The Curse of Character

Read part one here.

"Curses" work by activating the emotions of our threat brain, which motivate us to behave aggressively, defensively, or submissively. In this series of blog posts, we will be exploring five human curses—consciousness, memory, culture, family, and character—which are particularly potent and which, if we do not recognize or manage them, can cause us significant problems.

Character: Who we are

By the time we are 5—and some would argue much sooner¹—our core character has emerged. Character informs but is not the same as personality, which describes our outer appearance and behaviors that are more conscious, context-dependent (for example, my personality at home may be different from that at work), and likely to change over time. Personality can be understood as our ego-self, the one that pays attention to and interacts directly with the external world.

Character lies behind the mask of persona or personality. It has more unconscious characteristics, including deeply embedded intuitions about the self and the world around us. Character is more likely to manifest as yearnings, feelings, compulsions, and repetitive behaviors that we might not understand and cannot seem to alter. Personality, on the other hand, is more fluid, adaptable, and responsive to what we should be like as opposed to what we are like.

We become cursed by our character when we repress, ignore, deny, or hide its needs and intentions—which many of us do, because it is our character that carries many of the unwanted, rejected, and shamed parts of our being. Often, our character does not behave as it should—that's personality's job—yet it craves expression and recognition. We can feel our character in the strange, unexpected, powerful emotions and yearnings that arise in us.

One way to break the curse of character, which appears in the destructive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that we don't understand and can't seem to stop, is to discover what our character needs and wants. However, as I have said, given that many aspects of our character lie deep and hidden, this is not easy work.

Shame

One of the reasons it is so difficult to undo the curse of character and to reach and meet the parts of the self which represent deeper intuitions and yearnings is that this curse is sustained through shame, a very potent and controlling force.

Shame is a feeling triggered by threat brain emotions and is primarily fear-based. The author Brené Brown, who is well-known for her shame research, suggests that this fear arises from a fear of disconnection from others. This suggestion is supported in my research, which shows that threat brain emotions are triggered when we sense our physical, social, and psychological safety is in jeopardy, and as we are animals who find safety in groups, rejection from our group is highly threatening on all these levels.

Shame is such an intense feeling that we readily adopt other people’s "shoulds" because we notice that when we feel, think, and behave as others tell us we should, they seem to like and accept us more. Which makes the fear go away for a while. It comes back when we act in supposedly "shameful" ways, which is why many of us are hypersensitive to criticism and disapproval.

Our cursed character is buried under the layers of all that we feel we should be, based on the desires and demands of significant others, when in our first years of life, being who we should be was a matter of life and death. Then we learned to defend, justify, and protect this "should-be" version of ourselves and, every time we did, shunned our true character and reinforced the curse. We learned over and over again how to be what we are not, and in doing so, we stopped growing; we ossified.

A woman once said to me, “I feel like I’ve turned to stone. Not suddenly but gradually. I don’t feel anymore, and I don’t really care about much. What was the point of it all?”

This is a typical reflection when the curse of character begins to show. After five decades of dragging it around, you look at it one day and no longer see your face in the stone.

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Rediscovering who we are

To break the curse of character, we need to look again, with brave honesty, at the people (dead or alive) who informed us in those crucial years. What did they tell us about life and how we should live it? And from where did their versions of the world emanate?

The second question is crucial because breaking the curse, as we have already seen, also requires us to enter the cave of the past with appreciative eyes. Blame, anger, fear, guilt, and shame will make shadows dance that will send us hurtling and screaming from that dark place. Appreciation, curiosity, respect, and forgiveness throw a different, warmer light that invites us to go further and to learn about the people behind the shadows—most of whom are benign.⁴

When we do this, we can feel compassion for our parents, who themselves were acting out the tyrannical "shoulds" of how to be a good parent. At the same time, we can also recognize how the socialization process disappears aspects of our character and leaves us incomplete, unfulfilled, and conflicted. Our character wants to emerge; it wants to be seen in whole, not in parts. The more we deny its expression, the more it will curse us with its demands, unwanted appearances, and the strange and pervasive feeling that things—that we—are not quite right.

In part five next week, we explore the curse of family.