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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

freyaindia.co.uk

41–50 of 537 posts

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#41
IIRC a "disorder" is a personality trait that is extremely strong; specifically, strong enough to significantly negatively affect one's life and relationships without medication or therapy (real therapy, not "talk to someone" therapy).

For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.

We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#42
post #16

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

I think "normal" is the tough part.

I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.

If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.

Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.

Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.

At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.

But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.

Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#43
post #16

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensivenes…

Hahahaha this got me. My sarcasm/satire detectors are clearly malfunctioning today...

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensivenes…

Having gone through therapy for 10 years, nah. Having someone tell you what you already know isn’t helpful, unless you have a need to feel heard. Most people just know the bottom line. I still go to therapy. It isn’t helpful.

Why go then?

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#45
post #16

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

You mention a resistance to pathologizing normal human behaviors. That could stem from early experiences where you were perhaps judged or misunderstood for simply being yourself by caregivers, teachers, or peers. If, as a child, you were expected to conform tightly to rules or suppress emotions, you might now feel protective of traits that others try to label or correct. Therapy can be a space where that defensivenes…

This response sounds kind of effed up in the context of the article. I don't think everyone needs therapy, especially not if they're happy. Leave them be.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#46
post #42
post #16

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

I think "normal" is the tough part. I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal. If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers migh…

To some extent I think it’s valid though. The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability, it’s a natural response of your brain telling you that this activity sucks and you should get up and move.

Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#47
post #42
post #16

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

I think "normal" is the tough part. I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal. If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers migh…

ADD / ADHD denial is a pet peeve of mine because I know people with it who have experienced before and after treatment. It’s absolutely real. It’s not a consequence of “capitalism” or screens or anything else circumstantial.

Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#48
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "normal" is the tough part. I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal. If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers migh…

To some extent I think it’s valid though. The inability to want to sit in a chair and reorganise spreadsheets for 8 hours straight isn’t a disability, it’s a natural response of your brain telling you that this activity sucks and you should get up and move. Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.

This isn't really my original point but the reason I dislike the "you don't have ADHD you have capitalism" meme is that ADHD's intentionality symptoms isn't about attention but about self control[0]

So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.

Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".

Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.

And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.

Bit of a glib opinion, though.

[0]: Not a doctor, etc.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#49
Labels are incredibly simplistic and reductive. Try to compress the entire written works of Shakespeare into a single word. You can, though it would not do his command of the language justice.

Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.

Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].

Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.

The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.

Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.

[0] Jaynes 1976

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#50

I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.

We all have a personality and it IS who we “really are.” We also all have the ability to construct personalities that misrepresent our inner lives. Doing so creates a certain kind of stress and relieves other kinds of stresses. Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several differ…

Are you the clothes you wear? No you are not. In a similar manner - your personality is what you show to the world. A construct based as a response to some trauma (or something else very influential, but usually trauma) inflicted on you as a child. i.e. your personality is the clothes your real self wears. It doesn't mean it's not part of you - it is.
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