THE PERSONALITY FACTOR: CAN WE CHANGE IT?
By this point, you may be saying, justifiably, "That's all fine and good, and it makes sense. Now we understand in more elaborate detail how we are as a couple—the good, the bad, and the ugly of it all. But so what? Being like this just comes naturally; it's just the way we are and always have been. Our personalities make us react in these ways, and our personalities aren't going to change just because we're now coping with illness."
Without doubt, there is a definite limit to how much we can change our personality-based coping patterns. We do seem to battle the same old feelings of low self-esteem and struggle with variations of the same old anxieties and fears from the time of grade school throughout adulthood. It is almost as though there is a part of us that simply will not be soothed by new information—a negative "inner sense of self" that is a constant source of painful and anxiety-generating reactions that continue to haunt us. Consider only a few examples of how some people continue to be plagued by earlier life experiences: Slender adults who were overweight as children still feel like fat people in disguise. Successful and powerful adults sometimes still feel driven by the quest to overcome the powerlessness they remember from the pain of always being chosen last when teams were picked on the playground. Hard-driving, competitive individuals who intimidate others often still feel the painful shyness that filled earlier stages of their lives.
That we all have such private internal struggles does not mean we are all frauds. Neither does the awareness of these painful emotions doom us to misery. These struggles mean simply that we all used to be vulnerable children, less capable of controlling our lives than we are now, and that a part of our brain will remember forever the vulnerability and fears that came with being young and small. These fears are stored in the old brain and very much shape both our personality and our reactions to one another.
The old brain consists of the most primitive portions of the brain, including the brain stem and the limbic system. Here, our minds are filled with hazy awarenesse of the external world, which stir automatic, self-protecting physical and psychological reactions. In contrast, the new brain—the cerebral cortex—is much more highly developed. Our new brain allows us to consciously choose reactions, to think and make decisions based on new information, and to plan and organize.
The reason our internal emotional struggles never seem to go away is that our old brain has no sense of time. Past, present, and future all blend together in this part of our mind. This is why we sometimes react to here-and-now stressors (for example, marital conflicts and heart illness) in ways that are alarmingly out of proportion to the events at hand. This is also why the psychological and behavioral ways we developed long ago to deal with life become rules for coping (deeply ingrained coping habits) that forever shape our reactions.
Because the primitive coping strategies that are stored in the old brain are the most familiar and automatic psychological reactions, they drive our behavior during stressful times. The higher the stress, the more driven we are to act in these old ways. Doing so feels necessary for emotional survival and just seems natural. Even if we know in our new brain that a different way of coping would work better, we automatically reach for the old, familiar reactions to soothe ourselves.
After all, it is unlikely that we would further stress ourselves during scary, stressful times by trying new, unfamiliar ways of reacting.
The unfortunate truth is, however, that these most familiar ways of coping often backfire in our contemporary efforts to deal with life. These old-time coping patterns often fuel unhealthy ways of thinking and behaving—ways of coping that can work against both individual and marital health. As will be seen shortly, this is particularly true of coping with the stress of illness.
Nevertheless, personality change is not impossible. Even in reacting to something as stress generating as heart illness, we can learn new ways of coping. To do so, we must first accurately pinpoint our personality-based rules for coping. Then we must honestly determine if these overlearned ways of coping are actually interfering with our ability to make healthy choices in reacting to life stressors.
So what are your old-brain, personality-based rules for coping? What might be the negative health consequences of blindly following these rules to cope with heart illness? How do your personality patterns differ from your partner's? What effect does your personality have on your marital intimacy? And what can you do to update your old-brain rules and control your coping reactions?
There are many possible ways of discussing personality types and their behavioral consequences. However, this book is by no means intended to be about personality theory, so I have simplified the topic in the next section.
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