Our Personality
Our personality
Do you sometimes wonder why you behaved the way you did? Feel that you've let yourself down? Do you wonder why you said something you did. Or feel like you've done something wrong, when actually, you've done nothing wrong at all?
Well, we're complicated things, and even more so, because there's more than just one of you inside there, running the show! In fact, there are many different versions of you. Some versions are a re-run from the past, some are versions we've copied from other people! Often these parts are in competition with each other, one part wanting one thing, the other wanting something else.
One simple way of understanding how our personality is made up is the PAC model (pronounced 'pack'). It is also a way of understanding your behaviour and the behaviour of other people, when we interact with each other.
In the PAC model, our personality is shown as being made up of three main parts: Parent, Adult and Child.
Each part is known as an ego state, so we have Parent ego states, the Adult ego state and Child ego states.
A bit about the word ego: the word 'ego' comes from Latin, and it means 'I'. It’s used here to mean our sense of identity, our sense of self, as separate from others, ie this is me, this is not me; I am cold, I am hungry, I am a girl, I am not a boy etc. It’s how we make sense of the world, by defining what we are and what we are not. Ego states, therefore, are the various different ways we have of thinking about ourselves, the world around and the identities we have.
Problem solving - the Adult ego state
We all have an Adult ego state - even children. When we're in our Adult ego state, we are fully present and using all our current resources: all our thinking capacity, all our problem solving skills, all the knowledge we've learnt to date. This is the most current version of ourselves, with our up-to-date thinking and skills which are developing all the time, in every moment.
Sometimes it's difficult to know when we're not in our Adult ego state. One way to check that out, and to bring yourself back into it if you're not, is to bring your attention back to your body. Focus on your breathing.
Regulation and social control – Parent ego states
Our Parent ego states contain information we've taken in from other people, their views about what's 'right' and what's 'wrong'. Indeed, the Parent is a real mishmash of input from the world around us.
The Parent contains thoughts, feelings and ways of behaving that you've learnt from - you guessed it - your parents! Inside each of us, is a mini version of some of our parents’ ways of thinking, feeling and behaving!
More than this though, the Parent ego state contains the ways of being in the world that we've taken on-board from other influential figures in our lives. These can be people like grandparents, close family friends, siblings and teachers.
Looking further outside ourselves again, our Parent ego state also contains the beliefs and ways of seeing the world of the culture and society we were immersed in as we grew up.
The Parent ego states are helpful; for example, this is where we store our knowledge on how to cross the road safely, so we don't have to figure it out every time we want to cross the road. The Parent also gives us something we call social control - how to behave in society eg it's not polite to burp at the dinner table. The Parent keeps us safe... but is also limiting, because it contains other people's opinions and beliefs, and ways of behaving, which means we're not arriving at our own thinking, until we start to examine those beliefs.
Child ego states
When we're in a Child ego state, we are said to be behaving in a way we did at a younger age. We are thinking in a way we did at a younger age. In our bodies, we actually experience the feelings we had at those times too. It's a bit like watching a repeat of a television programme - we re-run an earlier experience, so it's almost like it runs on top of what's happening now - we don't see or hear everything that's happening, and we go back to thinking and feeling in a way we did in the past, and because of that, we behave as we did at that time too.
So we're not using all our current thinking - what we're doing is looking at reality through the eyes we had of us as a younger person, it's like we put our Child ego state glasses on, we are re-framing what's happening around us, to fit how we saw the world at an earlier time - not now. We don't see all of a situation, we disregard some aspects, perhaps what people are saying to us, we hear what we want to hear, we might exclude certain bits of information.
Our Parent and Child ego states are a re-play of little moments of time from the past. We experience feelings we had in the past, and think in ways we used to... but we're often not aware of this. Even more significant to our present well-being, the thoughts and feelings we have shape our reality.... so if we're in a Parent or Child ego state, our perception of reality is coloured by these moments of time from the past.
To us it usually feels as though what we’re experiencing is the actual reality. However, it may not be us, nor even actually our thinking and feelings that we’re replaying. Aliens may have not landed... but we may be re-playing someone else's thinking, feelings and ways of behaving.
