(2017-01-31) You And Your Therapist Can Change Your Personality

You (and Your Therapist) Can Change Your Personality. A question for the ages: Are you stuck with yourself?

Lately, personality psychologists have taken a more moderate view: If personality traits do change, they change slowly, and the overall difference over time tends to be modest.

In an analysis of 207 studies, published this month in the journal Psychological Bulletin, a team of six researchers found that personality can and does change, and by a lot, and fairly quickly. But only with a therapist’s help. (Imagine that.)

Therapy, this analysis found, seems to be especially effective at decreasing neuroticism

Past research (not to mention common sense) has suggested that people’s personalities generally tend to mellow as they get older; in particular, neuroticism tends to decrease with age. This is like that natural process, only sped way, way up: The review found that three months of therapy lowered neuroticism “by about half the amount you might expect to see over 30 to 40 years of adulthood,” as science writer Stephanie Pappas succinctly explains it.

A person’s gender or age didn’t make a difference one way or another; likewise, the type of therapy didn’t matter much, though psychotherapy was a bit better than medication on its own. These changes happened quickly, as “most of the gains were made within the first month of therapy,” the authors write, and there was “no evidence that the effects of therapy faded with time.”

also worth noting the work of Brian Little, a personality psychologist at the University of Cambridge and author of the A-plus 2015 book Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, who draws a distinction between what he calls biogenic traits and sociogenic traits. According to Little, biogenic personality traits are genetically programmed, and, therefore, fixed; sociogenic traits, on the other hand, tend to be more malleable

The authors do not claim, nor have they shown, that what I call the biogenic aspects of personality have been influenced by clinical intervention,” Little said in an email. “But they have shown that there are measurable changes in the ways we present ourselves to others (and to ourselves) — closer to what I think of as the sociogenic features of personality.”