Personality-Mind-Body Connection

In the literature on Multiple Personality Disorder, before it became DID, there are anecdotes that a switch in personality could result in physiological changes in the body. The body might not need glasses with the identified primary personality, but if a near sighted personality fronted- the eye was changed physically resulting in a need for glasses. One personality might have allergies, and another not, and switching could result in allergic reaction. If an adult personality that required medication switched out with a child personality, the body might find itself in a toxic situation requiring medical attention.

Whether those are anecdotes or hard science, I would like you to hold that in mind as I move you to a provocative, and radical way of perceiving the personality-body connection that could explain the placebo effect, variance in efficacy of drugs, and a wide range mental health issues, from depression to anxiety. I also like you to consider that ‘personality’ may be more fluid than we have ever considered. Case in point, split brain studies seem to suggest that separating the two hemispheres of the brain results in two separate, and often quite unique personalities. One can find anecdotes about these studies in the works of Michael Gazzinaga, such as in his book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the science of the brain.” What’s interesting to note about the emergence of a second personality is that both personalities perceive a life long continuity of life, without the disruption one might imagine having when your brain was just severed in half.

When considering the theory I am going to propose, I use myself as one of the examples. I have experienced chronic depression, dysthymia interrupted by episodic Major Depression. My first experience with a psychiatrist was age 6. I was on and off antidepressants from my teens to my forties. I have been in out of counseling. In 2007, while not in therapy, not taking medications, I experienced a spontaneous and inexplicable shift in my mood’s set point. I went from being mostly below neutral, not quite sad but struggling just to get up and function most days to suddenly, just above neutral. I became aware of having more good days than not, and because I had no explanation, I went to see a counselor. I wanted to know what I was doing ‘wrong’ and how i could maintain it.

We have lots of modalities for coming at depression. There is the pharmaceutical route, obviously. I have tried quite a few things and nothing was ever sufficient. Johann Hari has got my attention with how maybe our entire approach is wrong, and we should be looking more at social dynamics. The research from World Health Organization is undeniable, that places like America are seeing epidemic increase in depression and loneliness, even as we hold our cellphones and are technically more connected than at any time in history.

I am a fan of dreams, and have been practicing lucid dreaming with some modest success, and one of the interesting things I have discovered is that the ‘characters’ I interact with seem to be self aware. Obviously, I can’t prove they’re aware. I can say authors like Robert Wagoner, author of ‘Lucid Dreaming: Gateways to Inner self,’ would concur with that statement. But I can take the concept of proof one step further and say, I can’t prove to you I am aware. In addition to the tabled artifacts above, I want to hold the idea that dream personalities are aware and have concurrent, parallel lives running in the background- the same way someone with DID might experience their extra personalities running along side them.

When looking at consciousness, we agree there seems to be a conscious and unconscious mind. Hypnosis is an interesting tool, when you think about it- because even though you are interacting with the same person- you can quickly peel back the layers and discover that there is more to us than just our core personality. There are things we don’t remember, that are repressed, and sometimes the ‘personality interface’ that you interact with in deep hypnosis will say, “No, we’re not unlocking that at this time.” That’s paraphrasing of course- and lots of ways a person might resist change. And why would a person want to resist change? Change results in fundamental personality shifts, and most of us, me included, are seriously attached to our personalities.

So, here’s the proposal. Assume personality is much more dynamically fluid than you ever imagined. More than that, assume your brain is a personality simulator. It doesn’t just run your core personality, but it runs hundreds, maybe thousands of personalities. Assume everyone you ever met is inside you, in simulation. That would make sense, if you think about it- because without that, we couldn’t predict what our friends and families will do. One of the reasons we like characters in our favorite shows is they’re predictable. They can act out of character, but when they do, we need a context to relate to that or it doesn’t make sense.

For the sake of that assumption, I am now going to suggest there are multiple versions of your personality. One for each emotion you generally experience. I will use me to illustrate. There is a Sad-John, a Happy-John, an Angry-John, ad infinitum. Just as a personality switch in a multiple personality resulted in physiological changes, a change in emotion-John results in the appropriate mannerisms, expression, and chemical signatures of that emotion. Very precisely, I am saying- the chemical response doesn’t come first, but the shift in personality results in that chemical being manifested. Have you ever been so angry you couldn’t think straight, or couldn’t remember something? Maybe you couldn’t access a memory because that personality is locked out from particular memory sets. Memory didn’t go away, the operating personality just couldn’t get it. And maybe this explains the phenomena of some dementia patients regaining full lucidity directly before death.

Considered yourself, from the analogy of Disney’s Winney the Pool as a frame of reference, each of us in a sense are the entire 100 Acre Wood. Poo is the primary interface for that world, not Christopher, but Tiger, Roo, Christopher, Rabbit, and Ior are all ‘100 Acre Wood.’ You are you, but you are definitely not you all the time.

Have you ever found yourself in a state of mind contrary to the group you were with, and no matter what you did, you could not get yourself out of that slump? Well, I suggest, for whatever reason, you couldn’t switch because that personality- the grumpy one, or the ‘I am not having it one,’ was unwilling to step back and let the other ‘fun’ personality in. Or, a greater ‘mind influencing agent’ didn’t want to allow the shift. There are levels here. There is the fronting mood-personality. There is a level of awareness, a conscious agent observing that is aware that there is a disconnect from others. Maybe that awareness is simply observing, maybe it’s wanting the change but there are rules that it can only observe and see how we figure it out. There is definitely a rule set here that would need to be discovered to explain why some of us get stuck, while others experience easier shifts to appropriate moods. This concept works perfectly well within the framework of a System Perspective. We are born into systems, and more often than not, we are given roles to play. Family of Origins tend to get irritated when a person starts to deviate from their script. The goal of the system is to keep everyone in their roles so that the unit functions.

Leaving the family of origin, we go off to school, and to work, and different personalities can manifest in these places. In the old days, we would say we wear different hats for different occasions. The hat is the personality. Our public face is not necessarily are private face. We subtly shift personalities to reflect our environment and the people we are with. Every couple is different. Every group is different. Every individual is different in context to the other or others they are with. Some people are more attuned to these shifts, and will make statements like “I am loosing myself.” Well, in some respects, from this concept of personality-mind-body, that’s true- we change to accommodate the people we are with. Well, many of us. There are some who are so rigid they will fight any change, but often times those folks either end up alone, or they end over running the others in their group who become submissive to that personality. I would argue here that people with greater rigidity of personality are the ones with the greatest level of social difficulties, resulting in labels of personality disorders such as asocial and antisocial personalities. That can be positive or negative, and doesn’t necessarily equal DSM V disorder. It’s just that most people like to accommodate others, and so we modify our typical personality response to others to be agreeable. In a situation with a ‘dominate’ or ‘rigid,’ personality, we will sometimes be more likely to tolerate nonsense to a greater degree to accommodate flow. What that looked like in my family of origin was, if the matriarch was happy, everyone was happy, and so we catered to her. When that became intolerable- I was excommunicated from the family, mostly by choice.

If you consider the phenomenon with riots, where people who would never imagined getting caught up in looting and damaging find themselves suddenly doing that very thing, and on reflecting afterwards not having explanation- I would say, from this perspective, it wasn’t just that they had a decrease in inhibition, but that their normal personality interface was either switched off, or switched out. Consider how alcohol affects different people. There is the happy drunk and the mean drunk. It’s the same chemical, but people respond differently to it? Take that further, how is it some people can be addicted to a substance and can quit cold turkey, with no side effects, and walk away from substance and never use again, while others have severe side effects from quitting and spend a life time of relapsing? Nicotine addiction is supposedly one of the hardest things to quit. Maybe it’s hard because that’s the tag line we’re sold and buy into; it’s a belief, and shared beliefs can be quite powerful. Allen Car’s Book, “the Easy Way to Stop Smoking Without Willpower” gives a lot of evidence to this. But what if it’s even simpler. There is one personality that has a relationship with cigarettes, a personality that is jonesing in the absence of cigarettes, and another that could care less about cigarettes. Maybe even one that detests everything about smoking, from the cost to the smell, to how it affects them socially.

You may find some correlation in terms of personality changing to reflect our relationship to others, but what about ourselves in isolation. Would a multiplicity of personality theory hold in solitude? Well, yes, because we don’t just have relationship with other people, but we have relationships to our-self and our environment. External environment is unavoidable. You can’t be without that context, whether that be nature, house, air, sky, tree, television, bathroom. Every room in our house could solicit its own personality interface. I suspect we are more likely to get stuck in a personality set when we’re isolated than with people. A caveat to that might be personalities that are highly creative, as they might create art or stories that allow for the normal flow of variance in personality that we need to function. Just as every moment of the day is governed by movement of sun across sky, there is probably a subtle, corresponding shift in personality, Sleepy-John, Hungry-John, and everything in-between-John. Also, because we don’t usually think in terms of mood shifts being personality shifts, we don’t access this paradigm and so we don’t easily shift. From a strictly materialistic perspective, if the brain is likened to a computer, then a shift in personality is simply the activation of the next app to meet a physical goal.

I can imagine some people saying, “I don’t even like myself. If I could change my personality, I would so do that.” And I have heard people say that very thing. We can lock in our core personality through extended use, out of favoring it, or even by hating it. “What you resist, persists.” What you focus on becomes more prominent. It is when we shift our attention away from self to focus on others, or a task, that the personality shifts. Behavioral changes results in personality changes. Personality adapts to the task. This theory, though, could also explain a general distrust of pharmaceutical psychotropics. The number one concern expressed about psychotropics is “I am afraid it will change me.” If it’s true that a shift in personality results in a physiological change in the body to reflect that, and we assume that the body has a repertoire of ‘personality’ and corresponding chemical states, adding a foreign chemical could result in a nuanced personality shift that isn’t allowed for or understood by the existing operating system. We are what we eat is a true statement. What we eat influences mental states. It subtly shifts personality. Mood and personality could be synonymous from this way of thinking.

Not all medicines work on all people all the time. Maybe that’s due to variance of physiological makeup. But what if it was also personality? There are some people, no matter what you give them, they have an atypical response to medicine. Why? Chemical response to chemical should ways manifest with the same results, right? I suppose we could say our biomes, the gestalt of all the flora and fauna that we are host to may be having more affect than we have given them credit- and there is mounting evidence that is true. For example, consider the rats that were irradiated to test fecal matter transplants. Fat rats given bacteria from skinny rats became skinny. Skinny rats that got fecal matter from fat rats got fat. This is not limited to rats; this has been shown to happen in humans, too- as fecal transplant is an actual medical procedure we humans use in our arsenal for health. There are examples of people who never had weight problems suddenly having weight problems, and all because the donor happened to have weight problem. (It begs the question, why aren’t we donating our own fecal matter before the procedure?)

When it comes to illnesses, there are lots of anecdotes about inexplicable remissions or flat out cures. There are as many anecdotes that people can make themselves sick as there are that can make themselves healthy. We worry ourselves into ulcers. Being fearful or negative supposedly influences our healing rate and the efficacy of drugs. But what if it were something more profound- like an active personality that manifests a physiological change? There are a list of ‘sick’ personalities, each coming with their own thing. I had chronic asthma as a child. There were real things that I was allergic to. I also had episodes of asthma that I self-induced because I wanted out of something. I have even experienced a complete recovery from an episode by a shift in thoughts. That didn’t happen often, but I experienced it. Looking back, what if I had just had that one, subtle nuance shift into John-breathing okay personality? If personality change can result in physiological changes, then it isn’t just our ‘beliefs’ that affect our bodies- but more profoundly, it’s the personality. Having asthma and being sick got me out of PE classes and a host of other things I didn’t want to do, and so I learned really quickly to put that hat on; everyone saluted that hat. There is a death personality, too. Some people who are told they have six months outlive their doctors. Some people told that same thing die two months later. If it is true that we have more influence over our physical health than we currently utilize, which actually explains why placebos work, then we could say with some authority- all deaths are suicide. We do all die, and we have personality that guides us there. The Grim Reaper may not just be an archetype. He may be us.

I imagine this might be a testable theory. I am not sure how that test will look like yet, but when I consider one thing that most scientist agree on, especially when it comes to treating addictions and mental illness, focusing on connecting people to quality relationships results in the remission of illness and addictions more often than any other treatment modality. We also know, from analogy, if you’re on an airplane and it depressurizes, you put your mask on first. Once your air is secure, then you can help others. If you try to put other’s mask on first, you risk being rendered unconscious and not helping other. This analogy is fairly apt when you consider your mask is your personality. Your personality interface may be the thing we need to focus on in a therapeutic way. Not just one change for all time, but many changes so that we’re not making great leaps from ‘depressed-John’ to ‘happy-John.’ Sometimes that’s too great a leap. We need transitional personalities to move through to hit the target personality. When I used music therapy, I would begin with a song that had a tempo that matched my mood. I would then find a song that had a slightly elevated tempo compared to the last song. In this manner, I progressed up to a tempo that reflected a better energy state. I never bounced from slow to fast tempos. That was irritating. There are a plethora of ‘state-John’ I must utilize for optimum performance. Our mistake has been thinking there is one personality and it’s static, just as it was a mistake think the brain was static and couldn’t change. Utilizing this modality as a vehicle towards health, one doesn’t try to ‘fix’ the core personality, but rather one would cultivate additional, nuanced personalities so that there were more options to wear.

If you ever acted out of character, you may get what I am communicating here. If you ever blacked out and didn’t remember anything, well- you were still interacting with the world, it was just through a different personality interface. Fight or flight frequently results in behaviors that we don’t remember, or say “I don’t know why I did that.” Some of us even say, “I saw myself acting, but it wasn’t me.” I have had more than one client say something along the lines of “I want the happy me back.” I wish now I had a precise number to how many times I have heard variances of that statement- because maybe they weren’t speaking metaphorically. Maybe there really was a subtle shift of personality, and that one got locked in.

And this really isn’t so strange when you consider the metaphor of light. White light produces the rainbow spectrum. It’s still light. In a white light, all the spectrum are still present, they’re just not experienced because all together white is dominant. Maybe personality should be considered a form of light. The personality-mind-body is the prism that reflects the light. Or the other way around, the light shapes the personality-mind-body.

If nothing else, this theory makes for an interesting thought experiment. How many you’s can you identify that is different from the identity which gets expressed with different combinations of people? If you got two friends together that have never met, there will be congruence for sure, but there will also be some differences as well. Maybe we should explore those differences more than our consistent traits. That may be the pathway to finding our core self, and allowing it to express itself more often than not. And should you find an unpleasant self in the front, maybe that personality is there because it needs the most love- the most compassion- at the time that it’s presenting. We heal ourselves first, by showing compassion. All personalities in us want to be safe to emote and to think and contribute; this is just being human. This is why person centered therapy works- when a person feels validated, there is a shift and people get traction towards change. Narrative therapy works, too, and maybe because characters change- they grow, moving from troubled personality to personality that has overcome. We don’t just jump there. As Glenda said, “You wouldn’t have believed me if I told you that you always had the power to go home.” We are all flawed and perfect, because that which contains us contains all of us, whether that is potential or activated sets that exist. If you can imagine it, it exists. When you spend time with yourself in a meaningful, validating way- that fronting personality you find annoying or limiting heals- and then the next one comes forwards. There is a core you, like a guardian angel, that knows much more- but that’s not the personality fronting. If you’re reading this, you’re literally the ‘chosen one.’ For now, anyway. This too will change.