Shared Personalities

When you and I meet, we create a new entity

Photo by Align Towards Spine on Unsplash

Spoilers for Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series

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In a way, this seems like a strange post for an independent-minded, introverted individualist with a knack for alliteration to write. I live alone. I meditate alone. I’ve gone the vast majority of my life without a romantic relationship. A lot of my best memories are of solo travels in various corners of the world. I’m sitting along in a cafe as I type this. Surely if anyone believes that self-discovery is essentially a solitary process, it’s me.

But in another way, all this is what makes me perfectly suited to write about how we’re a ‘million different people from one day to the next’. If I wasn’t so attuned to what’s going on inside myself, I wouldn’t notice how much my “self” shifts around. If I was less introverted I might adapt myself to others less and do less modifying of my persona. Finally, spending so much time alone heightens the contrast between my solitary self and my selves-with-others, just as being single for so long has highlighted how much I change when I’m in a relationship.

With all that out of the way, what I want to suggest here today is that we don’t have a “personality” — at least not in the narrow sense that we usually think of one. What we have is a bunch of inclinations, tendencies, triggers and potentialities, many of them latent, that sit inside us waiting for different people and situations to activate them. Some of them are so pronounced that they get activated by most or all situations, giving us the sense of a consistent personality that persists over time. But a surprising number of them are only discovered in collaboration with specific other people and situations. So much so that you don’t know they’re there until someone, or something, brings them out of you.

People move, or change job, or go on a mood pill, or have an enlightenment experience, and can’t believe how different they feel. They thought they were a bored housewife, and suddenly they’re Shirley Valentine. They thought they were Richard Alpert, and suddenly they’re Ram Dass.

Think of water: it’s always got the same chemical composition, but the forms it takes vary wildly depending on its environmental conditions. Put it into a narrow channel and it flows; put it into a large hole and it just sits there. In freezing temperatures, it turns to ice. In boiling temperatures, it turns to steam. The moon’s gravity acts on it, and we get waves. Sometimes it shoots from the earth. Sometimes it falls out of the sky. Sometimes it forms into cold crunchy balls that melt on your skin, sometimes into hard pellets that slam against your window. It’s hard to believe all these manifestations spring from the same H2O, but they do.

Similarly, each of us has our genetic “givens”, perhaps to a greater extent than we like to think. But we also have a wide array of personalities. And just like water wouldn’t know what it had in it if all it did was sit in the same tank all day, only some of our personalities are ever going to make themselves known as long as we stay in our own company. This means that, for all that self-exploration, meditation and solitude are valuable, for most of us there’s a sharp limit on the amount of self-knowledge they can bring you to. The more people you interact with, the more sides to yourself you see. This means we need others in order to know ourselves.

There are huge philosophical debates to be had here about whether the “self” exists at all, what it consists of, whether it’s static or dynamic, whether the various parts that make up the “individual” really cohere into a unified entity or not, whether you can define a Self without contrasting it against an Other, what it means to have agency, what consciousness even is, and so on and so on. AI’s ongoing assault on virtually every sphere of life will only make these debates more pointed as the years go on, but I don’t want to think about that right now.

My focus here is narrower. I want to look at what happens when people meet and form joint personalities together.

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Erik Hoel

of

The Intrinsic Perspective

published an interesting piece a year and a half ago about “egregores”. An egregore is what happens when a group of people get together and somehow merge their thoughts and feelings, resulting in a kind of collective consciousness / groupthink / hive mind (notice how your perception of the phenomenon changes depending on whether your word for it has positive or negative connotations?). Hoel mentions the “synchronising” that goes on in the intense shared experiences of cult rituals, football stadiums and concert halls, before warning that social media might be causing us to collectively Frankenstein together a shared personality that’s stupider and more reactive than its users are individually (‘Maybe the reason people seem to be losing their heads on social media is that they are actually losing their heads?’).

I’m reminded here of armies and of patriotism more generally — of country-scale “personalities”, i.e. national stereotypes, that different places love to tease each other about — of the oceanic “merging” feeling that accompanies many mystical experiences and psychedelic trips — of how individual birds come together to create a flock — of the even more drastic “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” behaviour of other species like bees and ants -

- and of the “egregore” themes in some of my favourite sci-fi. Think of the “Overmind” in Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, which takes individual humans and repurposes them into a single group entity that exists to carry out its inscrutable purposes. Or the concept of “psychohistory” in Asimov’s Foundation series, which assumes that tribalism’s stupidity and reactivity makes the behaviour of large numbers of people easier to predict (and manipulate) than that of an individual. A notion that any general who ever used a rousing speech to pump up an army before battle might agree with.

So much for nations and tribes. What about smaller group minds? Take family systems theory, which treats individuals within a family as interdependent parts that respond to and affect the emotional structure of the whole. In this context, your personality isn’t something you have all to yourself, but partly a series of adaptations to a complex group dynamic built around certain patterns, expectations and demands. You slot into a certain role, play a certain part. You mould yourself into a certain shape for them, and they do the same for you. Crucially, this process is well underway before you even know the words for “me” or “you”.¹

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Let’s go even smaller. What about a group mind of two?

Impenetrable couple-speak. Even more impenetrable sibling-speak. Your unique dynamic with your father. Baby talk with your infant. Your bond with the family cat. Creative pairs that fuse into more than the sum of their parts. Seinfeld’s “Relationship George.”

There are endless examples of two people coming together and getting things out of each other that no-one else can find. Constructing whole emotional worlds, entire mythologies, together. Magicking up shared personalities, mini-egregores, that you can almost see hovering in the air between them when they meet.

Time for a new analogy.

Let’s extend an olive branch to the idea of the individual personality and say that each of us is a different colour. You’re always that colour, and only you are that colour. But now say you interact with someone else. Maybe you’re speed dating, and you click with the first person you meet. They bring out a certain side of you. Maybe they’re very funny, and for some reason they think you’re very funny too. You know you’re not as funny as they are, but you enjoy that they seem to think you are. You come out of yourself a bit. You start attempting more jokes. They respond to them. Encouraged, you try a few more. Before you know it, you’re turning into the class clown you never thought you could be. You’re being silly together — finally, someone’s letting you be silly with them. You’re so used to people thinking you didn’t have it in you that you’d started to believe it yourself. What a relief to let your hair down and feel like a kid again…

You move along to the next person, who fixes you with a glum look. Your defences come back up, and so does your hair.

Keeping with the colour analogy, let’s say you’re a “blue”, always a blue, never not a blue. But the first person you talked to was a yellow, and that made your shared personality a green. From your point of view they were just “being themselves”, but your aura acted on them just as much as theirs did on yours, creating a third thing that needed both of you to come into being. But the second person is a red, making your shared personality a purple. Your blueness hasn’t changed. But the dynamic has, so you’re acting completely differently anyway.²

When I’m with my sister, we often slip into a barrage of silly voices, in-jokes and warp-speed back-and-forths that leave everyone else in the vicinity reacting with everything from bemusement to mild alarm. She’s like this with some other people, too, but I’m not; her personality acts on a part of me that would otherwise lie dormant. Meanwhile my partner is a very from-the-heart sort, which encourages me to be the same way; my more ironic side is tamped down in favour of sincerity and guilelessness. Same goes for their dog, with whom I have an unspoken understanding that all our interactions will be quiet and gentle. Meanwhile, I’m at my most “normal” at work, talking to my favourite colleague about my boiler trouble, car trouble and general everyday trouble. Do I reveal my inner child to him, in all its vulnerable glory? No, but this kind of small talk is me too, just like the boiler trouble itself is a bona fide part of my life. It all needs expressing. And the more I mix the more colours I can create.

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Of course, not all latent potentialities are created equal. Some environments will push all the wrong buttons in you, all the time. Others just won’t activate enough of your potential to stimulate you, and you’ll start to feel stifled. The sad reality is that many of the people you encounter simply will not collaborate with you on shared personalities that allow space for many of your qualities. And it can be practically crazy-making to watch yourself being shoved into the narrowest of boxes, where it feels like your only choices are to stay silent or say things that don’t sound like you at all. I don’t even think hiding your treasure away is always a “fake” or “inauthentic” thing to do — it’s more, what’s the point of posting a letter to an empty house? If you know all your jokes are going to go down like a lead balloon, why tell them?

Naturally, the people you want to spend the most time with are the people you can discover the most sides of yourself with. Now heavy, now light; now serious, now playful.

Over the last dozen years or so I’ve found myself increasingly collaborating on different flavours of persona to the cerebral ones I used to focus on. I’ve been moving more and more from a left-brain-centred approach to life to something more somatic and emotive, as the sensitive child that got smothered by adolescence continues to resurface bit by bit. So towards the end of college I found myself engaging less and less with my coursework and spending more of my time at open mics, writing soul-baring songs — the only way I knew how to bare my soul at the time — and having conversations that didn’t revolve around debating vegetarianism, immigration policy and abortion. I was meeting new people who introduced me to novel sides of myself, making use of fresh environments to explore a new range of shared personalities.

My change of direction was signposted from the start by the types of people I’ve always been attracted to. Of course, nothing gives you information about the sides of yourself you want to prioritise like your choice of a romantic partner. And despite being analytical and academically inclined myself, I’ve never been anything close to a sapiosexual.³ I want warmth, affection, a profound depth of connection, embodied awareness, silliness and playfulness — all very early-years things, when you think about it — with an arty side a nice bonus. Intellectual jousting is way down the list. Clearly, when it comes to my attraction system, my inner child is running the show.

But of course, all children have to grow up, and so do shared personalities. In an intimate relationship, your mutual personality is only going to be as mature as all the unresolved issues you’re carrying between you (which so often find their mirror in each other). In strong relationships, both of you grow up together and your shared personality matures with you. The childhood wounds you both expose in each other are explored with sympathy, tended to and eventually healed. Untapped potential is recognised, encouraged and realised. If love is there and both parties are willing to learn, adapt, grow and admit fault, even relationships that start out with elements you’re tempted to call “toxic” can blossom into things of beauty and strength.

In other cases, one partner grows up faster than the other, and the shared personality breaks down.

Looking at the still-learning-to-walk shared personality I’ve built with my partner so far, I see plenty of things that make me uncomfortable. Stuff I was half in denial over. Stuff I knew was there but had been hoping wouldn’t present as much of a problem as it does. Stuff that bothers me in them that’s really stuff that bothers me in myself. Again and again, we mirror each other’s insecurities; fears; unhealed traumas; need for love, support and comfort. Sometimes we carry the same baggage in the same way, sometimes the same problems are expressed in opposite ways; sometimes we have problems that seem to be each other’s opposite but complement each other all too well (their ‘walk away when things get too much’, my ‘never leave no matter how bad things get’).

In other words, things are great. I’ve been put here — for all I know I put myself here — to expand outward as far as I can and learn as much as I can, usually the hard way. And there’s nothing like an intimate shared personality to shine a massive spotlight on all those potentialities of yours that hang out in your darkest corners. Taking those shadows and transmuting the hell out of ‘em.

I should add that I’m having a lot of fun too.

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What about you — has reading this made you think any differently about your relationships with your friends, family and colleagues? How much do you change from person to person? Why? Who brings out the most sides of you? Does anyone make you take yourself by surprise? If you hit on anything interesting, the comments are open!

Photo by Barthelemy de Mazenod on Unsplash

1. These systems aren’t confined to biological families, either. Before it sadly vanished from the Internet, the Beatles fan site Hey Dullblog provided hundreds of articles’ worth of thoughtful and thought-provoking analysis of history’s most important band, much of it about the psychological dynamics that powered their creativity.

Michael Gerber

, who now pours all his energy into

The American Bystander's Viral Load

, used to argue that the Beatles bore all the hallmarks of an alcoholic “family”, with John Lennon as the “addict” and the others adapting themselves to him by falling into various supporting roles: Paul the enabler and perfectionist “hero”, George the resentful “lost child”, and Ringo the peacekeeping “mascot”. I hope I’ve got all that right; I haven’t read the blog in a while and of course it’s impossible to fact-check myself now.

2. A friend of mine, let’s call him Methuselah, recently told me about the day he introduced a couple of his other friends — both of whom live in Brussels — to each other. The one was a hard-scrabble working musician and the other, an old schoolfriend, was an ambitious sort trying to get ahead in the world of government and policy. As he described it, the two had nothing in common, and all he could do was do his best to keep the night going while it lasted and laugh to himself about how hard it is to mix friends from different worlds. This made me imagine a Venn diagram with a boho circle and a 9-to-5 circle, whose only shared area was Methuselah, a well-read musician’s son who’d forced them together for a day. I bet Methuselah’s “shared personality” with Boho Friend is very different to the one he’s nurtured with Politics Friend.

3. At least, according to the narrow ‘I like people with PhDs’ definition. I highly prize intelligence in the broader sense of the term: awareness, depth, imagination, insight, sharp instincts.