Work, rest and play

Some years ago I was required to administer personality profile tests to a variety of individuals. These tests are no longer deemed accurate enough, but did give an understanding of a subject’s strengths and weaknesses. The results of the test appeared in a graph format with highs and lows on a horizontal line.

One of the subjects was a Chinese who had been well educated in China before coming to Australia to take up a technical position. I was surprised to find that his graph was a straight line. When I showed this to a psychologist he stated that this meant that the subject had been trained from an early age to conform with those around him. Although I felt this was sad, it did indicate that the test was subject to external pressures since he had proved his worth for a number of years.

Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterising typical patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change.

But the assumption that you can routinely measure these traits using questionnaires that identify typical behaviour has come into question in the past two decades. It is not only that behavioural changes happen often but that they occur from day to day and hour to hour. Someone could be open and agreeable at noon but negative and rigid at two o’clock.

Such oscillations in daily feelings and behaviour—designated with the bland title of intraindividual variability, or IIV—are, in fact, so great that they rival or even exceed the differences in personality traits such as extroversion or conscientiousness that can be measured between one person and another.

As researchers have learned to quantify this kind of hour-to-hour variability, they have started to evaluate what vicissitudes mean in devising a larger picture of personality. They might measure hourly fluctuations in a person’s mood against monthly variations in self-esteem.

If the person’s mood changes a lot but their self-esteem remains relatively constant, one interpretation might be that their level of self-esteem is not much influenced by the temporary highs or lows they might experience from a compliment or a put-down.

For therapists and patients, acknowledging the highs and lows of daily emotions—some bad, others eminently good, some moods way up, others beyond down—has provided new insights for the enduring goal of psychology to help define who we are so that we can learn to live with that knowledge and find ways to become more the people we want to be.

Whilst we define ourselves and others by our personalities some people appear to have more than one, as if multiple entities were existing within the one body.

One such case has been written up in Scientific American. It involves an eighteen year old patient called Ella who came for help with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. She was a survivor of long-term, severe childhood sexual abuse by a trusted religious leader. She had nightmares, flashbacks and anxiety, and she engaged in various forms of self-harm, among other symptoms.

But there were other things going on. Ella regularly missed pockets of time. She “spaced out” unexpectedly, “waking up” wearing different clothes. She experienced intense thoughts, emotions and urges that felt like they were coming from someone other than herself.

In a way, they were. Ella, it eventually became clear, had dissociative identity disorder (DID), a clinical condition in which a person has two or more distinct personalities that regularly take control of the person’s behaviour, as well as recurring periods of amnesia.

Popularly known as “split” or multiple personalities, DID and its criteria are listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the authoritative psychiatric compendium published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Over time Ella manifested 12 different personalities (or “parts” as she called them) ranging in age from two to 16. Each part had a different name; her own memories and experiences; and distinctive speech patterns, mannerisms and handwriting.

Some communicated in words, and others were silent, conveying things through drawings or using stuffed animals to enact scenes. Most of the time the different parts were not aware of what was happening when another part was “out,” making for a fragmented and confusing existence.

As far as Ella could discern, all these parts were versions of her at different ages. Some parts were better at dealing with certain situations and feelings than others were, and they would “come out” when those feelings were especially strong or when a situation required that part to appear and act.

Sometimes, however, the parts were in conflict. For example, a part named Ada—age 16—first appeared in the wake of a catastrophic rejection by a high school guidance counselor after Ella shared her abuse history. As a result, Ada was mistrusting and suspicious. She was also extremely rigid, moralistic and self-punishing and was quick to lash out with an acerbic tongue, including at me. She viewed herself as a protector.

Violet was very different. Violet trusted easily and loved generously. She really wanted to connect with other people. These traits often put Violet and Ada at odds and sometimes led to all-out internal warfare, with Ada, the older and stronger, usually prevailing.

To punish Violet, Ada would sometimes hurt “the body” by hitting and biting her arms and legs and holding a pillow over her face until she passed out, behaviours Violet experienced as a reenactment of the abuse that created her.

Most of us are happy with three slightly different aspects of our personality – home; work and social. However, we tend to think of ourselves a being a little above average in all of them – better drivers than others, more honest and reasonably generous. We also tend to discount the negatives as being minor, be it walking past the homeless in the street or not getting involved when we see someone being annoyed or worse.

In truth we all offer differ aspects of ourselves to different social circumstances, both consciously and unconsciously, raising the question of who we really are at our core.