This isn’t meant to be a negative post. I wanted to tweak how I handle some things and have gotten better but I it made me think.
Could you turn someone 360 completely? Like from a freak to a mighty, a chad to a chud, a person to a stealers fan?
You certainly can change your personality. It takes a long time and effort. That being said if you want to change your personality you shouldn’t take a 360 turn
Yeah, on a more serious note there are effective treatments for personality disorders, most notably DBT.
Also we’re all growing and changing all the time. I was once an awkward and unpleasant prude, these days I’m anything but. The thing about personality growth is it’ll happen whether you want them to or not unless you’re stagnating (also bad).
You just act the way you want to act, and keep doing it until it’s who you are. A Vonnegut quote I love is “we are who we pretend to be.” I pretended to be socially confident and it turned out to not be hard after some practice. I pretended to be cool with stuff that I didn’t like made me irrationally uncomfortable and wouldn’t you know I got comfortable around it. Pretend to be nice and wouldn’t you know it eventually becomes second nature.
And yeah it can go worse. Shut yourself off from new experiences and the outside gets scarier. Spend time with bigots and you may find yourself agreeing with them. Move to Pittsburgh and not only will you risk enjoying their football you may even dump your fries on your sandwich even when you’re in the civilized world.
Choose your actions carefully, you risk letting them determine who you become. It’s a lot easier to justify your behavior than to change your habits and instincts.
Yes. Mine changed because I changed it. I had BPD my entire life. My providers are certain I was born with it. I’ve always only ever known extremes and unstable relationships, until now- after a year of intense DBT treatment. I have changed my personality, my entire perspective on life, so yes. I hope the OP sees this. (I’m also bragging a bit, it only took a year to recover from a disorder I unknowingly had my entire life once diagnosed and was informed.) You have to rewire your entire fucking brain, but you can.
How much did that DBT cost you? It’s a pretty big undertaking right?
So, with my therapist’s guidance, I was able to do my own after she picked out things I specifically needed to work on. I ordered a DBT spiral workbook and learned from there, I can now apply these skills daily. It’s saved my relationships and life. And yes, you have to re-wire basically your entire brain and world view. I was able to get it done in about a year.
It’s possible to change your personality. Most people have several. You probably don’t act the same way towards your best friend as you do towards your boss or towards a random stranger. Sales people change their personalities to match the person they’re trying to sell to.
If you’re talking about changing lifestyles and habits, that’s absolutely possible too. It just takes a lot of determination and repetition.
It’s even possible to turn 360 degrees and walk in a different direction (as long as it’s a moon walk)
Dated a salesman, can confirm. They’re crazy.
Wouldn’t it be 180?
Yes it would.
But 360 is easier to accomplish
My family hurt my feelings, so I went from class clown to silent observer. I intended to only modify my behavior around them, but it started to spill into other areas of my life. Now I’m a very quiet person.
I mean, in the late 2000s I was kind of a shitty person. But in like 2014 I realized I was a piece of shit and started to work on myself.
I stopped basing my personality on how many girls I could land and started just focusing on myself and not on relationships. I spent 2 years guiding myself to a much better place, and then in 2016 I met my current fiance.
Semantics. 360 is back to start.
But yes.
I was a social outcast introvert, and people used to assume I’d be some Columbine kid. Now I speak in front of huge crowds in my company, and manage a engineering department.
One of my staff member was in the Olympics. Now they’re doing tech work. Another was homeless. Another was a “mom who dropped out of high school”. And another used to work at Little Caesars. All of them are engineers doing kick ass work. And you would never know their history.
You are your actions.
Semantics, but OP never said the unit of measure. It could be radians for all you know.
could be radians
That’s a reach. 360 (degree) spin is a common enough “could care less” type expression. There’s no way OP meant “spin 57 times, then turn a little more than one quarter more.”
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Maybe don’t do this though
I was always told this story with ending that he became a monster after starting life mild mannered. The actual accounts conflict each other depending who was being asked about him… I can’t imagine having half the prefrontal cortex blasted out leaves you with better judgement though?
Anatoli Bugorski is another case worth a look. No personality change though.
Woah, good that he survived and it’s impressive he continued to work in the field afterwards
As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russian SSR, Anatoli Bugorski worked with the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union, the U-70 synchrotron. On 13 July 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 GeV proton beam. Reportedly, he saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns” but did not feel any pain. The beam passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left hand side of his nose. The exposed parts of his head received a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens (2,000 to 3,000 Sieverts). Bugorski understood the severity of what had happened, but continued working on the malfunctioning equipment, and initially opted not to tell anyone what had happened.
Well, I suppose if he wasn’t traumatised he would have subsequently been extremely careful in the lab ;)
It’s a slow and difficult process, but yes. There are certain personality disorders that can be provably put into “remission,” and if people with conditions that severe can change their personalities, anyone can.
You have to learn how you’ve been conditioned to think and feel the way you do, and get a lot of self-discipline re: stopping to notice your feelings, figure out why they’re arising, think through the consequences of acting on them, and choosing a better way.
I hate to use terms like this since they’re so often the territory of conspiracy nutjobs, but you’re basically deprogramming yourself. For example, a sensitive person who’s been exposed to a lot of bullying might have learned some pretty intense defensive reaction, so you’d have to stop every time you think “what did he mean by that?” and think of why that’s your first reaction, then choose to believe the best possible meaning even though your feelings scream at you not to. And you’d maybe keep a journal to remind yourself of all the times you were right to assume the best, since a defensive mind discards the positive and overemphasizes the negative.
This sort of thing is best accomplished with the aid of a mental health professional, but there are workbooks you can get if that’s out of cost/feasibility reach for you. You’d need to know your deal to know which ones to focus on.
Yes you can change personality drastically.
Generally speaking, anything described as a “spiritual practice” will tend to alter people’s personality to the degree they put effort into it.
It’s not normal for personality to change much. People’s personality changes under relatively rare conditions: trauma, enlightenment, extreme conditioning.
Another commenter mentioned psychedelic drugs and those are definitely catalysts for personality change.
The things that have changed my personality the most are:
- abuse
- violence while homeless
- ayahuasca ceremonies
- getting the 10-series from a rolfer
By “personality” here I’m talking about emotional patterns, which become the foundation for all sorts of beliefs, tastes, tendencies, social roles.
By emotional patterns I mean the overall averages of joy, sadness, fear, openness, guilt, etc, both over time and also in their typical daily cycles.
I believe you can! To change honestly is an epic task, you need willpower & foremost the characteristic of self reflection, self observation from the most possible objective perspective (I know, complete objectivity not achievable), and you need a person you can trust to get another point of view imo, but at the end of the day you need only one thing: the honest, straight and truthful will to change. I’ve seen people turn 180°. That’s what life is for imo.
A long time ago I listened to a podcast episode (Probably Hidden Brain or something) where they discussed how memory affects your personality. People with dementia or some other memory related condition tend to have a different personality than they previously did. Then on another podcast, video or something I picked up another interesting piece of information. People can make new fake memories. Put these two together, and you got a strange method I came up with. If I’m able to come up with this stuff, then obviously smarter people have already done it and are using it on a ragular basis. It’s just that I haven’t heard of anyone doing that yet.
So, here’s the idea. Let’s say you don’t like the way just chill out all day and nothing gets done. You want to change that. Then you start fabricating new memories about how you are really hard working and how you have your life under control. Just imagine a bunch of stories like that about your fabricated past and those stories will gradually become proper memories inside your head. Once that’s done, it’s going to start influencing the way you see your self and how you behave in the future.
If anyone has a name for this, let me know.
Visualization is what it’s called.
Probably not the safest thing head-wise, but I guess you can achieve this with LSD ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Really? I thought it was just a EDM party drug
Weed helped me do a complete 180 on my lifestyle. I went from an unemployed overweight alcoholic retard to a barely employed mildly overweight idiot.
If you wish to know more about the benefits through therapeutic approaches, I highly recommend Prof. James Fadiman’s book titled ‘The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide’. It is a rather large resource based on Fadiman’s involvement in LSD trials before research was halted abruptly and without warning, and is as close to a scientific approach to developing better pathways to preferred thought processes (through the use of psychedelics mainly LSD) that I am aware of.
Other resources include a therapeutic handbook, provided to health professionals such as psychiatrists prior to the illegalisation of LSD. This can be found on Erowid, alongside other documents that have survived.
LSD as an EDM party drug is excellent in the same way Batman would make an excellent shade structure.
I have gradually turned myself into a more compassionate person by deliberately working on managing my emotions. I’m a lot less angry and far more open minded than me of ten years ago. There’s hope if you really want it.
