The Quest to Be Oneself

A fundamental human motivation is to act in character. If I am constantly rewarded in the presence of an object or condition, I will come to associate that condition with the reward, and I will imbue it with all sorts of positive connotations.

Brand loyalty in marketing depends on this very connection. I prefer Coke because I associate the good taste of cola with the Coke logo. Nostalgia for home is also a function of conditioning. Much good that happened to me as a child happened at home, so I am fond of home. One constant that is present whenever I am rewarded is me.

I was present during every good meal, every moment of comfort, every aesthetic experience, and every bit of pleasure. If everything good that had ever happened in my life had happened while I was writing, I would be very fond of writing. Since everything good that has happened in my life has happened while I was being me, I am very fond of being me. People act in character because acting in character is reinforced every time anything good happens to them.

Growing up in a family system that has cultivated a certain way of being oneself is another powerful motivator for acting in character. When you act in character, you are rewarded by having things run smoothly—or at least familiarly. When you act out of character, you are dissuaded by having things run chaotically. For example, 12-year-old Tom was supposed to be extremely insolent, an attitude that served a family function. It gave his father a good excuse for ventilating hostility, it gave his mother an excuse for not working outside the home as she was constantly called to school, and it made his little brother seem angelic by comparison.

When I met them, just holding the assessment session met all these agendas: Dad was exasperated about missing work because of Tom's need to be assessed, Mom was again prohibited from facing the larger world, and the brother was clearly there as the good son. Thus, Tom did not need to be insolent that day and, in fact, was quite pleasant during the family session. The rest of the family proceeded to irritate him until he finally blew up. His father described him to me in insulting terms, his brother grabbed the toy Tom had picked off the shelf, and his mother made Tom let the little brother keep that toy. The family was, of course, also motivated by their desire to show me what they had to put up with, but I still think that, in general, they were also showing me how they conditioned him to be insolent.

It is like that old joke where the guy consults a psychiatrist about his brother who, for 20 years, has lived as a chicken. The psychiatrist asks why they are coming for help now and not 20 years ago. The guy replies, we needed the eggs. In this case, the eggs were the gains associated with Tom's insolence. The family's need for these made Tom act in character.

Because of these different motivators, most people like to be themselves and will take every opportunity to be the way they identify as "I." This is what makes personality testing work. On inventories, people want to represent themselves by answering the items truthfully—they want to act in character. On projective tests, character wins out because people prefer to construe ambiguous situations in their familiar ways.

The motive to be oneself is often hard to spot in spite of the fact that it is so powerful. This is because the impulse is so ubiquitously and pervasively gratified that it is rare to see a person not acting in character and therefore rare to see how hard the person will work to get back to the familiar. It is like the quest for oxygen. People are rarely without oxygen, so it is hard to guess from watching people under normal conditions how powerful the motive is to obtain oxygen. Analogously, people are generally acting in situations that are suited to them, because they have constructed social and physical environments made for their own identity.

It is only when people are placed in novel situations that their desire to act in character becomes clear. Group therapy, for example, teaches people about themselves by putting them in novel groups and helping them discover what roles they insist on playing. Psychological testing puts people in novel situations and records how they manifest themselves. Relational therapy analyzes the way the patient creates a unique relationship with the therapist that keeps the patient in character. One reason family complexes reproduce themselves in the individual, and then again in new situations, is that individuals come to define themselves according to their roles in the complex, and manifesting that definition is very powerfully motivated.

Therapy, whether group, family, or individual, can broaden people’s definitions of who they are so that the character they are driven to manifest isn’t so constricted. Therapists may empathize with parts of their patients that are not currently included in what is considered to be acting in character. Therapy communicates that you’re still you when you are angry, tender, needy, triumphant, sexual, and so on.

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Therapy can also help patients experience the drawbacks of acting in overly constricted ways. When a woman’s suspicions (which may originally have protected her from an intrusive family, for example) make only narcissists dare to approach her, it bolsters her sense that others are narcissistic and increases her reserve. When the same thing happens in therapy, the therapist neither plows ahead nor ignores her, but instead wonders how they got to a place where the only way they can relate to each other is if the therapist acts intrusively. The patient gets to experience a new way of relating that is neither, in this case, intrusive nor uninterested.

A similar version of this post was published in The Colorado Psychologist.