Can therapy help me change my personality?
I recently read Atlantic staff writer Olga Khazan’s Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change, a memoir about her year-long effort to change her personality, calling on research on personality psychology. I found the book funny and inspiring. When I was in college I took a course on personality psychology with Dr. Richard Koestner that left a lasting impression that personality is relatively fixed and unchanging, but in fact it’s complicated. My takeaway from the book is that, with hard work, things we don’t love about ourselves can be adjusted, if not totally eliminated. Olga joined an improv comedy troupe, a sailing group, took private lessons and attended a conference on conversational skills, meditated and took Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, took an anger management class, and more. She became less aggressive to her now-husband, more positive and even-keeled, more social, and more grateful.
A key takeaway from the book is that therapy can be an important space to brainstorm how to change and develop the motivation and courage to do so, and that often we have to put in energy in other ways, too, if we want to see results. I loved the way that Olga described her ambivalence about changing her personality, something that I see in many patients I work with. Sometimes the issues people present to therapy with are connected to their personality or identity, for example depression and loneliness are more common in introverts. It can be helpful to embrace an identity that others dismiss or even denigrate, and certainly our culture prefers extroversion. But sometimes therapy needs to involve personality change. Couples therapist and author Terry Real says this is one of the explicit goals of his therapy, Relational Life Therapy. Marsha Linehan describes this stumbling block in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder, helpfully validating the challenge of giving up an identity that’s been central to your self-definition in pursuit of greater health and peace.
When you accept that you need to change, it’s time to create a plan and work methodically to implement it. If you want to be more patient with your children, experiment with techniques that may help, like exercise and meditation. When you find something that works, make it habitual. Therapy can be a valuable space for devising such a plan and holding yourself accountable to it.