Dave’s 4Personalities Theory In Relationships

Relax. Open your mind, and come along with me on a journey into the human mind. Together, we will consider the four active personalities that exist within our minds.

We carry many more personality elements and general knowledge within our minds, but we predominately do not actively use them… we sometimes refer to them, sometimes make jokes with them, but mainly, they remain filed away or in a “backburner”, proposed-use scenario, just simmering. This is how we operate.

Please note that this essay primarily applies to the over 50 crowd. Younger folks are obviously forming these structures, but may not be able to connect with everything here.

It is most difficult to analyze ourselves broadly to make accurate predictions about our behavior and relationship prospects. This is true, because we know too much of our “backburner” complexities, which have little effect on our active four personalities, we change over time, and the different types of people we meet draw out different personality elements in us as we interact and respond to them.

So, it is very difficult to predict, in a very useful way, which specific elements we'll be dealing with in an anticipated relationship. Anyway, making specific predictions is not why we're here considering the human mind.

We simply want to understand our operations and the patterns our interactions will be looking to follow. We’ll talk about the most likely order of operations, but with people, anything can happen, so the order may jump around, but the structure remains essentially the same.

Since we are changing / evolving creatures, the best way for us to develop our understanding of our relationship behavior is by taking snap-shots of how we were during specific brief relationships, and during specific identifiable phases of longer relationships.

First, I’ll present a general introduction to our four active personalities, who they are, and the functional areas they specialize in as they assert themselves in our lives.

Each one of these four active personalities is a part of us with specific territories and capabilities. Their relative freedoms and strengths are variable and are somewhat controllable the more aware we generally are of their presence. So, let's look in on them now…

1. Our "Inner Spirit" personality is usually the next to last of the 4 personalities within us that the other person gets to meet. This is who we truly are. It is essentially our inner child, which most of us will only share freely during moments of our most open, vulnerable, trusting, and joyful times. This is the big boss but not the day-to-day boss everyone normally sees. This “Inner Spirit” personality primarily handles our long-term strategies and major changes in direction, location, or orientation decisions. But it is also tender, sweet, sentimental, trusting, and gentle. It wants to be happy. It decides what happiness is, and what it isn't. For me, this personality is usually the most endearing, for it is ALWAYS the one I fall in love with IF I fall in love.

2. Our "Work/Public View" personality is normally the first, and sometimes the only personality which other people get to meet. This personality runs our daily business, handles our tactical maneuvers, and manages all phases of our lives where we wish to present a smart, responsible, and guarded yet reasonable, and flexible persona. But this personality is not really who we are - it's just an efficient and effective, outer, general working, living, and dealing-with-people personality we have developed over the years just to keep things rolling, plus any applicable special training we may have ingested and applied to this purpose.

3. Our “negative” personality is immediately-judgmental, self-critical and cynical about the things we are involved in or considering. It wants to brings us cautious balance to the wild ideas our more adventurous personalities bring to the table. Within this personality is where our worries, guilts, self-doubts, and self-conflicts reside. No one ever actually meets this personality individually, but it commiserates closely with the “Work/Public View” persona, and if it's presence is strong, it can easily be detected in the self doubts, negativity, and apathy expressed from the “Work/Public View” personality as our relationship develops and begins to encounter some “growing pains”. Some people hardly show any signs of this personality because they keep it carefully tucked away, but others become obsessed with it and actually allow it to take over within the “Work/Public View” persona. This personality can definitely become very limiting and can eventually become the relationship ender.

4. Our “Highly Principled Ruler” personality is triggered by some key principle(s) embedded into our psyche by life scars. It's always there, lurking comfortably, perhaps smugly, back in the cool, dark corners of our minds, waiting, watching, listening. We normally keep this personality suppressed, but within certain conditions and situations, it just pops right out with a passion. We all seem to have one of these with at least one strong trigger chain, but there can be more triggers, and each one of these we have in our mind increases our chances of breakup when it comes out. (Usually, in the absence of adequate tolerance, this is the one personality that either breaks up the relationship or is the reason the corresponding personality in the other person breaks it up).

In summary, the “Work/Public View” personality generally takes the lead in most situations, but is influenced and sometimes distracted by the “Negative” personality. The “Highly Principled Ruler” hangs back taking in everything and ready to pounce upon the first solid sign of any I-told-you-so situation. And the sweet, loving, and vulnerable “Inner Spirit” is quietly running the whole show, leaning heavily upon it's three tougher and meaner associates.

Now you have the fundamental concepts of these four active personalities in your mind. Do you find them familiar to you as you read their descriptions? Is an odd smile creeping across your face as you encounter these words? Please continue…

Let’s take another journey now into how our motivations and drives operate within these four personalities when we decide to develop and conduct a relationship with another person.

When we approach another fully functioning human carrying the hopes or intent of creating a relationship with them, we feel nervous. It seems like a blind operation because we feel lost in the nothingness we know about them. Perhaps the following narrative will provide some “common ground” we can work with.

#1. I, my “Inner Spirit” primarily want to get to know your “Inner Spirit”, because I know without a doubt, that is the personality I might fall in love with. And, if I do fall in love with your “Inner Spirit”, I sincerely hope that my putting up with your other three, harsher personalities within you, will surely be worth it just to have the opportunities to associate with your “Inner Spirit”. That is my primary motivation and drive for getting to know you. I run the show behind the scenes.

#2. I know that your “Work/Public View” personality will be your most common presence I have to interact with. And I also know that I will know pretty quickly if this personality is going to be a problem for me trying to like you. I know that, usually, if we get past the first few casual meetings and I find this personality okay to be around, it will not become the deal breaker by itself.

However, my real goal is to get my inner spirit in touch with your inner spirit and hope they really like each other. Because that’s where love happens.

#3. I'm really hoping your “Negative” personality is not too strong, because I want you to be nice, but I also want you to be confident and tolerant of the nuances you will encounter in a new relationship with me.

I want you to be patient to allow some of our new activities to adjust and settle down a bit on their own time, before we start critically evaluating and discounting the value or effectiveness of the attempts.

Please allow plenty of time and reflective thought for the more delicate aesthetic voices within us to be heard before allowing the “Negative” personality to just trash everything we’re trying to do.

#4. I know that, although we will be getting to know each other, I will probably not see your “Highly Principled Ruler” personality, until we have spent a lot of time together, built some trust, met our inner spirits, decided how we feel about them, and then, during some primarily mundane process together, while we are both primarily in “work/public view” persona, we will encounter some kind of character conflict situation(s), which will present us both with different choices according to our specific character differences in the applicable area(s) of thought.

This is when we will find out how really compatible we are, or not, in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with travel, movies, musical tastes, food seasonings, or anything else we may have focused on initially as important to our relationship.

The issues that will arise for us during these times may put us at sharp odds against each other with very little warning and thereby, end the relationship based upon those differences in strong principle, no doubt backed up by our impatient “Negative” personality, EVEN if we deeply love each other's inner spirits. And this will be heart-breaking, for both of us.

The dividing issue might involve something personally troubling, which either you or I may not want to discuss, and it will be this lack of openness that causes us to break up.

So, if this should happen, please take some time to consider, put things in perspective. If you're hiding something, reconsider if you might do better revealing it to work out. Allow cooling off time as may be appropriate to the situation, and if possible, try again with fresh consideration for what is real and what might just be overinflated fears. If clarity can be improved, then a thoughtful shared review might replace misunderstanding with empathy and support.

Life is short. Choose to be honestly happy, rather than self-righteously justified and alone… unless… that's what you really want.

~Dave

End.
DWS