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Summary

Solutions for Personality & Change
Change your Mask for Emotional Freedom © Martyn Carruthers

Online Coaching for Changing Personality

Your personality influences your all of your life - relationships, health, career and meaning of life - more than anything else. Is your personality too aggressive, too passive or too depressed? Are you satisfied with your personality? You can change if you wish.

Are People Really Equal?

A Western concept that people are fundamentally equal seems to follow Western legal philosophy. If people are legally equal, then perhaps they are or should be similar in some fundamental ways.

Although most people have similar needs, they may have different goals, motives, values, obsessions, impulses, urges, likes and dislikes. They may think, conceptualize, perceive, understand and comprehend life differently to you. And yet their behavior, like yours, is mostly rather predictable.

Assessing Human Personality

Your personality reflects both your genes and your experiences. You differed from other infants because of variables that you inherited, and because of your experiences since your conception. Your differences influenced how your parents responded to you. And since then you have integrated many more experiences.

Your personality has been assessed many times, by your family, friends, salespeople, job interviewers, doctors, psychologists and potential partners. While the accuracy of their assessments may be questionable, if you disagree with your assessment, your disagreement may also be assessed. You may be labeled in unflattering ways - and you probably responded to your labels..

Personalities are about individual differences and shared commonalities. Have you considered how neurotic people and healthy people differ - and what they have in common? The commonalities overwhelm the differences. The differences are mostly how they interpret experiences ... how they habitually ascribe meaning to events.

Helping and marketing professionals often describe personality in comparison to imaginary norms. If you assess personality preferences, you may better understand, appreciate and predict people's behavior - depending on the accuracy of your models. And your personality chooses how to use or abuse this knowledge.

A risk in any conversation is the possibility of damaging fragile personality defenses. We strive to avoid this in our coaching by paying attention to nonverbal objections and body language.

Partial Personalities

When teaching, I sometimes comment, rather provocatively, that, "We are all borderline multiple personalities ... well ... at least part of me thinks so!"

Sigmund Freud identified three different parts of the mind, based on our level of awareness: Conscious mind, Preconscious mind and Subconscious mind

• The conscious mind includes current thinking processes and a few objects of attention..
• The preconscious includes things of which we are aware, to which we are not paying attention.
• The subconscious manages a myriad processes and content without conscious interaction.

Freud decided that much behavior is driven by the subconscious mind ... with a consequence that we cannot fully control our behavior, including behaviors which we would sometimes prefer to avoid.

Even if true, this model is insufficiently complex. We find that most people seem to have subdivided their consciousness into more than thirty parts. Perhaps these are what Freud meant by the term complexes - although we find them simple enough - simplexes perhaps? We more often refer to them as fixations or as relationship entanglements.

We perceive parts as immature personalities that were rejected or hidden during some trauma or abuse. Of course, our emotion coaching helps people identify, mature and integrate these lost parts of self.

Depressed & Angry People

Depression may stem from helplessness - feelings that you cannot control the outcome of events. Or from anxiety - feelings that you must control events around you. Or from guilt - feelings that you have hurt other people. Or depression may stem from lack of purpose - feelings of being lost in life.

Depressive personality traits include gloominess, pessimism, introversion, excessive skepticism and self-criticism, feelings of inadequacy and worry. People who often behave in dependent and impulsive ways risk suffering depression. Melancholic people may have identified with dead people.

Aggressive people often seem to be constantly irritated. Everything may seem to annoy them, nothing is right, they are often suspicious and they seem to exaggerate flaws. We often find that chronically angry people habitually assess the world through suspicious beliefs - they may have identified with victims (usually during childhood) and strive to find justice. (See Identification and Identity Loss)

We coach people to change depressive beliefs and angry behavior by helping them change the basis or roots of their personalities - which we perceive as the meanings ascribed to significant emotional events.

Human Identity & Human Spirit

While most psychiatrists focus on behavior and medication, Dr Viktor Frankl, founder of Logotherapy, focused on the human spirit. Dr Frankl spoke of meaning and spirit, and said that these could not be defined or measured. Frankl's theme of increasing sense of life, Logotherapy, is part of our coaching.

Frankl spoke of an existential vacuum. If you seek meaning of life, and you are frustrated, you may feel empty. If you seek to avoid this unpleasant feeling, you may participate in obsessions, compulsions and addictions. Sense of life seems to be linked to integrity and connectedness. In our systemic coaching, we often call this experience integrity or the Soul of Soulwork.

You have learned many habits and repetitive behaviors ... and we can help you change your habits if you wish. We can help you apply your awareness, creativity, integrity and your desire for happiness, to make better choices! You can form new habits, responses and traits. We can help you re-engineer your personality, to find and fulfill your life goals.

Personality Change & Systemic Coaching

Do you avoid or delay seeking help? Do you feel inadequate and emotionally distant? Do you avoid solving relationship conflicts? Do you ignore your problems instead of seeking solutions? You can change.

If you had no past or future - no memories or goals, you could only react. Your behavior would reflect your environment. However you not only remember events and sensations, you remember the meanings that you attributed to those events and sensations. Those meanings may control your life!

If you can change how you cope with experiences, you can change your personality. Your change can be temporary or lasting, depending on the relevance and strength of your experiences and the methods you use to modify your responses. If you want to change your personality - contact us.

Online Coaching for Personality Change

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 2005-2011 All rights reserved.

Plagiarism is theft. Copyright © Martyn Carruthers 1996-2011 All rights reserved. Soulwork Systemic Coaching was primarily developed by Martyn Carruthers
to help people dissolve emotional blocks, improve relationships and achieve goals. These concepts and strategies are for general knowledge only. Consult a physician about medical conditions and before changing medical treatment. Don't steal intellectual property ... ask for permission to post, publish or teach this work.