Who the Hell Are We?

Who The Hell Are We? - The Owner's Manual

Robert Cloninger breaks it down.

Robert Cloninger and Personality. Okay, let's break down personality. The slide you see below dates from Dr Cloninger's work in 1993. It breaks personality into two separate but interconnecting branches, temperament and character.

Breaking Down Temperament

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Temperament is about our habit systems (which roughly equates to the ancient Greek concept of the "four humors") namely:

Harm avoidance - The fear system that mediates responding to punishment and pain.
Novelty seeking - Looking for pleasure, which leads to rage when frustrated.
Reward dependence - Allows us to be sensitive to social cues that in turn allows social intimacy.
Persistence - Allows us to deal with expectations about whether we will get rewarded or not. We see it in very conscientious people.

But these traits don't stand alone. They're always interacting with the person's character, namely their view of who they are and how they relate to the rest of the world. You can describe these in terms of three cognitive sets: 1) Self-directedness, 2) cooperation, and 3) self-transcendence.

It's the communication between all these that allows us to say whether someone is healthy and in a state of well-being. This in turn influences your overall sense of who you are, which in turn allows you to shape the rest of your personality.

Thus, we have a model of mental self-government that allows us to regulate the competing urges from our basic biological drives.

Fine, but if our mental self-governance is closer to anarchy, can we impose order? If it's closer to autocracy, can we loosen the reins? In short, can we change?

Let's back up. Below is Dr Cloninger's "temperament cube," that he developed in 1987.

Don't worry. We will compassionately spare you the details. The gist of the model is the interplay between three of the four temperaments: novelty seeking (high and low), harm avoidance (high and low), and reward dependence (high and low).

Thus, someone with low harm avoidance tends to be carefree and risk-taking while those with high harm avoidance are characterized as anxious and pessimistic. Combine high harm avoidance with low novelty seeking and worlds collide.

Note, on the corners of the top we see the four Cluster B Axis II personality disorders, together with their prime descriptors, thus: histrionic (passionate), antisocial (adventurous), narcissistic (sensitive), and borderline (explosive).

The bottom corners produce another set of (opposite) extremes. Thus, the antithesis to someone with explosive borderline traits would be a methodical and obsessional individual. Fortunately, most of us don't cluster into the corners.

Breaking Down Character

But life isn't that simple. This is where mental self-government and its three branches come in:

Self-directedness equates to the executive branch that implements the rules and allows you to be responsible, purposeful, and resourceful.
Cooperation equates to the legislative branch that gives you the rules to allow you to get along with other people, so you can be flexible, helpful, and compassionate.
Self-transcendence (judiciary) gives you the flexibility to figure out when the rules apply and don't apply.

Voila, the "character cube."

The ones who seek help, Dr Cloninger said, tend to be schizotypal or depressed. Thus, if we look to the bottom corner of the cube, in Dr Cloninger's words: "I had a patient of mine describe this as, 'Life is hard, people are mean, and then you die.'"

This contrasts with those who hit the character trifecta with the Jungian prize of enlightenment and all the goodies that go with it. Those with the Freudian prize of being organized can take comfort in the fact that they can at least love and work.

Thus we see a spectrum from transcendence to psychopathology, with a lot of room in the middle, meaning there is no true separation between normal and abnormal personality.

In the slide below, the upper case letters (S,C,T) stand for high self-directedness, cooperation, and transcendence, while the lower case letters (s,c,t) stand for their polar opposites. Red is happiness, blue is sadness.

Take a look. If you're low in all three, you're really going to be depressed. And seeing that personality is fairly stable, you are likely to stay depressed. Not good.

The Dynamics of Change

Change is a very nonlinear dynamic process. We tend to maximize our strengths to move in more positive directions. By contrast, if we deteriorate we tend to maximize all our weaknesses.

We are shaped by the interactions between our genes and environment, and our self-awareness (a uniquely human trait) allows us to modify our environment. So what happens when we grow up in a hostile home environment?

Dr Cloninger cited a Finish study that followed 3,600 kids from birth to adulthood. Among other things, the findings showed the effects of growing up with parents who were either overly strict (tending to bring out anger and novelty-seeking) or overly neglectful (tending to bring out anxiety).

An angry or anxious individual is going to be restricted in reacting to his environment. This is because if you get the limbic system, the emotional brain, all charged up and defensive "you shut off reasoning."

(Have you ever tried to reason with someone who is angry or anxious?)

Brain imaging studies amply demonstrate the over-reactive limbic system at work, but the same body of research also shows activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). A 2001 study that Dr Cloninger was involved in demonstrated a correlation between heightened left dorsal medial PFC activity and and those with high "self-directedness."

Translation: The thinking parts of the brain can transcend the emotional brain. Instead of blindly reacting or engaging in avoidant behavior, well-adjusted individuals evaluate what is going on inside them.

So - how to engage these recently-evolved rational parts of the brain to mobilize change? Okay, take a guess: How many thoughts do we have per second?

Answer: Ten, as in ten thoughts a second. Try snapping your fingers as fast as you can - your thoughts are going way faster. What's remarkable is that when a person has a new thought or looks at something from a new point of view, "ALL the connections in the brain shift just like that."

So we're not sending messages by neurotransmitters down highways. Rather, we are going from Point A to Point Z in the brain. (Think quantum change.)

Below is a diagram of how the internet was connected in 1999. We are looking at long tracks that connect local networks.

There is another property. Complex adaptive systems operate like nonlinear thermodynamic systems. "Stable State A," for instance, may be okay, as everything nearby is worse. But "Stable State B" (that manifests a gain in potential energy) is where you want to be. But activating the energy to get from A to B tends to involve perturbations that initially makes one feel worse.

"You have to go through this valley of tears to get there, and that's painful."

Psychiatry tends to be focused on "keeping people close to their local optimum," in other words at Stable State A.

Development is a spiral, Dr Cloninger told his audience. You can spiral up or spiral down. You need to seize on your strengths to get through your pain.

Wrapping It Up

If I interpret Dr Cloninger correctly:

If you want to return to the same miserable life you had before, psychiatry is pretty good at helping you with that. Character, Dr Cloninger is fond of quoting Immanuel Kant, is "what people make of themselves intentionally."

But if you are like me, change is forced on you. A marriage break-up, losing your job, on and on ... Whatever worked for you isn't working anymore. There is no return. Only the certainty of a long and bitter trail of tears. Even though we're in no shape to imagine the possibilities, we have no choice but to acknowledge the inevitabilities. We let go of whatever it was we were holding onto. We close our eyes, we hold our breath. We make that first step ...

McMan's Depression and Bipolar Web