Do you feel there are two sides to your personality?

[Progress]

This was something my group therapist brought up when I was in therapy but we never really discussed it so I've been left wondering about it.

I think me or someone else had said that we do something or think something and then another part of us is perhaps critical of ourselves or has a different thought. He said that there must be some kind of split within our mind.

I sometimes wonder exactly what he was thinking. I do feel sometimes as if I have 2 personalities. Part of me is more gentle and easy going and part is more aggressive and a fighter. Maybe it shows in my posting here - I can try to be helpful but also have some slightly aggressive humour or debating style.

I'm wondering what the answer is. Sometimes I think that there is a fight in my head and that one personality or the other should win. But that doesn't seem right, I think they should merge and I should see them both as part of me. But the trouble is I think they hate each other and they both want to win.

Anyone else get these kind of conflicts?

[ProcessingHow]

Interesting thought. Well there are two sides to everything really.

You seem to think there is another you, but I believe you are describing parts of one personality. The way we react to similar situations is highly dependent on our mood at the time. Perhaps you post in a more gentle way when you are melancholic, well I do anyway. When something has left you annoyed, maybe that is when the aggressive part of your personality shows up.

[mossieman]

Yes so much so that i have been going to do my own post for a few days now about feeling a bit jekyll and hyde but just could not think how to word it.

[Progress]

Originally Posted by Mark09

The heart and the mind?

Maybe a bit like that.

Originally Posted by ProcessingHow

You seem to think there is another you, but I believe you are describing parts of one personality. The way we react to similar situations is highly dependent on our mood at the time. Perhaps you post in a more gentle way when you are melancholic, well I do anyway. When something has left you annoyed, maybe that is when the aggressive part of your personality shows up.

I think you're right, it doesn't help to separate the two sides to personality. I can control how I post pretty much, but I sometimes worry about the balance. In general my aggressive side can beat up my meeker side sometimes (and maybe the other way round too)

Originally Posted by Riccip

For a start I really like your debating style and would call it assertive rather than aggressive. Not a bad thing that.

I was very aggressive when I joined here, but I've learned how to tone it down. I could probably still be aggressive if I wanted to but realise it doesn't do much good in the long term.
The gentle side of me sometimes doesn't like an assertive debating style in others, so probably doesn't like it in myself… therefore self esteem issue.

Originally Posted by mossieman

Yes so much so that i have been going to do my own post for a few days now about feeling a bit jekyll and hyde but just could not think how to word it.

I glad I'm not the only one

Originally Posted by Progress

I glad I'm not the only one

I bet you are

[MLP James]

A lot of the time when I think to myself I do it as if I'm talking to another person, as if there was a second person in my head. Like I'll ask myself a question and then answer it, and I have a conversation with myself in my head. Sometimes this other person in my head is less than nice.

That might not make any sense, I really don't know how to describe it. This is obviously just my imagination, I don't really have two personalities in my head.

[Progress]

^ Makes sense, I do that.

____


I think I remember something the therapist said now. He said that when we are self critical and beat ourselves up, there needs to be almost two sides in our head - one that beats the other up. It must be that part of us doesn't accept another part. I think the solution is about accepting ourselves for everything we are, even if there are parts we don't think are ideal. Parts of us might be weak or submissive or quiet or aggressive or dominating. If we hate something about ourselves we can go into denial and that might mean the trait gets worse without us realising. That's probably what happened with my dominant side a bit.
But my dominant side can still tend to beat up my submissive side sometimes.
It's about accepting our failings in the end.

[Amber Fyre]

Of course! We try to simplify ourselves too much, believing we are one distinct personality. But really we often have multiple thoughts, opinions and personalities in our one mind, and they don't always agree!
In my mind I've always thought I have two very prominent personalities - the logical one and the emotional one. The logical one is usually telling the emotional one off or trying to reason with it. For instance, if I go outside and feel anxious that people are looking at me, those are the thought processes of the emotional personality. Meanwhile the logical personality will be saying 'don't be silly, no one is looking. Just ignore everyone and go where you want to go'. They then might have a little argument about who is right!

I think people rarely talk about this so everyone thinks they have something wrong with them because they have multiple voices in their head saying different things! But it's all of us. When I was a teenager my friend and I even created names for our different personalities. She thought she had five, I had my two.

[Sunshine Recorder]

I believe I have another, more outgoing personality, and it's trying hard to convince my dominant, anxious personality that it really needs to change. Sometimes, these personalities can disagree, for example, part of me thinks that I'll remain forever alone, and the other part is remaining hopeful I'll meet someone special.

[bluefairy]

Conversations with myself

:Come on we have to go out
:No I don't want too
:We have to, been in here is not helping us
:But I don't like going out
:Come on you can do it
:Ok, wait a minute I just want to do something first

[Appear]

I think Amber Fyre's got it in one. The idea that anyone can have a single, coherent, and unchanging personality is a bit of a myth. Sure we all have individual patterns of behaviour we might repeatedly engage in (which are often more a response to the being same environments rather than due to innate characteristics), but generally the personalities we attribute to others, and ourselves, are just a convenient, quick way for us to better make sense of the world and our relationships with it.

The brain itself isn't even a coherent entity; it's got a ton of different parts, each pushing us in different, often contradictory directions, but for the most part we're not aware of this. We're just presented with the illusion of consistency and agreement - it's easier that way. It's often only when something's particularly difficult to reconcile that these internal conflicts bubble to the surface of conscious awareness.

One simple way to get a sense of this is to consider the brain to be comprised of three separate smaller brains - the reptilian brain, the limbic system and the neocortex. Each developed at different points in our evolution, and each has its own desires and responsibilities. Reptilian brain's an animal, its only interests are sex and food; the limbic is where the emotions lie, and it encourages us to care for our young, and one another; and the neocortex, the newest part, is responsible for all those higher functions like conscious thought, language and reasoning. They're each in their own corner of the ring, but the fight doesn't stop at the bell.

Because of all this, we're all made up of a bunch of contraditions, paradoxes and inconsistancies, most of which we won't even be aware of. We're a complicated lot.

[Progress]

Yeah, I guess it's natural to have conflicting thoughts and feelings.
My problem is that the two sides of me hate each other. Maybe they can't merge but they need to make friends.