Super OT: Personality and Relationships

[J. Dan]

OK, this started by reflecting on a FB post from a friend from high school that brought back some memories. I was debating whether or not to post this and ultimately decided to because at least on the KC (maybe others now that we've expanded with Craig Anderton and some of the studio stuff) over time I get the idea that many (not all) of you have very similafrr personality types to me in a few ways, and have shared similar experiences whether dealing with band mates, friends, relationships, divorces etc. Long story short: A lot of us tend to think, make decisions, communicate, and be motivated in similar ways. As I see people on social media either stressed over the situation, locked indoors, or more often stressing over where they'll get the next paycheck, I'm happy to see folks emotionally supporting one another and my hope is that maybe some of you can identify with this story and maybe learn something from it (if you're like me) that will help take some stress and confusion out of interactions you experience with people who just don't seem to make sense.

 

I'm turning 49 in a week but I'm going to take you all the way back to college - Engineering School. University of MO Rolla at the time, now they call it something like the Missouri School of Science and Technology. Mostly irrelevant other than to say it was an EXTREMELY challenging school back then with about a 50% dropout rate. In fact, I essentially flunked out after my first few semesters and spent a couple semesters at community college and UMSL getting my grades up enough to go back and get accepted into the department. Only reason why that is important is my guidance counselor. I hated him -he was a total hard as and basically yelled at me and berated me and told me I would never make it. It pissed me off so much that I was determined to prove him wrong and stick it in his face. In hind sight, after studying various personality models, motivation, communication, etc.....I finally realize as a counselor, he probably read me like a book and knew that my motivation would be, as a rebel, to prove him wrong, and that was the best way to make me succeed. Well I did, but that's not what this story is about.

 

My second "serious" girlfriend. I knew her since 2nd grade and she by this time had 3 serious boyfriends, one of whom I even set her up with. I always had a crush on her but we were just friends. Well I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend of 1 year and she just broke up with her boyfriend and we started hanging out again - started Christmas Break. She went to Mizzou (Columbia, MO) and I went to Rolla....about an hour drive apart in central MO, but we were both from Stl. Anyway, it was kind of weird at first because we were just friends though I made it clear I was interested in more, without pushing it. Eventually we got together and that was it - instant intensity....mostly in good ways, but ultimately lots of bad......which is where the REAL story begins.

 

Even though I had known her since 2nd grade, as the relationship deepend, I learned a whole lot I never would have guessed. She had a lot of issues with her parents, who had divorced when she was a teenager. She had an eating disorder - bulimia. Ultimately she was diagnosed bipolar and went though various doses of medication ranging from Prozac to Lithium. I SWORE I would never desert her or let her go. I would ALWAYS be there for her, no matter what. She could count on me! I wouldn't leaver her the way she felt her mom left her. We got engaged - bought the ring, made plans to marry once we were out of college. She, several times, broke up with me, immediately slept with somebody, then within a week wanted to get back together. I characterized it as cheating but she justified by the fact that she broke up first. I took her back each time because of my promise to always be there for her. I graduated Dec 95 and the previous semester, Spring 95, over spring break she slept with my room mate. Before everybody got back from spring break I had already moved all my stuff out into an apartment and stopped talking to the previous room mate. She wanted to get back together. I was an Emotional WRECK and at a time when I was trying to finish up me degree and start interviewing for jobs, so by somebody's suggestion (don't recall who) I sought out counselling on campus - this time not academic, but emotional.

 

I got the same guy who told me I would fail, but this time his tone was very different. I feel like as much as he understood how to motivate me academically, he also understood better than me my poor relationship choices and why I was having a hard time. THIS IS THE PART THAT IS IMPORTANT. Sorry it took so long to get here, but context is important. I didn't understand myself and how I inherently think differently than others. The result was me just simply being unable to comprehend, process, understand why somebody with a different personality would do something. He explained to me that she subconsciously created chaos and sabotaged her relationships in order to try to fix them because she had an unresolved need to fix the issues in her parents relationship. Problem was that every time we fixed our own relationship, it didn't actually resolve her issues with her parents, so she would keep repeating.

 

I completed the perfect storm, and suspect many of you are the same. As an Engineer (and other technical types) I feel valued and personally have a need to fix things and solve problems. Subconsciously I felt a need, and desire for self worth, by solving her problems....fixing things. In general, even with different basic personality types, I think this is a common problem between guys and girls where women just want us to listen and we think we need to find a solution. But this was deeper and more serious than that. Again, he read me (and her, without every meeting her) like a book. He taught me a few tough lessons about myself that carried me through, and that I still sometimes try to remind myself of when I realize that I've started making the same mistakes.

 

1) You can't fix every problem, and you can't evaluate your self worth on your ability to fix things that are out of your control.

2) This was the hardest one for me, and took a long time to come to terms with. I struggled and felt guilty and had to do a lot of soul searching. Put yourself first. Up to that point I always believed that it was selfish to put yourself before others. Bad people are selfish. We should always sacrifice for our fellow man and especially those we care for. The idea of turning my back on her in favor of what was best for ME just seemed flat out WRONG and against every fabric of my being -everything I was taught. To make it worse, she was threatening suicide and a couple times I just dropped everything, skipped class and rushed an hour drive to make sure she was OK. NOW, if she says she's going to kill herself, I'm supposed to ignore it and look out for myself? Seemed like terrible, cold hearted advice. But he was right. I wasn't helping her. I wasn't helping anybody. I was only hurting myself.

 

Fast forward through the rest of my life and it's kind of a back and forth between logical and stupid decisions. My personality tends to dictate that logic is the guiding factor in my day to day decisions. But that makes me a HUGE sucker when emotion rears it's ugly head because I'm not used to it and don't know how to handle it. The drummer of one of my previous bands once said something that has stuck with me for about 10 years now. He viewed me as some sort of super smart technical genius type or something. In the middle of my divorce I was dating a much younger girl that ended up generating all kinds of drama. He said "Dan, you're the dumbest smart guy I ever met". He was absolutely right and I think it's significant that he readily recognized it and I didn't - regardless of education, technical knowledge, etc......to him the emotional side and all the pitfalls were obvious. To me, probably in the back of my mind I could logically calculate the potential issues, but once the emotion took over, all bets were off!

 

I know this was insanely long but I hope maybe some folks can identify in terms of different personality types and maybe make some sense of things that didn't before. Maybe that will bring somebody some peace as well as a little guidance moving forward.

 

Peace.

[Joe Muscara]

Good post, Dan. Thanks for sharing.

 

In some ways I'm like you (wanting to "fix" situations instead of just being there to listen, for instance), but I've luckily not had that kind of drama in relationships. I've been told and can see that people get what they expect. For example, if they think all women cheat, they find women that cheat (sometimes I think they create the situations where they see the women as "cheating" though they didn't have sex).

 

However, I am technical, logical, and am still learning about handling emotions, especially my own. I can clearly see I didn't have good role models for that in my parents. I'm not blaming them, I'm just saying they weren't good with that, either, so who would I learn from? Since then, I've been finding out on my own, using my own compass of what makes me feel good and what seems right. But sometimes, even though the compass points north, I go south anyway. Even when I realize that's what's going on, I often struggle with turning myself around and going back in the direction I know I should. Being angry and upset in situations is something I'm used to and a hard pattern to break.

 

I wonder what it is for you that draws you to these women. Do you want to fix them? Or do you think that's the way they all are and so you keep finding them?

 

I was about to say something about balancing logic and emotion, but them I realized I can't, because I have no idea how nor what that really means.

[SamuelBLupowitz]

Thanks for sharing this, Dan. I have had very different experiences that still parallel yours. I've also had to learn how not to be a "fixer" in relationships; I was in a few fairly toxic relationships when I was younger (some with some really nice girls who just completed a "perfect storm" like you said, and one or two not so nice...) that I stayed in because I felt validated by being supportive and helpful when other people would run. I stayed with my last girlfriend (before I met my wife) probably about two years too long; I was willing to put up with a lot of emotional abuse because I wanted to make good on my promises, and to show that I wouldn't abandon her like her father and stepfather.

 

I would also try to fix things when someone didn't *want* to be in a relationship with me. I would try to make changes in my behavior as if it was a game I needed to improve my strategy to win, and then I would get frustrated with the object of my affection when it didn't change anything. Like it's her fault knows what she wants, and she's not interested? But that's not what I learned growing up (and I imagine a lot of other guys didn't learn that growing up), and I drove myself crazy trying to figure out how to get certain people to like me more, instead of just moving on and finding the right fit.

 

Boy, this quarantine stuff does force you to do some self-reflection, doesn't it?

[George88]

Many of us are codependent to some degree. Setting boundaries sounds wrong so we don"t speak up. This can lead to deep and persistent resentment in addition to chronic invalidation of ourselves. Like when we don"t tell a band member how we feel so we don"t 'rock the boat.' Relationships in general are tough. Maintaining healthy boundaries and limits can be quite helpful. How someone responds to our reasonable requests doesn"t mean we don"t have the right to a make a request. The worst thing we can do is to stop asking because we are afraid of how others will react. This is classic care-taking. Melonie Beattie has some good literature about this.

 

Dan, your story in particular about not abandoning someone despite how much drama they stir up or pain they inflict particularly resonates with me. Night in shining armor syndrome just drags out our enabling and resentment:

 

'Why won"t he/she change??'

 

Why would they if they have you around?

[timwat]

Fascinating topic, Dan.

 

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

 

- "The heart knows reasons, that reason knows nothing about." - Blaise Pascal

 

Everyone makes sense to themselves. The way we choose to act, behave, respond and react, as well as every choice we make - we choose them for reasons that make sense to ourselves, somewhere deep inside. And if Pascal is correct some of those reasons will be supra-rational (or, non-rational to the outside observer). But it doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. It just may not make sense to you (on the outside, trying to interpret it, without their perspective or context).

 

- Rational humility suggests I have just as many blind spots as the person next to me. And the reason they're called blind spots is, well... and these are often the source of our recurring challenges (cue the joke about "If you've had 14 consecutive bad roommates..."). An excellent short read on this is titled, "Leadership and Self-Deception", worth the small change on Amazon or whatever.

 

- Life begins when we forget about ourselves and start thinking of others. Not seeking to cross the religion line on the forum, but faith of any kind suggests one can only be generous and gracious with others to the degree one feels secure that one's own deep needs have been taken care of and thus one can give to another from a place of contentment and gratitude for gifts already received. Atheists / agnostics might call this being psychologically mature, and I think there may be a fair degree of domain overlap.

 

- Everyone has damage, and some of us have very deep damage. It can make it extremely difficult on those who choose to be in close relationship with us. And it's worse when one refuses to acknowledge and work on the consequences of prior damage.

 

- Life is short, so keep in mind what legacy you're leaving. Self-explanatory, except to point out the obvious: no one on their deathbed rues over career, money or achievements. Their hearts focus on the relationships they're leaving behind - the good, the bad and the ugly - especially with the ones that mean the very most to them.

[Joe Muscara]

- Everyone has damage, and some of us have very deep damage. It can make it extremely difficult on those who choose to be in close relationship with us. And it's worse when one refuses to acknowledge and work on the consequences of prior damage.

 

I heard someone say something regarding the term "damaged" as it has become commonly used now. She argued that we're NOT damaged, that in fact our coping mechanisms did what they were supposed to do when they encountered a threat, so in fact we didn't do anything wrong and actually did what was right for us in that initial event. The only thing is that we have to now learn that we don't have to cope and respond in the same way every time. (This is especially true for those suffering from PTSD.)

 

Note that I'm not criticizing you Tim, nor your use of the word. I merely bring it up because I thought it was an excellent way to reframe the issue many of us have.

[timwat]

That's a really good point, Joe.

 

I need to think about that some. In the fresh air of talking "in theory" - there's a broad point that I've tried to make (often, in business settings) that most leaders & managers get.

 

But certainly, in 1-on-1 conversations, how one frames the conversation can be EVERYTHING. And I'm not a trained therapist...and have run across instances where what I typically talk about in group settings is NOT initially well-received in 1-on-1 settings, and you're making me rethink how I've casually framed my ideas.

 

Very rich food for thought - thank you very much, Joe.

[MathOfInsects]

I agree, I like that framing, Joe.

 

It's a tight needle to thread, but IMO the approach that says, "I can be better at relationships if I fix X," is the same impulse that thinks that someone else is [perfection minus X], where the X can be removed. Either way, you are falsely assuming there is a version of them (or you) that exists without that trait or tendency--and that you're just the guy to fix it. But there isn't, and you're not.

 

Not that we shouldn't work on ourselves, particularly if it involves ethical treatment of others. But I think the real goal is to find equanimity with even our flaws--and therefore others'--with the knowledge, understanding, acceptance, and even celebration of the fact that each of our traits, good and bad, is what makes the whole.

[HSS]

Dan, I can definitely relate to your post and the issues you bring up. I've always been socially and emotionally atrophied, and, at best I'm perplexed by human interactions/ behaviors and at worst I'm prone to avoid people and be a social recluse to avoid being hurt or inadvertently hurting others.

 

Like you, I'm also a technical person with a B.S. and MS. in geology and geophysics. Ironically enough I also went to school in Rolla for 7 years, for both undergraduate and grad school, but I graduated long before you in 1983. During my years in Rolla, the male - female ratio was approximately 9:1 which, along with Rolla being an isolated small town in southern Missouri's Ozarks, certainly didn't help me develop a good social /emotional skill set. Nevertheless I'm grateful for my education because it allowed me to have a technically interesting career, see the world, and has afforded me a relatively comfortable retirement.

 

Despite my good fortune with my career, I'm pretty much reconciled at this point to going to my grave totally confused about humans, most especially the fairer sex, and why they do the things they do.

[GRollins]

A few points:

 

1) This quarantine/distancing thing is going to put quite a strain on families. In our case, I'm very much a loner and can spend vast amounts of time by myself without stress. My wife, on the other hand, thinks she can handle solitude, but can't. I've known this about her for a long time, but she's having to confront the fact that she's not going to see anyone at work for an extended period of time--that it'll just be me and the three kids, here at the house--and she's about to lose her mind. And this is only a few days in, mind you, so it's liable to get worse.

 

The quarantine is going to be hard on some people. Some of them will learn from the experience. Some will not. It will be an interesting litmus test for us all, personality-wise.

 

2) At the risk of sounding sexist, I read in a book (by Deborah Tannen?) that women don't want their problems "fixed." They just want someone to listen and they very much resent a guy who tries to solve the problem because--in the woman's view--they're not listening. To me (very much a fixer), this borders on insanity. Why the hell would someone keep a problem...nurse it, nurture it, milk it, when it would be so much more logical and reasonable to just bloody-well fix the problem and move on? Well, I've learned the hard way that those words are true. If Tannen is right, it's a gender thing, not a personality-type thing and you simply are not--ever--going to win. Period. You can't fight emotion with logic and you can't fight logic with emotion. The fight will never end; never be won; never be resolved. Just one, long, ongoing fuckup. Ugh.

 

Yeah, I know, men and women aren't hard-coded to be precisely this or precisely that...yadda, yadda, yadda...can we just skip that whole argument, please? I look at it as two bell curves (Gaussian distributions for those who want to be pedantic about it) that have considerable overlap, but there are also differences in the "average" man and "average" woman, in spite of those who would have you believe that men are simply "just like women, but they were brought up in a society that tells them to act 'manly'" or vice versa. Some of the difference seems to me to lie in the realm of how we respond to problems. As a real world example, my wife will put up with a leaky faucet forever (even though she has tools and sufficient mechanical ability to rebuild a faucet), whereas I glare at the stupid faucet for about ten seconds, willing it to stop. When it doesn't stop dripping (the Force must not be that strong with me), I head down to my shop and grab wrenches. She lives with it. I fix it. I don't know of a single relationship where those roles are reversed, although I do know of a number of relationships where neither partner will fix things. This could potentially be a whole thread in and of itself. It's an inherently messy subject.

 

3) I had a girlfriend years ago who I went through the breakup/make up cycle with many times. I learned the hard way that a relationship like that isn't good for either party. I later heard that if you're in a relationship where you keep having the same fights over and over and over...get out. It's one thing if you have a fight about topic A, then the next time it's B, then C, etc. that's not so bad. But if you keep fighting about A, then A, then A again...A, A, A, A...that's real bad. You're not resolving anything and the relationship is toxic and will likely always be so. Leave. I didn't. I and my girlfriend fought over the same three or four things forever. Two of the topics were obviously based on her obsession with her father, who left when she was young, but the other stuff I never figured out. And, yes, some was me, in case you're wondering...

 

Footnote: One of my degrees is in psychology. One of the things they taught us was that a lot of psych is cyclical. Take nature versus nurture, for instance. The pendulum swings one way, then the other. Look for the cycles to run on the order of decades, not weeks, months, or single digits of years. It depends on the specific topic, but some things run about thirty years, others closer to seventy or eighty years, others even longer. Another example: We're in #Metoo now. In the '70s it was Women's Lib. Before that it was the Suffragette movement, roughly the same time period earlier, etc. You can't set your watch by these things, but there's a definite periodicity to them. And it's always the same mantra, "Contrary to what people used to think, studies now show..." over and over and over again. Once you're hip to the cycles, you can trace them back--in some cases for centuries.

 

Grey

[TommyRude]

Trying to decipher your ask here JDan. Boiling down to personalities and decision making, seems to me a good approach is to focus and build on your strengths. Put your energy there, and most of your decisions will be the right ones and the rest will fall into place, including music, family, friends and relationships.

 

 

caveat - thinking through this kind of stuff is not one of my strengths, and I'm not sure if what I said here makes any sense. Possible that I'm feeling the virus and starting to spew gibberish

[J. Dan]

Not asking anything, I just thought that the things I learned through the process might be helpful for others, especially during a time when people are under increased stress and in many cases, confined to quarters.

[George88]

Dan, please elaborate on what you learned and how you apply now to relationships.

[J. Dan]

Dan, please elaborate on what you learned and how you apply now to relationships.

 

OK, this started by reflecting on a FB post from a friend from high school that brought back some memories. I was debating whether or not to post this and ultimately decided to because at least on the KC (maybe others now that we've expanded with Craig Anderton and some of the studio stuff) over time I get the idea that many (not all) of you have very similafrr personality types to me in a few ways, and have shared similar experiences whether dealing with band mates, friends, relationships, divorces etc. Long story short: A lot of us tend to think, make decisions, communicate, and be motivated in similar ways. As I see people on social media either stressed over the situation, locked indoors, or more often stressing over where they'll get the next paycheck, I'm happy to see folks emotionally supporting one another and my hope is that maybe some of you can identify with this story and maybe learn something from it (if you're like me) that will help take some stress and confusion out of interactions you experience with people who just don't seem to make sense.

 

I'm turning 49 in a week but I'm going to take you all the way back to college - Engineering School. University of MO Rolla at the time, now they call it something like the Missouri School of Science and Technology. Mostly irrelevant other than to say it was an EXTREMELY challenging school back then with about a 50% dropout rate. In fact, I essentially flunked out after my first few semesters and spent a couple semesters at community college and UMSL getting my grades up enough to go back and get accepted into the department. Only reason why that is important is my guidance counselor. I hated him -he was a total hard as and basically yelled at me and berated me and told me I would never make it. It pissed me off so much that I was determined to prove him wrong and stick it in his face. In hind sight, after studying various personality models, motivation, communication, etc.....I finally realize as a counselor, he probably read me like a book and knew that my motivation would be, as a rebel, to prove him wrong, and that was the best way to make me succeed. Well I did, but that's not what this story is about.

 

My second "serious" girlfriend. I knew her since 2nd grade and she by this time had 3 serious boyfriends, one of whom I even set her up with. I always had a crush on her but we were just friends. Well I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend of 1 year and she just broke up with her boyfriend and we started hanging out again - started Christmas Break. She went to Mizzou (Columbia, MO) and I went to Rolla....about an hour drive apart in central MO, but we were both from Stl. Anyway, it was kind of weird at first because we were just friends though I made it clear I was interested in more, without pushing it. Eventually we got together and that was it - instant intensity....mostly in good ways, but ultimately lots of bad......which is where the REAL story begins.

 

Even though I had known her since 2nd grade, as the relationship deepend, I learned a whole lot I never would have guessed. She had a lot of issues with her parents, who had divorced when she was a teenager. She had an eating disorder - bulimia. Ultimately she was diagnosed bipolar and went though various doses of medication ranging from Prozac to Lithium. I SWORE I would never desert her or let her go. I would ALWAYS be there for her, no matter what. She could count on me! I wouldn't leaver her the way she felt her mom left her. We got engaged - bought the ring, made plans to marry once we were out of college. She, several times, broke up with me, immediately slept with somebody, then within a week wanted to get back together. I characterized it as cheating but she justified by the fact that she broke up first. I took her back each time because of my promise to always be there for her. I graduated Dec 95 and the previous semester, Spring 95, over spring break she slept with my room mate. Before everybody got back from spring break I had already moved all my stuff out into an apartment and stopped talking to the previous room mate. She wanted to get back together. I was an Emotional WRECK and at a time when I was trying to finish up me degree and start interviewing for jobs, so by somebody's suggestion (don't recall who) I sought out counselling on campus - this time not academic, but emotional.

 

I got the same guy who told me I would fail, but this time his tone was very different. I feel like as much as he understood how to motivate me academically, he also understood better than me my poor relationship choices and why I was having a hard time. THIS IS THE PART THAT IS IMPORTANT. Sorry it took so long to get here, but context is important. I didn't understand myself and how I inherently think differently than others. The result was me just simply being unable to comprehend, process, understand why somebody with a different personality would do something. He explained to me that she subconsciously created chaos and sabotaged her relationships in order to try to fix them because she had an unresolved need to fix the issues in her parents relationship. Problem was that every time we fixed our own relationship, it didn't actually resolve her issues with her parents, so she would keep repeating.

 

I completed the perfect storm, and suspect many of you are the same. As an Engineer (and other technical types) I feel valued and personally have a need to fix things and solve problems. Subconsciously I felt a need, and desire for self worth, by solving her problems....fixing things. In general, even with different basic personality types, I think this is a common problem between guys and girls where women just want us to listen and we think we need to find a solution. But this was deeper and more serious than that. Again, he read me (and her, without every meeting her) like a book. He taught me a few tough lessons about myself that carried me through, and that I still sometimes try to remind myself of when I realize that I've started making the same mistakes.

 

1) You can't fix every problem, and you can't evaluate your self worth on your ability to fix things that are out of your control.

2) This was the hardest one for me, and took a long time to come to terms with. I struggled and felt guilty and had to do a lot of soul searching. Put yourself first. Up to that point I always believed that it was selfish to put yourself before others. Bad people are selfish. We should always sacrifice for our fellow man and especially those we care for. The idea of turning my back on her in favor of what was best for ME just seemed flat out WRONG and against every fabric of my being -everything I was taught. To make it worse, she was threatening suicide and a couple times I just dropped everything, skipped class and rushed an hour drive to make sure she was OK. NOW, if she says she's going to kill herself, I'm supposed to ignore it and look out for myself? Seemed like terrible, cold hearted advice. But he was right. I wasn't helping her. I wasn't helping anybody. I was only hurting myself.

 

Fast forward through the rest of my life and it's kind of a back and forth between logical and stupid decisions. My personality tends to dictate that logic is the guiding factor in my day to day decisions. But that makes me a HUGE sucker when emotion rears it's ugly head because I'm not used to it and don't know how to handle it. The drummer of one of my previous bands once said something that has stuck with me for about 10 years now. He viewed me as some sort of super smart technical genius type or something. In the middle of my divorce I was dating a much younger girl that ended up generating all kinds of drama. He said "Dan, you're the dumbest smart guy I ever met". He was absolutely right and I think it's significant that he readily recognized it and I didn't - regardless of education, technical knowledge, etc......to him the emotional side and all the pitfalls were obvious. To me, probably in the back of my mind I could logically calculate the potential issues, but once the emotion took over, all bets were off!

 

I know this was insanely long but I hope maybe some folks can identify in terms of different personality types and maybe make some sense of things that didn't before. Maybe that will bring somebody some peace as well as a little guidance moving forward.

 

Peace.

[George88]

Noted. Perhaps your first post was all you cared to elaborate. That is absolutely fair.

 

It took me years to tell people no and not get sucked into drama. Eric Berne"s book, 'Games People Play' helped me a lot.

 

Another thing I had to learn, thanks to Dialectal Behavior Therapy skills, is allowing my rational and emotional brain to inform my decisions. I have since discovered boundaries sometime cause crisis, and crisis often leads to boundaries.

 

I digress.

 

I appreciate the thread and an opportunity to explore another side of our experiences.

[J. Dan]

Well it was already an extremely long post. If I elaborate anymore, I'll have to write a book, lol.