Transcending Personality

Our first step is to establish a safe place from which to recognise our trauma.

Our sense of self arises each and every moment as a reaction to experience.

How we react to others, as well as challenges, is our personality. This is nothing more or less than our conditioning. If our conditioning was traumatic, then understandably, we tend to react unusually or unnecessarily. This is our personality, which is neither our sense of self nor our true self.

When we think about difficult times, we can easily recognise that how we reacted, both internally and externally, was simply our trauma (personality). How we felt at this time was our sense of self. Now, as we think about these difficult times, our sense of self is different to what it was then. This is because our sense of self is not fixed, but responds every moment to our current experience.

We also have a third viewpoint — the observer. From here, we can see our personality (traumatic response), our sense of self at that time, and our current deeper sense of self that might start to feel like the previous one. This is why we don’t like reviewing painful experiences — our sense of self brings forth similar feelings. However, this deeper awareness allows us to realise we cannot just be our traumatic memories or how we respond to them.

From here, we realise that we are more than our personality. Personalities are simply a curriculum vitae of relative privilege and/or trauma. Nor are we the reaction to this. We never really mistake our sense of identity for our feelings or thoughts — these happen to us.

We can gain increasing confidence in recognising our trauma, which manifests as personality, while ceasing to invest any importance in it. If we are super-anxious and jumpy, we can recognise that of course we should be — but it is not who we are. Once you can firmly remove any sense of self from personality, the behaviours it creates will tend to reduce in both frequency and intensity.

“The mind is everything. What you think you become.”
— The Buddha (Dhammapada 1:1)