personality form?

Sidony inspired this topic for me. What are your thoughts?

<ul type="square">[*]What exactly is the definition of a personality?[*]What contributes to a person's personality? [*]Just exactly how does a personality form? Would experience change what personality you ended up with? [*]I wonder if there is such a thing as a suppressed personality? I wonder if a personality gets suppressed or doesn't fully develop when you aren't given a chance to express yourself? [*]What kind of personality you would have if you chose it for yourself? Do you think you could modify or change your personality if you wanted to?[/list]

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

Good questions, Rose. I’m reading a book on emotional intelligence, which is really about personality. I’ll give my personal opinion on these questions.
<ul type="square"> [*]What exactly is the definition of a personality?
A simplistic definition might be: it’s your intellectual, emotional, and communicative traits, as well as how you see yourself and how you relate to others.
[*]What contributes to a person's personality?
I think you’re born with a certain amount of our personality. A group of children raised in the same environment often have dramatically different personalities. The environment does affect your personality to some extent, though, as well as the people you spend a lot of time with. Your appearance can also affect your personality. A physically strong person might be more aggressive than a weak person.
[*]Just exactly how does a personality form? Would experience change what personality you ended up with?
Aside from genetics, self-esteem plays a large part in how your personality exhibits itself, although unhealthy self-esteem might actually suppress or inhibit your true personality.
[*]I wonder if there is such a thing as a suppressed personality? I wonder if a personality gets suppressed or doesn't fully develop when you aren't given a chance to express yourself?
That’s funny, I just answered that. Anxiety can also suppress a person’s personality.
[*]What kind of personality you would have if you chose it for yourself? Do you think you could modify or change your personality if you wanted to?
To a great extent, your personality is ingrained. It might be suppressed, but it’s still there. If you are by nature a quiet individual and you try to be outgoing, you’d probably come across as being a phony.[/list]

Maybe personality is who you are when you take everything else away: the job, the possestions, the fears and worries, the body. Maybe it is the essence or that part of you which is eternal and everlasting. Perhaps it evolves with you as you grow.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>
WinterRose said:
Maybe personality is who you are when you take everything else away: the job, the possestions, the fears and worries, the body. Maybe it is the essence or that part of you which is eternal and everlasting. Perhaps it evolves with you as you grow.

</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">
I think how you handle things like your job, fears, and worries are part of your personality. Some people are very materialistic and that is part of their personality.

Well maybe. I think experiences are an opportunity to reveal your personality. How you handle things is an expression of your personality - not really part of it, is it?

I think it's a part of your personality. But on the other hand, your true personality might not come out if you're under so much stress that it inhibits your personality.

I"ve heard that when under stress we tend to fall back on our less dominant traits - the ones that are least like us and that we are least comfortable with. This information was particularly referring to Meier's-Briggs traits.

I think we're a combination of nature and nurture and each person has a different "percentage" of each for each trait they're born with, just like for different colored eyes, etc. But, unlike eye or hair color, personality traits don't necessarily automatically get expressed, can be affected by the person's environment/nurturing. But shy people often have shy parents, for example, so it would be unusual for the person to become more outgoing unless they had a grandparent or someone else who took care of them more often than the parent did who was outgoing. But there's loads of traits we don't know much about or think of; sense of direction (do you get lost easily, probably one of your parents does too) and little stuff that can influence other stuff depending on how things are combined. That's what makes us very unique just like we may look like a parent or grandparent or other relative but we're not at all exactly like them or our siblings. That relates to the "soft" traits too, not just the obvious physical ones. If one's father is good at math and good at music but outgoing and you are good at math and good at music and shy you may end up an actuarial instead of an orchestra conductor. So, I think we all get born with our various physical and all other traits but what happens with the non-physical ones depends on environment and nurturing and how they're combined with all the other traits we have.

i agree with lots of what has been said for what its worth i think that it comes from a melting pot of ideas ,even if you say aha that is my label what matters is how you deal with life .i can at the moment diagnose myself with a depressive/dependent personality but i feel sure this will alter slightly .i find at 51 my ideas are still evolving i feel it is about growing awareness of my strengths and weakness and living with limitations,there is no use myself becoming a salesperson as i don't have the strength to do it,though could i do it if i had to do it? no probably not ,i am coming round to seeing that we all have a part to play in the drama of life ,at times it feels like a joke a friend of mine a psychiatrist said once to me that personality disorders are just labels made generally by men in suits they can help in treatment strategies but dont forget the human being.i think our personality is made up of both nature nurture with social economic factors i call it my melting pot theory,as if i just believed in one thoery i'd have to do a lot of defending of it!!!