<story><title>A little discussed effect of therapy: it changes personality (2017)</title><url>https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/01/19/a-little-discussed-effect-of-therapy-it-changes-your-personality/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>What even is &amp;quot;personality&amp;quot; - leaving aside technical and dictionary definitions, if you --the person-- are the sum of your life experiences, can you ever truly not be you?&lt;p&gt;I pose this because I encounter resistance from people to the notion that they can change themselves, lest they lose some notion of their &amp;quot;self&amp;quot;, and personality is often equated with &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; from my experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gnode</author><text>&amp;gt; can you ever truly not be you?&lt;p&gt;You can stop being the you that you were, and people often do so.&lt;p&gt;Personality can change slowly over time as we develop through experience and reflection, or it can change rapidly due to post-traumatic stress, drugs, electroconvulsive therapy, or traumatic brain injuries.&lt;p&gt;I think the conceptualization of self as immutable is tautological, as we tend to thus discount aspects of personality which we find to be mutable from being considered part of the self.</text></comment>
<story><title>A little discussed effect of therapy: it changes personality (2017)</title><url>https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/01/19/a-little-discussed-effect-of-therapy-it-changes-your-personality/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yomly</author><text>What even is &amp;quot;personality&amp;quot; - leaving aside technical and dictionary definitions, if you --the person-- are the sum of your life experiences, can you ever truly not be you?&lt;p&gt;I pose this because I encounter resistance from people to the notion that they can change themselves, lest they lose some notion of their &amp;quot;self&amp;quot;, and personality is often equated with &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; from my experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AndrewDucker</author><text>&amp;quot;can you ever truly not be you&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a question of degree.  There&amp;#x27;s a clear line from me yesterday to me today, with a massive amount of similarity.  I&amp;#x27;m comfortable about my wants and needs and how my life is set up, because the &amp;quot;me&amp;quot;s of the past set things up, and I&amp;#x27;m similar enough to them to fit into the niche they worked on.&lt;p&gt;That personality can change over time - I&amp;#x27;m not who I was when I was 20, and I&amp;#x27;ll be different again when I&amp;#x27;m 60.  But with a slow set of changes that&amp;#x27;s easy enough to cope with - and indeed, people generally don&amp;#x27;t even notice the changes.&lt;p&gt;But if I woke up tomorrow with a vastly different personality, the change having happened all at once, it would affect all of my relationships, my working situation, my home life, etc.  It&amp;#x27;s wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a slow transformation from one person to another, it would be the instant death of one personality and their replacement by a different one.  And that feels very uncomfortable to people.</text></comment>