Know Thyself IV: Know Your Personality

24 March 2021

In this fourth consecutive blog, on Aristotle’s explanation of the Delphic inscription, Know Thyself, the goal is to understand the role that the inborn desire to understand plays in your own soul. One of the most important background facts about this perspective is that Aristotle saw human beings as rational animals.  This has two implications.  Firstly, rationality, the ability to account for things, is what Aristotle believed differentiated humans from non-humans; rationality was the Aristotelian calling card of the human being.  Secondly, to be alive, per Aristotle, was to possess the capacity for movement.  That movement was held to be ends-based or goal-directed. 

Desire, rational accounting, and movement are the three immediate topics.  When I imagine introverts and extroverts coming to terms with these three factors, contrasting scenes arise.  The desire, the choice of rational versus irrational accounting, and movement, are common to introverts and extroverts, but the direction of exploration may be different.  That is, for introverts more of the exploration may be internal and self exploratory.  For extroverts, exploration is more broadly social, more outward looking than for introverts.  All of which assumes well-spirited, healthy subjects of exploration i.e., the movement and rational accounting is pulled toward healthy subjects and pursuits.

This is not so with addictive behaviours.  With addictive behaviours and with manageable mental illnesses, the focus tends to be neurotic.  As many of you will know, neuroticism is the “N” in O.C.E.A.N. the Big 5 of personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism).  “People [who score] high on the personality trait of neuroticism tend to worry frequently.  They may worry about their health, their social interactions, their work, their future, or just about anything.  Worrying and complaining takes up a great proportion of their time (Larsen & Buss, 2014, p. 414, My emphasis).”  There is a known relationship between negative emotions and high neuroticism.  Let’s put this in the hopper with Aristotle’s claim to see what emerges.

If correct, psychosocially “normal” human beings (and if you’re reading this, you are in that category) possess a desire to know, a tendency to account rationally, and a drive for movement within their lives.  The person with optimum scores on OCEAN traits probably skips through and functions in healthy ways although that is hugely dependent on her individual life circumstances.  If you are, for genetic and/or environmental reasons, high on neuroticism and introversion, and low on agreeableness, you probably spend an unhealthy amount of time unwillingly alone, worried, and deeply frustrated by life and other people.  All of this is part of knowing thyself. 

In SMART Recovery, it is recommended that, particularly at the beginning of your journey through sobriety and into recovery, you work with a counsellor, therapist, or psychiatrist, depending on your mental health issues.  When I look at the complexity of what we’ve just discussed those factors alone provide a great reason to have a second set of well-trained eyes on your situation i.e., knowing thyself is not a DIY project—it’s a concentrated awareness of your own internal processing combined with secondary observations of your external responses.  And that’s pretty cool because it says that knowing thyself is a necessarily social activity.

One of the sweetest corollaries I can recall learning is that the more we succeed at knowing ourselves, the less judgmental we are of our own behaviours.  The less judgmental we are of our own behaviours, the less judgmental we are of others.  All of which means, to know thyself is to know others, too.  And to have them know you.

Dan Chalykoff provides one-to-one counselling concerning life direction, addiction, and change. Since 2017 he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery: danchalykoff@hotmail.com