This isn’t meant to be a negative post. I wanted to tweak how I handle some things and have gotten better but I it made me think.
Could you turn someone 360 completely? Like from a freak to a mighty, a chad to a chud, a person to a stealers fan?
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.
How much did that DBT cost you? It’s a pretty big undertaking right?
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.
Wouldn’t it be 180?
Yes it would.
But 360 is easier to accomplish
Semantics. 360 is back to start.
But yes.
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.
You are your actions.
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.
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I believe you can! To change honestly is an epic task, you need willpower & foremost the characteristic of self reflection, self observation from the most possible objective perspective (I know, complete objectivity not achievable), and you need a person you can trust to get another point of view imo, but at the end of the day you need only one thing: the honest, straight and truthful will to change. I’ve seen people turn 180°. That’s what life is for imo.
Yes you can change personality drastically.
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.
Stealers? Steelers?
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If you didn’t change it willingly, you’ll be forced to change it when you have kids. I know for a fact that I’m not the person I was 10 years ago. Not even close.
It is certainly possible to adjust some measurable elements of personality. For example, use of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) has been shown to alter measurable personality factors.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6220878/
https://www.google.com/search?q=psilocybin+and+personalityI did it just by myself. I just kept critiquing myself after a negative interaction and trying to figure out why I got angry or frustrated. I still give in to that anger once in a while but I’ve gotten better.
I learned it’s easier for me to forgive when I’ve had proper sleep, actually. I also look at it from the other person’s side and think of what problems that person is going through and excuse them for whatever is frustrating me.
It’s easy to think of it like a shitty driver and getting angry at them. Why are they speeding? Could be a bathroom emergency. Could be meeting a loved one at the hospital. I don’t know, so I’m not gonna judge.
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I speed because then I’m not stuck in the 7-9 over range with every other asshole. Trust me. 15 over is worth the ticket. You hit way more patches of open road on the interstate if you blast ahead of the snarls. I’m taking 20 miles on a 3 lane with no one in front of you. It’s almost as nice as when everyone was dying from covid. The roads were so empty and stress free. We’ll never get back to that paradise.
I wasn’t like this before. This is one aspect of how my personality changed. Why do you care if I pass your 9-over ass? You shouldn’t. I don’t tailgate. I don’t drive crazy. I’m just going to go fast enough that I don’t get stuck behind every asshole that sets their cruise in the fast lane.
Probably not the safest thing head-wise, but I guess you can achieve this with LSD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Really? I thought it was just a EDM party drug
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.
Weed helped me do a complete 180 on my lifestyle. I went from an unemployed overweight alcoholic retard to a barely employed mildly overweight idiot.
LSD as an EDM party drug is excellent in the same way Batman would make an excellent shade structure.
You can and you do change as you age.
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 think you mean 180. 360 would be a full rotation, you’d be going from the dark side to the light side back to the dark side. But yes, it’s possible to change someone by overshadowing their bad influences. Good influences, by definition, have more influential potential.
