Does Going to Therapy Change your Personality?

All of us have different reasons for starting therapy and hence different expectations from it. Yet at the core, we feel the need to work on ourselves when we feel we could be more or less of something - more disciplined, more self-assured, more emotionally intelligent; or less anxious, less insecure and less stuck.   

So when we work on ourselves in therapy, do we eventually emerge with a changed personality? 

Unlike biological characteristics your personality doesn't stop developing at a certain age. This can bring great hope and reassurance if you’ve been feeling stuck in unhelpful patterns for so long that you start questioning your existence and self-worth. 

Therapy can get you closer to your real self - the one without inhibitions, people pleasing pressure, or fear of judgement. How? By helping you break down how these protective layers developed for you. Sometimes life circumstances require you to be a certain way in order to face the challenges at that point. Overworking, perfectionism, hyper-independence, conflict-avoidance, and emotional numbing are some such coping mechanisms to help us survive in emotionally, mentally and physically demanding times. These patterns tend to stick around even after the need for them has passed, keeping you in survival mode even when you’ve reached safe grounds. The work you do in therapy challenges you to go outside of your comfort zone. This allows you to explore who you could be outside the realms of comfort.

If you feel a certain emotion (anxiety, anger, guilt) affects you to an extent that it shows up in most of your behaviours and thoughts, therapy can help you regulate this emotion by helping you understand the purpose it serves for you and keep it only to the extent that it's required in your life. So you can be more than just your emotion. 

Often, our inhibitions are constructed to protect ourselves from judgement that might have been others' at a certain point, but which slowly became our own judgements. The parts of your personality that these judgements target slowly fade away (e.g. your unusual sense of humour, or your cheerful laugh). Therapy can help you process the past experiences that these judgments come from, so you can have the chance of deciding whether these judgments hold true and whether you really want to evaluate yourself against them.  

The bottom line is - there's no such thing as an ideal personality. So therapy is less about fixing yourself, and more about helping you become an authentic version of yourself. The goals you work on in therapy focus on resolving the barriers that prevent you from being truly you. 

References

Dweck, C. S. (2008). Can personality be changed? The role of beliefs in personality and change. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(6), 391–394. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00612.x 

Charles S. Carver, Jennifer Connor-Smith. 2010. Personality and Coping. Annual Review of Psychology 61:679-704. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100352 

Wood, W. (2017). Habit in Personality and Social Psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21, 389 - 403. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317720362 

Disclaimer: This blog post is meant for awareness/entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice and one must refrain from self-diagnosing. It is in no way a substitute for therapy with a mental health professional and it is not meant to be clinical. To consult with a psychotherapist on our team, you can contact us on fettle.counselling@gmail.com.