The Intransigence of Personality Alteration.
Human personality has integrity just as a fish has a naturally imposed integrity to behave like a fish after its own fashion even in environments (e.g., on land) where doing so invites certain death.
Warning: This article is mostly speculative, and the writing style, for lack of skills to make it any better and shorter, is overly dense and winding. Somehow in this age of bottomless sensory overload and sweet attention stimulants, I feel I have no right to put out something so egregiously and boringly long on such a platform as this. Hence the compulsion to apologize in advance.
Disclaimer 1: it is never the point of this article to argue that behavioral change is not possible or that past experiences and the external environment are inconsequential, but that behavioral change that resonates deeply into layers of personality is always either difficult or impossible. My mission is, therefore, very simple - though only cursorily so - and attainable (if at all) only via a highly tortuous pathway littered with dangerous theoretical landmines that must be delicately navigated. And should you, after reading this (if at all), still get the impression that I’m still somehow in a subtle way making a case for what I disavowed in this disclaimer, then you’re free to conclude that I’m a terrible thinker, and even more, a terrible writer, because such was never my intentions.
Disclaimer 2: As much as I would have loved it to be, this is not an academic essay (in the sense of conforming to all the rules and standards of academic writings). Consider the style an imperfect blend of critical rationality and empirical polemics.
“So much time has been wasted. So much needless frustration has been endured. So much of therapy, so much of child rearing, so much of self-improving, and even some of the great social movements in our century have come to nothing because they tried to change the unchangeable.” Martin Seligman
PART 1
A Case Study of Sort:
There is a well-known and influential Substack writer and a twice-published author whose name must not be revealed. She is a highly prolific and gifted polemicist. Her writings cut across many topical domains; politics, economics, technology, foreign policy, history, science, education, art, entertainment, and anything that's culturally relevant or trending at the highest elite level. She has also written extensively and continues to write about mental illness and the mental health industry as a whole. (Still in the spirit of keeping her identity protected, I won't be able to link to or engraft any quote from her writings relevant to this essay.) Her writings around the topic of mental illness are borne mostly from her own personal experience and she has and continues to detail her tragic struggle with her diagnosed mental illness. She is one of those rare few who, without romanticizing their debilitating condition, embrace it fully.
She has written severally about being on medication and utilizing therapy. But in spite of her stoic embrace of her illness (which has cost her dearly in both her public and private dealings), she remains trenchantly insufferable towards those who would romanticize mental illness’s impact on the individual or trivialize how difficult it is to successfully manage.
This writer of whom I write is extremely high on all the individual traits that are believed to contribute to positive prognosis following a diagnosis of mental illness: self-awareness, metacognition, self-criticism, self-agency, self-efficacy, etc. But she also lacks some such as stable social capital, sufficient impulse control, and interpersonal dexterity. And there's no doubt that those positive personal resources have tremendously helped her in coping with her illness. But when all is said and done, even if we could separate the woman from her mental illness (and this is not possible) we'd still be left with the woman's personality, that is, her organismic functional framework minus the disordered/diseased aspect. And I have sympathetically observed that this writer mightily wrestles with some of her personality givens: she is abrasive, irritable, contemptuous, dismissive, rash, forceful (these are qualities she herself has repeatedly and lamentfully talked about). But her real tragedy lies in the fact that she's also incredibly thoughtful, self-aware, and conscientious. Hence, beneath her extremely impressive and intimidating self-projections sits an unyielding feeling of inadequacy and social inferiority. Her mental illness, in a sense, is all these conflicting personality traits writ large. Thus, even without the albatross of a mental illness or its diagnosis, hers would still have been a problematic and tortured existence. Personality disorders exist as a diagnosable category for a reason, and their existence are not at all unjustifiable. To make an extreme and controversial statement: I would even go as far as hazarding the claim that all mental disorders are personality disorders. However, that is not the focus of the present exploration.
The summary of this case study is this: if anyone is capable of, willing to, knowledgeable about, and whose interest would be well served by modifying the distressing and maladaptive aspects of their personality, it is this writer. Yet, this hasn't happened and will never happen even though she is, as of this moment, still making a fine Sisyphean job of coping with her lot. I need not make clear that coping with something is not the same as changing the thing. I’ll be making a case for the impossibility of the latter under voluntary circumstances.
PART 2
Of Behaviors, Values, and Change
Change - sustained self-induced seemingly personality-altering change, as opposed to mere behavioral substitution or momentary situational adjustment - is (and ought to be) nearly impossible for reasons I shall attempt to speculate on in this essay. There is one special exception of sort to this claim which I shall tackle towards the end. Also ruled out are any involuntary alteration to personality due to mental illness, brain trauma, developmental trauma, grief, chronic use of psychoactive substances, nervous or spiritual experiences, etc. In any case, most of the personality changes that result from such involuntary mechanisms is likely to be net negative than net positive. In fact, most of what we regard as desirable, positive, and/or adaptive behavioral adjustment often requires the input of the voluntary and agentic parts of the self, hence its greater difficulty compared to negative changes. For one's behavior or personality to depreciate in adaptive value, all one has to do is NOTHING.
Depreciation, deterioration, degeneration, dissolution, disintegration, and gradual descent into chaos and death is the natural rule in every living system. And every positive survival effort has this negative force of nature to contend with. Personal voluntary effort, no matter how prodigious, ultimately stands little chance against an active negative/unwanted trend (e.g. cancer, genetic anomaly, addiction, aging, unutterable urges) except with the aid of something that transcends the agentic self, usually technological (medicine, surgery) or supernatural (miracles for those who believe in them) in nature.
Indeed, I believe strongly that it is the failure to adequately recognize and acknowledge this fact - that self-directed positive alteration to elemental components of personality is difficult-to-impossible - that is responsible for the most part of what is harmful about psychotherapy or painful about any constructive attempt to help another human being change. The same principle applies to human nature when we move the goal further up to the level of cultural engineering. Martin Seligman’s lamenting quote at the beginning of this essay is resonant precisely for this reason. When the idea of behavioral plasticity is taken for granted, abuse is always inevitable. This assertion is backed by numerous reports of people who came out of a behavioral intervention, that was supposed to help them, feeling worse and even more traumatized. Even gold standard behavior therapies like Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) have been reported and sometimes flagged as capable of causing harm to the specific population they were designed to help (Autism and ADHD) but even potentially traumatizing. And of course, the horrors and foolishness of the Conversion Therapy years for homosexuals is still very fresh (even though the equally potentially harmful reverse is now happening today).
Nonetheless, the mindset and the assumptions that gave birth to and drove the (scientific) belief in the efficacy of misguided programs like conversion therapy, psychological debriefing, and scared straight are still very much alive today. Sometimes, the assumptions underlying an intervention are the problem, but at other times, the problem is associated with other factors outside the intervention itself, such as who, how, where, and when it is being administered. No matter how despicable and harmful a program of intervention is, there would always be those few who would swear that it helped them just as there were those who would swear that conversion therapy worked or that positive thinking literally changed the course of their life.
A Dangerous Assumption
What is this often deep-seated but dangerous assumption surreptitiously dictating theory, practice, and policy in the behavior change industry? That behavior is infinitely malleable. Of course, most people in the business of helping others change would deny subscribing to such extreme belief, but they act and talk anyway as though they do (and this, I submit, may be, in itself, and under certain considerations, understandable). This irresponsible and infantile assumption is implicit in our theories, in the change techniques we espouse the most (the evidence-based magic formulas), and in many costly but ill-conceived social intervention policies. However, the less problematic and moderate assumption that I would like to make a case for (while simultaneously making a case against the extreme version) is that: behavior, most of the time and in most cases, is only minimally malleable. I hear your immediate protest and I'll address some of them in due course.
A Righteous Stigma
Every time, everywhere, a lot of people are stigmatized and subjected to moral inquisition for their inability to successfully orchestrate a behavioral/attitudinal change demanded or deemed necessary by others or themselves. If the change is demanded or required by others, rejection, abuse, ostracism, and stigma are the likely consequences of failure. If the change is self-demanded, depression and self-loathing are the consequences of failure. It could be a change in eating habits, or with regards to some addiction, or about how the self is often evaluated relative to others, or of an interpersonal style considered obnoxious, or away from a generally passive lifestyle to a more active one. Whatever the specific nature of what we desire (or is desired of us) to change, the bulk of the professional and lay class of change dealers starts with the assumption that it is possible to easy. I say, rather, they ought to start with the assumption that it is difficult to impossible.
The former starting point, which assumes that any change is possible, emboldens the dispenser or conductor of this change procedure with a sense of smug superiority while initially injecting the subject with an attitude of trusting dependence and a sense of unbounded hope and belief in their own (or the helper’s) capacity to deliver the goods - this is the ideological nucleus of the phenomenon of transactional exploitation. However, this starting point also necessarily set the stage for disappointment and an eventual worsening of hope and belief in the event of failure. And even in the event of success, it only pushes the subject into the very pernicious fallacy that “because I was able to do it, then anyone can also do it”. (Of course, I need mention that the opposite of this fallacy is equally pernicious: the fact that you are unable to do it does not mean another person cannot do it.) On the other hand, the latter starting point, which presumes the difficulty or impossibility of change, humbles and fills the dispenser or advocate of behavioral change with a sense of modesty while initially filling the subject with a sense of dread and responsibility; but it eventually weeds out from the outset those who think they can catwalk their way out of their problematic functional pattern while creating a mindset that is more resilient or better inoculated against disappointment. And in the event of failure, as it frequently happens, the former mindset progressively kills the motivation for future reengagement while the latter remains largely unchanged since its starting point was ‘change is difficult to impossible’ anyway.
Here's what two researchers I'd be quoting copiously later in this piece have to say on the matter:
Understanding the true nature and limits of brain plasticity is crucial, both for setting realistic expectations for patients and for guiding clinical practitioners in their rehabilitative approaches. The brain’s ability to adapt, while amazing, is bound by inherent constraints. Recognizing this helps us appreciate the hard work behind every story of recovery and adapt our strategies accordingly. Far from being a realm of magical transformations, the path to neuroplasticity is one of dedication, resilience and gradual progress.
Markin and Krakauer - The Brain Isn't as Adaptable as Some Neuroscientists Claim (Scientific America, 2023).
Of course, I’m very much aware that this more pessimistic (though equally more realistic and scientifically accurate) outlook could also engender a passive attitude or a belief in lack of subjective agency thereby reinforcing any preexisting sense of helplessness. But as long as this belief - that change is difficult-to-impossible - is not indiscriminately held, in other words, provided it is not pervasive, it cannot be the cause (but more likely itself the outcome) of a preexisting passive attitude or deficit in self-agency. For indeed, some things can be relatively easily adjusted about our behavior, only that they are rarely those that are fundamental enough as to leave any lasting and noticeable imprint on our overall personality.
Sorry, Another Disclaimer Of Sort
As already stated, some changes, given enough and consistent self-application, are indeed relatively very easy to implement, e.g. your meal time (but not your dietary preferences or meal quantity); your friends or social circle (but not your lover or spouse); your leisure activity (but not your occupation, vocation, or interest), your church/mosque/denomination (but not your faith or belief system); where you live (but not how you live or who you’re comfortable living with); what you say or profess (but not what you think or do); what you want (but not what you need), etc. My argument in this essay is not applicable to these relatively easy self-adjustments most of which are never at the risk of touching, let alone altering, the core of who we are. It is those changes of the type included in parentheses that are my focus here: they are deep, they are costly, and they are notoriously susceptible to the statistical principle of regression to the mean if ever managed. It is, therefore, not a coincidence that relapse is the rule rather than the exception in addiction management (same for every other stable personality trait). And in cases where addiction treatment does succeed and keeps succeeding, it often comes about not by the force of personal will but through the channeling of a force higher than and superseding the rational self.
So As I Was Saying…
Martin Seligman, in his highly clinically useful guide about ‘What You Can Change And What You Can’t: The Complete Guide To Successful Self-Improvement’ (2006), provided an interesting hierarchy of behaviors according to the relative ease and frequency with which they respond to therapeutic intervention. To give you an idea of his list, here is a snapshot of it:
With some carefully issued caveats here and there, I find not much to disagree with in Seligman’s list and I’m sure he left out many more candidates under both categories. It is remarkable that it is ever contentious at all to suggest that some things are resistant to voluntary change when evidence confirming this abounds in and around us. Even homosexuals and other queer categories, not excluding their sympathizers, who were for long (and still are) victims of this false claim are now equally disposed to assert that gender and sexual identity is boundlessly fluid (this idea undermines their very own identity as fluidity must necessarily suggest changeability). It is, therefore, poignantly fitting that Seligman’s first quotation in the said book was The Serenity Prayer. Apparently, addicts are not the only people who need the wisdom and guidance of this simple yet hard to internalize prayer.
What Has Belief Got To Do With It?
Every behavior generates an intricate set of beliefs/attitudes that subsequently reinforces and sustains it. This statement is obviously in clear opposition to popular wisdom in which beliefs are usually posited to generate and then sustain behavior. Here is how James Clear, the bestselling author of Atomic Habits, frames the popular take: “Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs” (p. 33). This sounds very meaningful and impressive, but it is a load of crap, one very difficult to empirically disprove but easy to reveal as silly and superficial. According to that particular view represented by Clear, self-help-preneurs, life coaches and even many mental health professionals, you cannot change your behavior without first changing your beliefs about them. This is a causal order thinking error. To use a crude illustration: a child once saw something that looked like a ghost. She developed a chronic phobia for any ghost-related stimuli. Her psychotherapist then posited that her phobic reactions to ghost-related stimuli were a result of her illusory belief in ghosts. Whereas the more accurate formulation would have been that her illusory belief was a product of an actual experience of seeing “something that looked like a ghost”. There was no belief at all until that first experience (though in many cases the belief-generating experience isn't always traceable). We could take the causal question deeper by asking “why did her brain associate that first experience with ghost”? Obviously, she must have already been familiar with the fear-loaded category ‘ghost’. However, this still wouldn’t explain why she associated that first experience with ghost because we know that majority of children who have seen dead bodies or heard about ghost don’t end up developing such phobia.
This is clearly not a neat or straightforward analogy of the often complex causal relation between behavior and belief or between belief and behavior. However, let’s imagine someone who has a borderline IQ and has been trying for 3 years to get into law school: is the person’s inability to gain admission first a behavior problem or a belief problem? Imagine another case of an individual, say a clergy man, who strongly believes and preaches that cheating on your spouse is wrong but is a serial cheater anyway: is this first a behavioral problem or a belief problem? These two examples, which are by no means uncommon, show very plainly why it is simplistic and fundamentally wrong to assert that belief always precedes and underlies a particular behavior. If it were so, simply getting people to change their beliefs should do the magic of self-transformation and we wouldn’t even have the concept of cognitive dissonance - people catching themselves doing the opposite of what they profess/belief or professing the opposite of what they do covertly.
CBT Nearly Got It Right
This awareness was definitely recognized in the formulation of the popular change technique known as Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). In CBT, three domains of personality or individual functioning are posited to be responsible for any given reaction to any given situation, namely, the thinking, the feeling, and the action domains. And Aaron Beck and other contributors to the development of CBT were smart enough to know that any pattern of behavior can be instantiated in any of those domains and that they have a multidirectional relationship with one another rather than a linear one. That is, thinking (or beliefs/assumptions) can influence feelings and behavior, and ditto for the other two domains, such that the change process can be potentiated in any one of them.
However, CBT also goes further in its propositions about the origins of unhealthy thinking style or beliefs: it posits that these often arise in childhood or past experiences (the Freudian ghost of ages past!). Again, this is another claim that cannot exactly be empirically disconfirmed, but it can be shown to be logically loose. Of course, beliefs can only come from the past. Where else would they come from? The future? All beliefs are formed in the course of a developmental life project, whether positive or negative beliefs. However, there are more queries about the nature of beliefs that are more germane than the question of their temporal origin.
Let's Question Belief a Little Further
First, what determines the nature (negative or positive, pervasive or specific, personalized or externalized, simple or complex) of the belief a specific individual would come away with from a particular experience? This question is very fundamental because we know very well that two individuals may go through the same objective experience and emerge with two contradictory subjective conclusions (or beliefs): the same vague stimulus that one brain interprets as a ghost another may interpret as an angel. CBT is loudly silent on this. When it comes to how we form ideas, it’d seem that it's not the experience per se that matters, it is the individual (or the brain) through which the experience is being processed.
Second, how do you tell if a particular belief, at the period of its formation, would be detrimental down the line or not? A belief, at the time of its formation may very well be adaptive only to gradually or suddenly morph into something grotesque at a later time. Consider this belief by an 8-year-old child: “I'm loved by my parents no matter what I do.” As a child, it inspires confidence and security. But as an adolescent, this belief may actually alienate people or trigger resentment because it betrays a deficit in awareness of the concept of duty, responsibility, and reciprocity. The adaptive self would quickly realize that no one has a monopoly of action, and that unconditional love does not exist outside the familial sphere or beyond the developmental frames of childhood. So, it is not nearly enough or even sensible to simply focus on the past origin of a belief and from there concluding that the very fact of its origin in the past makes it not only problematic but also worthy of being a target of systematic reformulation.
Third, if beliefs precede and undergird behavioral patterns, and these beliefs are traceable to some period in the past, what were the beliefs that characterized the behaviors associated with this time period? This is a slightly deeper query, a sort of second order digging into the developmental history of a belief. It is similar to the more familiar query: if God created everything, who created God? If present behavior was created or underwritten by past beliefs, what created past behavior? If you say past experiences, then I’d ask; were there no recognizable pattern of behavior prior to these past experiences? If there were (as there surely must be), then what were the beliefs dictating and directing those past behavior, you know, before things went south in the future? Here's how John Shlien, a former Harvard Psychiatrist, illustrated this absurdity in his sharp paper critiquing the psychoanalytic theory of transference on its claim that the feelings/wishes felt and expressed toward the therapist by the patient is always a reenactment of some past (emphasis mine) similar experience:
“Then, about my granddaughter. I dearly love this child. From what previous experience do I transfer this affection? Yes, I dearly loved my two daughters and my son when they were three-year-olds, too. But whence came that? Sooner or later, it has to be de novo, original."
Though, never this logically explicated and often entailing other factors, the three logical queries above are the reasons why some users experience CBT as silly, shallow and self-invalidating, and many professionals see it as cheap, simple, and easy-to-use.
In short, CBT, in a less obvious way to James Clear’s clearly stated axiom, also over-privileges (even obsessing over) the belief/thinking part of its theory while paying theoretical lip service to the other two domains. It often meets with clinical roadblocks when confronted with a belief system whose origins cannot be easily delineated from nor fit neatly with past experiences. But it could always get itself out of this potentially embarrassing quandary by letting go of the belief-precedes/underlies-behavior part of its theory and focusing more on simply activating new set of behaviors. Hence, if CBT runs into a snag in practice, it is often due to the theoretical rigidity of the person using the tool rather than the tool itself. For more intelligent critique of CBT’s theoretical assumptions, check out this article.
A Simple Way Out
However, all of these theoretical and practical legerdemain could easily be avoided if we would just adopt the opposite of the claim that says beliefs/assumptions/values are necessary precursors of behaviors and that they are needed for those behavior to persist or desist. And what is the opposite of this claim? That we don’t necessarily act according to our beliefs (or values or thinking), but we believe and think according to our most convenient and consistent behaviors in the immediate past and present (while keeping in mind that these behaviors themselves are caused by multiple, often dense combination of intricate factors). But our behavioral tendencies necessarily stipulate what we deeply accept/reject/formulate as our values or beliefs and not the other way round. We act and then we ‘valuate’ the action either in terms of the result obtained or in terms of the prevailing social norms; and if it’s something we do regularly and effortlessly, we are going to ‘valuate’ the behavior positively (not necessarily in the approving sense but in the this-is-who-I-am sense).
Of Objective And Subjective Environments
Broadly speaking, an individual’s common and specific environments often determine what kind of operations is needed to achieve adaptation. In dealing with common or shared environments, one often adopts the cultural or the normative adaptive practices. However, in dealing with specific or non-shared aspect of one’s environment (the subjective milieu), one has to device very unique, highly personal, and sometimes original mode of adaptation. It is in the latter domain that individual differences is first visible. Why is there a unique nonshared dimension to every shared environment? Because every human comes into the general environment (also known as the objective environment) with a unique set of genetic and biological predisposition. These predispositions in turn form the building blocks of experiential uniqueness. The aggregate of these individual tendencies often converges around an average which subsequently stipulates the culture of the group, be it family, ethnic, social or national group.
By itself, nothing in any given non-simple environment can reliably specify what behavior would be engendered in any given individual (though group level response can be more easily anticipated). When you put an individual in a novel relatively complex situation, can we consistently predict how this individual would respond? The answer is a definite no. No one knows how a specific individual would react in a given complex situation. In other words, every individual reacts in slightly different ways. What underlies these different reactions? Personality. And a lot of things go into its formation: gene, fetal events, childhood experiences, developmental history, critical life events, etc. Some people believe that a better answer would be ‘past experience’ and that this should suffice. However, is there anything in a person’s past experience that necessarily stipulates how they’ll respond to later experiences? Again, which experience in the past? Experiences are composite. They are rarely simple and temporally isolated - that is, every single experience is a combination of many previous experiences as well as other things not specifically associated with the particular experience. Lastly, can we by having an idea of someone’s catalogue of past experiences reliably predict their future behavior? I think it’d be ridiculous to answer yes. Why? For one, there is always a behavior or response pattern before any particular experience. The response pattern may then change slightly after an experience, but the direction and volume of change is not always predictable from what has gone before. Then there’s the added matter of the fact that experience don’t happen de novo: something is always there right from birth such that even when a biological organism is confronted with an experience that is entirely new, it still emits a response, no matter how crude. Lack of previous experience about a particular situation has never and would never stop any living organism from still responding to a given novel situation in the present. With or without past experience, any living organism would still ‘behave’ in any stimuli-loaded environment. The behavior may then get more complex (and more automatic) as more iterations of the experience is encountered. This is how the question of the origin of a particular behavior becomes a tangled mess as well as the consequent difficulty in untangling it.
There's always a response (adaptive or maladaptive) to any stimulus, with or without past experience. That is to say, even if you had no prior experience about the current situation, you’d still give a response that is more or less unique and more or less universal. Why? One thing we know for sure is that our behavioral patterns are partly genetically encoded to help us act and reenact in any environment we find ourselves such that even in the absence of experiential reference point, behavior does not grind to a halt in the face of a novel stimulus. And it is for this reason that Skinnerian shaping is even possible at all: put an organism in a particular situation and wait for it to give one of the natural responses possible to that given situation and then reinforce (or punish) that specific response. The rat does not need to have had previous job experience of pressing a lever before it can be induced to do so if the situation warrants it for its survival.
Am I Saying What You Think I'm Saying?
Am I saying past experiences don’t influence or shape current behavior? Absolutely not. Rather, I’m saying that our past experiences are also not independent of whatever internal neurobiological and evolutionary forces that are still shaping our behavior in the present. It is not like we were perfect and innocent in the past, as though experienceless, rather, more often than not, the ‘corruption’ lies within, not in form of experience-borne beliefs but in form of genetically underwritten thinking, behaving, and feeling predisposition which is brought to bear in how we process and interpret any given experience.
The Defining Power of Behavioral Consistency
How we think of ourselves is more a function of what we find ourselves consistently doing or how we consistently respond to situations. For example, an individual whose behavior as an autonomous adult includes a lot of religious rituals and routine would (and has to) believe in a particular god as opposed to merely an idea of God. The contra is true: someone whose behavioral repertoire does not include religious rituals and routine cannot (must not) believe in a particular god but can indeed subscribe to an abstraction of God. If they do believe in a particular god in spite of behavioral contradictions, this belief is utterly cosmetic and has no validity beyond its mere profession. It also means that such a belief is impotent in stimulating relevant behavioral adjustment since the two share no causal relation. You can change the belief all you like, as long as it is not connected or congruent with the behavior it is expected to foster, it would make no difference. Besides, such behavior-belief disconnect is an indication of personality fragmentation as opposed to a well-integrated self.
Mind you, a belief-first theory cannot make this distinction between potent and impotent beliefs since it starts with the assumption that all beliefs are potent in the sense that they dictate and stimulate behavior. However, in a behavior-first theory, beliefs are not necessary to synthesize a new behavior. In fact, in this model, beliefs and values are often artefacts of response patterns over the years.
And What Has This Got To Do With Change?
What has this got to do with change? Whenever we observe a disconnect between behavioral pattern and (the necessary) values (or belief system) they should stipulate, the behavior in question is likely to be more resistant to change or modification which reflects a mind-body split: the body’s psychophysical response mechanics being subjected to the dictate of values alien to it. This is often the reason why it is more common to see people ultimately opting to change their values to match their behavior rather than changing their behavior to match their values, e.g. identity crisis such as crisis of faith or sexual conflict. When such conflict exists between behavior and values, behavior almost always win. But what if the behavior is bad or maladaptive? Well, unfortunately, that does not change this natural principle of predominance of the body over the mind: the body fundamentally shapes the mind and not the other way round. This is not saying the mind cannot influence the body, but only temporarily and certainly cannot reshape it according to its own runaway vision. The person who insists on forcing an unwilling body to conform to the dictate of the mind (especially if this dictate came into such a mind by some process or influence foreign and external to the body that supports it), then they must pay a severe price to their psychological unity and continuity. It is like forcing a man to be the nurturer/carer in a marital relationship and the woman the provider/protector. This isn't impossible, but it's costly as it's a reversal of the evolutionary order.
PART 3
The Body-Mind Duplex
Every body-mind duplex has its needs which differ not only in quantitative terms but also in qualitative terms. To satisfy these needs, the origins of which are often intricate, arcane, and inexplicable, the organism is compelled to initiate appropriate sequence of actions designed to meet each need per time and place. I agree with James Clear when he wrote that “every behavior is meant to solve a problem”. However, the initial emergence of these sequences of actions (meant to solve highly specific and personal problems) have almost nothing to do with the organism’s moral valuation (right or wrong) or value judgement (good or bad) about those actions themselves, even though such considerations may later enter into how the actions are maintained in rigid fluency. More often than not, we only justify or rationalize a behavior after the fact: we do not act as we think, rather, we think as we act. And it is precisely for this reason that it is rather more difficult to change our thinking before or without changing our behavior, whereas it is comparatively easier to first change our behavior before or even without necessarily changing our beliefs about it. This may sounds counterintuitive but only because we’re deeply steeped in the idea that there’s a direct causal relationship between thinking and action with the former invariably coming first and stipulating the latter.
Hence, it is far easier and more realistic, in the long term, for a man or a woman who enjoys sleeping with multiple partners, at once or serially, to abandon or reject a value system that extols and exhorts monogamy than to alter the offending behavior in fulfillment of this value system. Indeed, I assert that behaviors don’t change, rather, they are discovered, uncovered, covered/suppressed, sublimated, rediscovered, and finally, exhausted. This is my response to those who would assert that they know people who have voluntarily initiated and achieved self-transformation. Yes, it is true that when any of these psychodynamic processes (of discovery, suppression, repression, rediscovery, sublimation, exhaustion, etc.) occurs, the resulting perception is that of an individual who appears to have “changed” or transformed before our very eyes. The more accurate explanation is that they were either never their true selves (as dictated by their psychophysical makeup) to begin with or they’ve depleted the bioneurochemical live-wire that fired up and sustained their former selves (e.g. change due to exhaustion of old age or extreme sickness). This fact will be illustrated in an anecdote I share later in this essay.
Again, like I already noted, the only exceptions to this rule are found under instances of involuntary change such as those of religious conversion, spiritual experience, extreme grief, brain trauma (due to injury or disease), chronic substance abuse, extreme chronic psychological/developmental trauma, etc.
PART 4
Of Personality and its Framework
When considered in its broadest and most fundamental outlines, the human organism can be conceived of as made up essentially of two inseparable dimensions or frameworks that undergird what we conceptualize as ‘personality’ or the organism’s ‘essence’. First, the internal invisible genotypic framework that underwrites and encompasses elemental and structural components like the DNA molecules, chromosomes, hormones, proteins, alleles, neurochemicals, microbiome, neurobiomechanics, cell, skeletal structure, bone density, sensorimotor organization, etc. And second, the external observable (and often measurable) phenotypic framework that include things like body type, speech style and tone, voice pitch, activity level, sensitivity, body-space orientation, eating and drinking pattern, sleep pattern, play preferences, external genitalia, gender, physiognomy, waist-hip ratio etc. Together, these two broad dimensions constitute the biological, the physical, and the psychological multiplex, intricately and inextricably integrated into a highly compact whole that manifests at the highest level of perception and experience as 'personality' - that ineffable constellation of qualities that defines each individual and how they are perceived by others.
The first dimension, the genetic, is the framework upon which and from which the second necessarily emanates. The phenotypic features are the outgrowth of the genotypic roots. It's the reason why even in the exact same physical environment, the inhabitants are still different, and these differences persist against any attempt to further homogenize the environment. It is also the reason why we find similar types across different environments. Of course, similarity increases with increasing environmental homogeneity, but this never quite translates into personality homogeneity, because the actual root of individual differences lies not in the external environment but in the internal environment of the organism. The external environment is powerful but not enough to significantly or consistently override the underlying structural framework of each organism's genetic configuration. In a sense, one could say that whereas the gene creates the artwork, the environment selects and organizes some (not all) of what is exhibited. Some latent properties, therefore, never get exhibited, while some forces their own exhibition in spite of environmental anti-selection. It is the reason why some seemingly evolutionarily maladaptive behaviors (e.g. sexual attraction to same sex) or phenotypes (e.g. albinism in the tropics) persist against the dictate of the environment.
Preferences and Choices: The Highest Expression of Identity
The epigenetic potentialities (the potential for novel gene expressions) of any organism depends foremostly on its underlying genome upon which specific environmental pressure can then be brought to bear. This gene-level dimension, together with its external phenotypic byproduct of the second dimension, then combine to produce another higher-order dimension consisting of choices and preferences. Harrison Koehli, in a substack article, called my third dimension “the third factor”. Here is how, quoting another author, he categorized the hierarchy of forces acting on an individual’s behavioral universe:
Lobaczewski’s fellow countryman and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski presented these ideas in a manner I think both clear and truthful. He identified three factors that shape a person: biology/heredity, social environment, and the “third factor,” where autonomy is to be found. Essentially, the stronger the first factor, the weaker the third factor, and vice versa. Those with the strongest first factor have the least free will, and Dabrowski cited psychopaths as an example.
Our second factors differ but our first and third coincide very well. I have disregarded the social environment because a living individual is not an object that the environment acts on, rather a reactive subject that actively interacts and negotiates with any given environment. Hence, my focus is on those factors that underlie differential reactions to similar environmental stimulus by different individuals. I believe these are the more fundamental stuff of differential psychology. Thus, Koehli was spot on with his first and third factors, but not quite with the second: social environment is important and indispensable in accounting individual behavior but it is not fundamental in analyzing or accounting for differential response pattern. However, Koehli was right to include social environment as one of the factors of behavior because the focus of his article was on the various constraints placed on free will and its exercise, and most especially how the limit placed by social factors through its myriad of subliminal influences is often denied, underrated, or missed, mostly by teenagers and young adults. Hence, in explaining a social or group phenomenon, the social environment should rightly be elevated above purely internal factors. But my own aim is different; I’m not trying to explain why we behave similarly but why we behave differently.
Two individuals in the same environment experience different (sometimes paradoxical) outcomes. Why? This lawful variation in individual response pattern and behavioral potential is why I could easily make the assertion that artificial/mechanistic attempts to change these patterns or potentials are ALWAYS extremely difficult or impossible depending on the specific change being targeted and the degree to which it is rooted in my three dimensions of personality superstructure: the genome, the phenome, and choices and preferences.
The third dimension (Koehli’s third factor) which I also term a meta-dimension (because it is produced by our pseudo awareness and false sense of control over the outworkings of the other two) is purely emergent. And to the extent that these choices and preferences are influenced by the underlying genotypic and phenotypic superstructures, they are predetermined and neither free nor objective, even though it is the level at which the highest degree of expressive flexibility exists. Yet, they are not 'free' because a 'choice' cannot be successfully and sustainably made that too strongly violate the dictate, ignores the magnitude, and opposes the direction of the underlying frameworks. Such wayward choices are doomed to fail or at best grind the system to a halt as a result of the immense resistance that the whole system put up which is often experienced as stress, frustration, pain, mental illness, and sometimes death (sometimes suggesting a fierce clash between nature and culture). But you perhaps ask how can something with the “highest degree of expressive flexibility” be also considered somewhat fixed in its operations? I think Koehli marvelously captured this paradox in his own article where he equated his ‘third factor’ to represent the domain of “autonomy” of action but which is still nevertheless limited by the other two factors. Here is what he wrote:
These “causal factors” are not so much strict determinants of our behavior as they are limits on our freedom—limits that can be modified or even potentially removed. Perhaps somewhat ironically, it is by making ourselves aware of such influences and how they do affect us that we can overcome them. In order to achieve freedom, a greater degree of free will, we have to understand the processes or the influences that are placing limits on that freedom. Compare the arrogant man confident in his own freedom who is in fact a total slave to his biology and social environment, to the one who sees how controlled he really is, and is thus able to act with a much greater degree of freedom. In other words, to become free, we have to realize how un-free we currently are.
In other words, if there’d be any hope at all of altering something intricately woven into our personality, the first step would be to recognize the forces that are acting to make such alteration impossible. Koehli is perhaps more generous in his outlook on how frequently such recognition leads to resolution, while I’m more unimpressed by what I have observed both in myself and others.
Why Our Choices And Preferences Are Neither Objective Nor Free
Our choices and preferences are never 'objective' because, if they are to be authentic, organic, and synchronous, they can admit of no motive force outside of the organism itself. That is, no organism can successfully implement an adaptive response using a framework that exists outside of itself or, to put it differently, that which is alien to its constitution. In other words, we may see someone else and want something that they have, but we may not have that thing except the recipe for its production already exists within our own biogenetic framework. Indeed, we don’t yet know the mechanisms by which the body’s genotypic and phenotypic inheritances produce and sustain a behavior, but we do know that the range of behaviors they do produce are not subject to the whims and caprices of choices and preferences, except in the most general, superficial, and circumstantial sense.
Also, while a specific environment may suggest or even compel us towards a particular choice that is objectively (that is, normatively) and optimally adaptive, it cannot have the final say as to whether that choice would be indeed recognized, and if recognized whether it'd be selected, and if selected whether it'd be implemented, and if implemented, whether it'd be maintained, and if maintained, at what relative biopsychosocial cost to the organism?
This lack of ‘freedom’ and ‘objectivity’ of the 'higher-order dimension of choice and preference' is the reason why we cannot simply aspire to every ability we covet or adapt successfully to every situation (both internal and external) we find ourselves. This is a serious handicap to dynamic adaptation, but as shall be argued later, each organism has also evolved mechanisms, more or less successful, to minimize or bypass this un-dynamic limitation.
If I Can Do It, Does That Mean you Can Also do It?
Or if the above form of the question offends your positive can-do spirit, here is a less pessimistic spin: If I can't do it, does that mean you can't also do it? In spite of the structural and functional fastidiousness of the genotypic and the phenotypic complex, these basal superstructures still leave some wiggle room for a wide variety of adaptive choices and preferences per individual-environment. This is what Harrison Koehli called the modifiable limits placed on our freedom of action.
However, every organism develops in a specific context of an 'immediate environment' as well as a wider culture (in the cases of social animals) that further place considerable limit on what is permissible. What should, thus, generally be possible in principle for every organism may not be permissible for some or many. What is achievable in certain environments and cultures may be fiercely resisted (by these organizing frameworks) in another environment and culture. This is why one of the most deluded and misguided sentiments humans everywhere have always expressed is that “If I (we) can do it, then you can do it”. This is patently false in the sense that even if I can do ‘it’, it is certainly not because you have done ‘it’, but more likely because I can also do it. Your having done it would never in itself make it possible for any other person who desires it to be equally capable of doing it. And this principle becomes increasingly true as we travel up the hierarchy of human capacities, from the purely general and basic (e.g. breathing) to the purely complex and exclusive (e.g. understanding theoretical physics).
Hence, with the active but unintentional collusion of the cultural environment (which is itself an evolutionary product of the workings of the vast genetic machine), our genotypic and phenotypic endowments are often left to support the organism's adaptive struggles within a much more constrained latitude. In other words, while much of the external constraint comes from one's immediate family and society, a significant amount is further imposed internally by the self or more accurately, by the organism's nervous system which, of course, is largely the product of its genetic inheritance. And even though each organism, hypothetically, often has the option of limiting or violating the externally imposed constraints, it almost never chooses to do so, mainly as a result of the superior power of the internally imposed constraints. And the ones who do manage to considerably expand the zone of expression (again by the share propelling force of their specific internal mechanisms) often never do so permanently, shrinking back at a later period to those earliest boundaries in their developmental formation.
NB: The phrase “zone of expression” (ZOE) came to my mind so smoothly that I thought I must have first come across it from something I've read in the past and must be a common concept. But I went on Google to search for it and nothing remotely close to how I'm using it here came up. So it may be necessary that I briefly define it as I'm using it here: ZOE is the additional behavioral potential of an organism aside its current manifest behaviors. In mathematical terms, it is current (manifest) behavioral set minus possible (latent) behavioral responses. It's perhaps similar to Koehli's concept of ‘degree of freedom’.
Whatever the case, it is within this 'zone of expression' (in which behavioral choices and preferences are comfortably exercised) that what we perceive as 'people changing' often takes place. The zone of expression is the boundary between the two fundamental dimensions (of genome and phenome) on the one hand, and the meta-dimension of preferences and decision-making on the other. The wider this boundary, the larger the zone of expression, and the greater the possibility of change or adaptive responses, and vice versa.
The Limits Of What Is Possible
Direct changes at the level of the first dimension, the genotypic dimension, are almost impossible except via epigenesis-mediated short processes or natural selection-based long processes or the artificial process of genetic (re)engineering. However, what we commonly regard as lifestyle changes are actually changes in choices and preferences rather than structural changes (at the biogenetic level), even though such lifestyle changes, if intense and sustained could faintly resonate at these deeper layers via the mechanism of epigenesis. Likewise, self-implemented changes at the second phenotypic level are only moderately possible but are severely moderated by the underlying genetic framework. One could push past this fundamental limitation through the artificial instrumentalities of modern medical tools and procedures, but the organism, unaided by such mechanical tools, remains ultimately powerless. Also, it must be stated that even medical ingenuity is largely limited to altering characteristics at the phenotypic level (e.g., various body-altering surgical procedures, organ transplant, transfusions, etc.) while consistently fallen short in facilitating change at the higher-order meta-dimension (of choices and preferences). And there are instances where even such medically assisted phenotypic alteration still fails to become self-sustaining against the fierce protestation of the body against being artificially violated. And should this protest fail to take hold, the friendly injury done to the natural integrity of the body is self-retaliated to leave a scarified memorial of the trauma inflicted on it.
Matthew Yglesias, in a poignant essay about his decision to submit himself to a weight-combating bloodless surgical procedure that involves stitching his stomach from inside in order to reduce its intake capacity, narrated how, after a period of respite from the urge to gorge down meal after meal, accompanied by a healthy amount of weight loss, his body began to reassert itself.
I’m extremely grateful to be a merely overweight person now rather than someone with Class 2 obesity. And yet it’s still a bummer to have stalled out at a point where the same basic behavioral issues reassert themselves.
PART 5
Of Structural And Functional Integrity Of Human Personality
Why are stable changes at these two deeper levels difficult-to-impossible to sustain even with medicotechnological aid? I don't know why but it's probably got to do with the necessity of any natural system (which a human body and mind is) to maintain its structural and functional integrity and coherence. Every product (natural or artificial) is designed and optimized to perform certain specific functions and to perform them in certain ways if efficiency is to be optimized. I stumbled on a book by Anthony Storr (an accomplished psychiatrist) with a title that deeply resonates with me: The Integrity of the Personality. Here's what Storr has to say about this concept of integrity from the point of view of individual personality:
Just as too wide a divergence from physiological equilibrium leads to discomfort, disease, and death: so the attempt to be what one is not, or the failure to be what one is, lead to internal conflict, neurosis, and emotional isolation.... I believe the development of personality to be a natural process which, ideally, follows its own course to its own conclusion.... In seeking to define the fundamentals upon which the practice of psychotherapy rests, I find myself returning again and again to the integrity of the personality and the validity of the human relationship.
In the course of shuffling through the creation of this essay, I came across an interesting Twitter post by a handle called @plasticity_lab. It was a provocative post based on a pre-print paper by Hunter Schone (@HunterSchone) et al.
I find it quite too hard and complex for my understanding but I think I was able to get the basic gist as summarized by Schone himself in his own Twitter update:
But for proper context, here's what Schone et al.’s study was all about as described in the paper’s abstract:
Neuroscientists have long debated the adult brain's capacity to reorganize itself in response to injury. A driving model for studying plasticity has been limb amputation. For decades, it was believed that amputation triggers large-scale reorganization of cortical body resources. However, these studies have relied on cross-sectional observations post-amputation, without directly tracking neural changes. Here, we longitudinally followed adult patients with planned arm amputations and measured hand and face representations, before and after amputation. By interrogating the representational structure elicited from movements of the hand (pre-amputation) and phantom hand (post-amputation), we demonstrate that hand representation is unaltered. Further, we observed no evidence for lower face (lip) reorganization into the deprived hand region. Collectively, our findings provide direct and decisive evidence that amputation does not trigger large-scale cortical reorganization.
What do I make of these interesting neuropsychological reports? In line with my critical argument in this essay, I consider Schone's research a hard if incomplete vindication of my primary claim that self-propelled changes that touch the deep biophysical structures underlying personality is difficult-to-impossible to successfully pull off (even when there appears to be some outwardly visible signs that such change has occurred). Scientific America has a piece on this very subject titled ‘The Brain Isn't as Adaptable as Some Neuroscientists Claim’. This SA article was written by a duo who have their own jointly published paper titled ‘Against Cortical Reorganization’. Here is the provocative conclusions the authors drew at the end of their study:
Crucially, our revised framework proposes that opportunities for functional change are constrained throughout the lifespan by the underlying structural ‘blueprint’. At no period, including early in development, does the cortex offer structural opportunities for functional pluripotency. We conclude that reorganisation as a distinct form of cortical plasticity, ubiquitously evoked with words such as ‘take-over’’ and ‘rewiring’, does not exist.
If body and mind are one and the same, then what applies to the body must apply to the mind. A mind cannot be more or less flexible than the body it serves. Mind you, I do not interpret any of these studies as saying or implying that personality change isn't possible, but that even where such changes visibly occur, the body (or the brain) continues to maintain its preexisting structural representation of the former functions (as per Schone) or that the realized changes are mere activations of existing but dormant functions (as per Markin and Krakauer). This is the basis for why personality or behavioral changes that are not due to some assault or insult to the body/mind are difficult to maintain. In other words, self-motivated attempts at altering an established functional pattern are often too weak to trouble the physiologically rooted core of those functional patterns.
The Degree of Freedom
Living systems of the same species are often designed to perform the same functions but not with the same efficiency since each organism's biological system can vary both qualitatively and quantitatively. This is especially true of humans. We are designed to essentially carry out the same biological and psychological functions: but we are never endowed with the same degree of material quality and design to execute these functions at the same level of proficiency and efficiency. In other words, no two individuals are endowed with the same degree of “latent capacity” at birth such that the scope and depth of novel behaviors or responses available and possible for each individual varies quantitatively but also, in many cases, qualitatively. Here's how Markin and Krakauer put it:
We argue that what is often observed in successful rehabilitation cases is not the brain creating new functions in previously unrelated areas. Instead it’s more about utilizing latent capacities that have been present since birth. This distinction is crucial. It suggests that the brain’s ability to adapt to injury does not typically involve commandeering new neural territories for entirely different purposes.
Thus, it can be said that the degree of freedom (both in the statistical and functional senses) afforded each biological system varies and I guess this is one of the reasons behind the general perception that some people find it easier to adapt to changing environmental conditions while others find same adaptation difficult or impossible. There is no true demarcation between ‘the biological’ and ‘the psychological’ - the body and the mind - functions of a biological system as they are both intertwined structurally and functionally. The mandate of maintaining system-wide integrity and coherence is therefore salient in both the physical and the psychological domains.
Functional and Structural Integrity - II
By “functional integrity”, I mean that the system is optimized to operate in certain ways irrespective of whether it facilitates survival or not and deviation from this way of operation triggers system-wide alarm and distress. By “functional coherence”, I mean that the subsystems within the main system are properly integrated in a lock and key manner such that a dislocation at a remote region reverberates throughout the whole system and threatens to create a functional chaos. This of course manifests as a disease or a disorder or a dysfunction or dysphoria, just as Storr intelligently observed.
Yet, systems are made to function within dynamic conditions and must therefore themselves be dynamic or risk becoming obsolete and/or falling apart. When a vital aspect of the environment changes, a reactive and healthy system is expected to respond appropriately and proportionately to this change in external conditions. This necessary maintenance of approximate correspondence between internal and external conditions is what is generally known as homeostasis. When this response depends largely on automatic activation, it is usually quick and efficient, e.g., the pupil relaxing when moving into a darker zone or the sharp withdrawal of the hand from a hot object. The problem often arises when the adaptive response depends largely on voluntarily initiated sequence of actions, that is, meta-adaptation. Even more difficult is when the change in environmental conditions is not immediately threatening, that is, does not require a corrective response but merely an optimizing one. For instance, going to bed one or two hours earlier would not actually literally save your life but merely boost it, over a longer stretch of time, in many little imperceptible ways in things like productivity, energy level, health, cognition etc. And even still more difficult is when such change in environmental conditions requires the exercise of judgement to assess the most appropriate response. For example, who among all these men claiming to love me truly loves me?
These are the proper region of choices and preferences, and it is where the common instances of individual behavioral adjustments that we often observe usually take place. They are rarely system-deep, that is they do not often penetrate or resonate within the larger structural system that frames personality. Also, this type of change happens quite often and poses far lesser threat to the larger and deeper underlying system. Such changes are weak in the threat they pose to the functional integrity and coherence of the supporting systems. And even though they are met with far lesser resistance and drag, such system-maintaining and system-optimizing adjustments are still incredibly difficult for many individuals to successfully and consistently implement.
Inter-Systems Friction
However, by far the strongest activator of the need for a system-deep change is friction with other systems. In other words, relationships. Recurrent inter-systems failure is a signal for intra-system corrections, and this is by far the most difficult kind of self-alteration, and one which even state-of-the-art medical procedure cannot penetrate. It is the domain where attempt at change comes with the greatest agony, strain, gnashing of teeth, and spectacular failure. Every individual is exposed to this truth very early in life and this exposure, and the pain it engenders, never stops resonating throughout their life.
Between Extra- And Intra-System Operations
What does the human organism do when confronted with inter-system friction (person-to-person) or system-environment conflict (person-situation); the two basic sources of external demand for personal change? Almost without fail, his first instinct is to try to alter the system external to his own. And this is no doubt one of the most conservative but efficient mechanisms the human organism has evolved to bypass or short-circuit the more excruciating option of changing oneself (that is, altering one’s own system). For most organisms and in most cases, this is a far easier strategy and far more likely to result in success than any attempt to tweak the system from within. Hence, an average human being, right from childhood, has got a quiver-full of manipulative arrows as well as environment-design instincts that he intuitively deploys in his persistent effort to minimize inter-system friction or system-environment dissonance/threat.
While this is no doubt the natural go-to strategy on account of its relative convenience as well as a higher likelihood of success, it is still not a reliably sustainable strategy, especially in the domain of system-system (person-to-person or group-to-group) changes. One reason for the tenuousness of this externalized approach is that while one may indeed successfully manipulate others and one's immediate environment, one cannot truly or fully control either. Another reason is that other people and/or systems are equally resistant to change just like ourselves.
It takes a lot to keep the environment (both human and physical) roughly constant and it takes a lot to manipulate the people in our lives or our neighbors into a stable pattern of behaving relative to us. And even when one manages to achieve this with a few persons, it means that an inordinate amount of vigilance and continued operations is needed to maintain it across time, space, and situation. This is both costly and stressful.
But the fact that humans tend to resort to this strategy more often than not is a testament to the forbidden difficulty of the only other superior alternative which is to minimize friction and conflict by changing the system from within, that is, our own behaviors/attitudes/tendencies.
I believe it's largely for the above reasons that many people persist in a relationship with another human being who makes their life miserable rather than better. This is very rational from the point of view of wanting to safeguard one’s adaptive investment over time, especially for individuals with the greatest potential for interpersonal incompatibility (I have a piece on this subject in the pipeline titled The Logic of the Ego). For these individuals, finding a compatible system is difficult, and achieving coherence with other systems is costly: hence, their reluctance to ditch the system even when it is harming them in many other ways.
Let us examine some simple and common ways by which humans apply this strategy, that is, the strategy of altering or manipulating other systems/environment rather than one’s own. All strategies of this type ever likely to be deployed I have categorized into three broad types and are fully mine:
1. Enhancing utility: finding out what the relevant other likes and giving or helping them to get it. This is the simplest, most intuitive, and most common adaptive strategy when trying to ensure inter-system synergy or minimize inter-system friction. Even a child is capable of deploying this interpersonal adaptive skill. Of course, depending on the existing configuration of the system utilizing this strategy, it can be taken too far if it is not offset by some other alternatives. As such, we end up having individuals who become too keen to please others above and beyond what is necessary to appease the other system to the point of even endangering their own.
2. Denouncing the object: negative judgment of other systems ("people are selfish", "men are scum", "my parents are too rigid") or the environment ("I grew up in a cold family" "the place is too hot", "the room was too crowded", “the community is too hostile”). This is similar to the defense mechanism of projection, with the intent of self-justification. By externalizing the cause of the problem, the person is reassuring themselves that nothing is wrong with them and, therefore, don’t need to change anything about themselves. This only works to some extent and only when there are (community of) others who share this externalized criticism.
3. Swapping: moving to a 'better' environment or a better system (relationship), e.g., separation, divorce, relocation, migration. The goal is to minimize distress, improve compatibility by changing person-to-person or person-to-environment pairing. Again, the person does not have to change anything about themself, just swap their environment or their significant other to minimize the external demand for self-change while maximizing compatibility. This, under certain considerations, is perhaps the easiest strategy.
There are, no doubt, other subtle strategies humans have evolved to cope with the unbearable pain of self-alteration, including the ultimate strategy of self-annihilation by suicide. This happens mostly when even the option of manipulating the environment or other systems is not available or bleak. In a way, mental illness can be seen as what happens when a system is unable to realize a change/alteration/adjustment demanded or necessitated by their situation.
PART 6
The Exception to the Rule
Self-induced and self-orchestrated change is, however, possible, relatively easy even, under one condition - when it is targeted to align with existing personality framework such that its structural integrity is preserved, and its functional continuity isn’t negated. But as per my argument throughout this essay, not even this can be strictly regarded as personality change since it only advances, repairs, modifies, or activates some already present aspects of it. It does not alter its architecture and design, only its structural fluidity and functional efficiency.
It is like a dress with a gaping hole that needs to be patched; for the mending to be considered successful, the extra piece of clothing has to approximately match or at least complement the violated dress in visual pattern (structural integrity) and be sewn in such a way that it aligns with the existing sewing pattern (functional continuity). This is roughly illustrated with the two images below:
The first patchwork is a disaster, the second works very well. To the extent that a clothing material (ditto a personality framework) is rare and intricate, to the same extent will it be difficult to find a complementary reparative framework. This is not impossible, only more difficult and infinitely far more painful, hence more costly, hence less sustainable.
How do you find a substitute behavioral sequence that works perfectly or acceptably within the existing personality framework? That is the underlying problem that every successful attempt to adjust or optimize existing behavioral tendencies must solve. And seemingly radical changes that we have observed some people achieve do not violate these two conditions of successful individual change: their successful and mighty effort did not alter but merely enhance existing but dormant or underutilized structural and functional qualities.
An Anecdotal Illustration
Here is a personal anecdote to further illustrate this principle. My elder brother went from a very mid student throughout his secondary school years in an average small town public school in Nigeria to someone who is now an academic at University College London after he narrowly missed out on Oxford. The precise moment he self-transformed was after he failed one (out of 9) subject - Chemistry - in the final external exam that is required for admission into any post-secondary institution in West Africa. He painfully had to watch every one of his friends proceed to various universities while he had to wait another year to make his result. But somehow, and absolutely without the advice or encouragement of any adult, he made some strings of bold decisions the most obvious of which was his request to our parents that he be allowed to return to the very same school where he failed (and where we his younger siblings were also schooling) to retake the exam.
I cannot convey how ridiculously courageous this decision was for a 16-year-old: not even our very principled parents (both of whom were secondary school teachers at the time) were going to ask him to do that. And not only did he sit in class with the very juniors he had very recently exercised the authority of a prefect over, he also decided to completely mingle with them as though he was never once their senior in class. And of course, for the first time in his schooling life, he began studying with never-before-shown intentionality and was attending study group sessions with his more brilliant colleagues. He would go on to record the best result that year, one of the best in the state, the best student in his university both at the departmental and faculty level and third best in the whole school, and the best student during his Masters as well (at Witwatersrand University in South Africa).
What happened? My brother simply discovered himself, nothing more nothing less. How did he achieve this? By simply tapping into existing but dormant or underutilized personality traits. When Markin and Krakauer (the authors of the Against Cortical Reorganization cited extensively earlier) were trying to reinterpret classic experiments that led many Neuroscientists to propose the theory of unlimited brain plasticity and its capacity for synthesizing new functions, their choice of words are highly instructive and very logical in a simple and believable sense (all the emphases in bold type are mine):
In the former case, the cortical regions did not start processing completely new types of information. Rather the processing abilities for the other fingers were ready to be tapped in the examined brain area even before the amputation.
And then:
Similarly, in Hubel and Wiesel’s experiments, the shift in ocular dominance in kittens did not represent the creation of new visual capabilities. Instead there was an adjustment in preference for the opposite eye within the existing visual cortex. The neurons originally attuned to the closed eye did not acquire new visual capabilities but rather heightened their response to the input from the open eye.
One of the most ignorant conclusions anyone could draw, and indeed most people would draw, is to say: “if my brother can do it then anyone can do it”. Absolutely no, anyone cannot do it, only a few others with same existing but latent neurological substrates can. And this is why.
Prior to his academic revolution, my brother has always been very well regarded among his friends, indeed by everybody. I was too young to know precisely why he seemed to achieve this high regard everywhere he went. He was usually friends with peers who were either the most brilliant or the most socially sophisticated when he himself was none of those things at the time. And even more enviably, he had a talent for befriending, in ways that are deep and loyal, people who were very much older and successful. However, thinking back now, I could definitely say that he has always been a highly responsible, sensible, dependable, teachable, and very humble yet bold person even when we were as young as 10 and 8 years respectively. I was the more stubborn and adventurous person and would often physically attack him in moment of rage, with him always managing to restrain himself and never failed to come to my defense whenever I was being physically bullied in and out of school. He was playful, spirited, adventurous, curious, but never to the same extent as me. And I was also the more brilliant person in school as I was the first in my family to acquire the narcissistic sense of self-motivated studying habit. When once my brother acquired this same sense after a terribly humiliating experience, he just simply unleashed the massive intellectual culture that had been there all along and which perhaps explained why he somehow never failed to win the admiration of his betters even before he could match them in achievement. There was always something there that was merely awaiting discovery. To expect someone without this personality framework and resource base to achieve the same degree of self-transformation by citing and comparing him to my brother would amount to giving my brother too much credit and setting the other person up for a potentially self-damaging lifetime shame. Parents, counselors, teachers, and self-help merchants, especially, need to imbibe this message.
In Conclusion
We do ourselves serious psychological harm whenever we trivialize or deny the difficulty of the process of beneficial self-alteration. Yes, some people may use this as an excuse not to try. Well, they also get to pay the consequences of not trying. But I’m more particular about people who by virtue of personal experience have not only come to the blasé conclusion that change is possible every time in every case, but also feel morally superior and critical of those who struggle with change. Such change-conceited persons are not only taking credit for something they were better equipped to pull off, but also blaming and shaming those less equipped with the same self-altering tools.