Yeah, on a more serious note there are effective treatments for personality disorders, most notably DBT.
Also we’re all growing and changing all the time. I was once an awkward and unpleasant prude, these days I’m anything but. The thing about personality growth is it’ll happen whether you want them to or not unless you’re stagnating (also bad).
You just act the way you want to act, and keep doing it until it’s who you are. A Vonnegut quote I love is “we are who we pretend to be.” I pretended to be socially confident and it turned out to not be hard after some practice. I pretended to be cool with stuff that I didn’t like made me irrationally uncomfortable and wouldn’t you know I got comfortable around it. Pretend to be nice and wouldn’t you know it eventually becomes second nature.
And yeah it can go worse. Shut yourself off from new experiences and the outside gets scarier. Spend time with bigots and you may find yourself agreeing with them. Move to Pittsburgh and not only will you risk enjoying their football you may even dump your fries on your sandwich even when you’re in the civilized world.
Choose your actions carefully, you risk letting them determine who you become. It’s a lot easier to justify your behavior than to change your habits and instincts.
Yes. Mine changed because I changed it. I had BPD my entire life. My providers are certain I was born with it. I’ve always only ever known extremes and unstable relationships, until now- after a year of intense DBT treatment. I have changed my personality, my entire perspective on life, so yes. I hope the OP sees this. (I’m also bragging a bit, it only took a year to recover from a disorder I unknowingly had my entire life once diagnosed and was informed.) You have to rewire your entire fucking brain, but you can.
So, with my therapist’s guidance, I was able to do my own after she picked out things I specifically needed to work on. I ordered a DBT spiral workbook and learned from there, I can now apply these skills daily. It’s saved my relationships and life. And yes, you have to re-wire basically your entire brain and world view. I was able to get it done in about a year.
A long time ago I listened to a podcast episode (Probably Hidden Brain or something) where they discussed how memory affects your personality. People with dementia or some other memory related condition tend to have a different personality than they previously did. Then on another podcast, video or something I picked up another interesting piece of information. People can make new fake memories. Put these two together, and you got a strange method I came up with. If I’m able to come up with this stuff, then obviously smarter people have already done it and are using it on a ragular basis. It’s just that I haven’t heard of anyone doing that yet.
So, here’s the idea. Let’s say you don’t like the way just chill out all day and nothing gets done. You want to change that. Then you start fabricating new memories about how you are really hard working and how you have your life under control. Just imagine a bunch of stories like that about your fabricated past and those stories will gradually become proper memories inside your head. Once that’s done, it’s going to start influencing the way you see your self and how you behave in the future.
Other than hoping you are a teenager, such things have been tried. Self hypnosis, autogenic training… I don’t think anything focusing on implanting fake memories (and removing current ones?).
If you wish to know more about the benefits through therapeutic approaches, I highly recommend Prof. James Fadiman’s book titled ‘The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide’. It is a rather large resource based on Fadiman’s involvement in LSD trials before research was halted abruptly and without warning, and is as close to a scientific approach to developing better pathways to preferred thought processes (through the use of psychedelics mainly LSD) that I am aware of.
Other resources include a therapeutic handbook, provided to health professionals such as psychiatrists prior to the illegalisation of LSD. This can be found on Erowid, alongside other documents that have survived.
My ex was a chill stoner who got radicalized on the internet and became an abusive alcoholic raging racist, then got sober but is still an angry right wing asshole.
I was selfish/self-centered as fuck as a teenager and gained patience and perspective over time, I think most people do change in that way, become more aware of others, nicer. Not everyone, obviously. But most.
You probably already do, I know I’m not the same person I was years ago. I think it’s a good thing to be conscious of your personality going forward. My take is, you are you, therefore whatever you do is something you would do. So do what you want, don’t overthink it.
I was always told this story with ending that he became a monster after starting life mild mannered. The actual accounts conflict each other depending who was being asked about him… I can’t imagine having half the prefrontal cortex blasted out leaves you with better judgement though?
Anatoli Bugorski is another case worth a look. No personality change though.
Woah, good that he survived and it’s impressive he continued to work in the field afterwards
As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russian SSR, Anatoli Bugorski worked with the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union, the U-70 synchrotron. On 13 July 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 GeV proton beam. Reportedly, he saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns” but did not feel any pain. The beam passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left hand side of his nose. The exposed parts of his head received a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens (2,000 to 3,000 Sieverts). Bugorski understood the severity of what had happened, but continued working on the malfunctioning equipment, and initially opted not to tell anyone what had happened.
I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.
I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.
I was a social outcast introvert, and people used to assume I’d be some Columbine kid. Now I speak in front of huge crowds in my company, and manage a engineering department.
One of my staff member was in the Olympics. Now they’re doing tech work. Another was homeless. Another was a “mom who dropped out of high school”. And another used to work at Little Caesars. All of them are engineers doing kick ass work. And you would never know their history.
That’s a reach. 360 (degree) spin is a common enough “could care less” type expression. There’s no way OP meant “spin 57 times, then turn a little more than one quarter more.”
Generally speaking, anything described as a “spiritual practice” will tend to alter people’s personality to the degree they put effort into it.
It’s not normal for personality to change much. People’s personality changes under relatively rare conditions: trauma, enlightenment, extreme conditioning.
Another commenter mentioned psychedelic drugs and those are definitely catalysts for personality change.
The things that have changed my personality the most are:
abuse
violence while homeless
ayahuasca ceremonies
getting the 10-series from a rolfer
By “personality” here I’m talking about emotional patterns, which become the foundation for all sorts of beliefs, tastes, tendencies, social roles.
By emotional patterns I mean the overall averages of joy, sadness, fear, openness, guilt, etc, both over time and also in their typical daily cycles.
My family hurt my feelings, so I went from class clown to silent observer. I intended to only modify my behavior around them, but it started to spill into other areas of my life. Now I’m a very quiet person.
First, you learn new things and you live new experiences. This changes your personality, for better or for worse.
Second, your personality is rooted in your ideals and beliefs, and you can purposefully change those.
Your personality can be described as the way you act and react, and both of those are learned. You may even say programmed. You can change the way you react to some situations, or the way you act in some situations. It takes a bit of practice.
Now that can sound easy, but it requires you to be very open-minded and honest about yourself, because you think with your beliefs already, so changing them may not be that easy. You need to litteraly think differently than you usually do. It’s a lot of introspection.
i would jump at the chance to have electro-shock. the only way into a better life (for me, BPD) would be to change personality altogether. i wouldn’t hesitate at all.
I haven't looked into the benefits of electroshock with BPD, but I'd recommend taking a look at Dr. Daniel Fox's workbook for an at-home DBT/attachment theory foucsed program. BPD is one of the few PDs that has been provably shown to be able to change. If you have $30 or so to spare, it can't hurt.
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