Personality Psychology And Character

Personality is your relationship with other people. Character is your relationship with yourself.

It has been noted that in recent times too much stress has been placed upon personality and not enough on character.

The personality psychologists generally come to an agreement that most personality disorders are incurable. That is because they do not know what they are doing. They are attempting to fix character problems with talk therapy. That is not how to go about doing it. The correct ways to fix character problems is to overcome challenges or to submit to the will of God.

The people I've known who've fallen for this line have generally not undergone improvement. Far from it. They appear instead to have gotten more adept at psychological tricks while remaining bad people. My mother had a boyfriend who was seeing a psychiatrist for narcissistic personality disorder. He did not become better as a result of it. If anything he became worse.

So it appears that psychiatry does not know what it is doing on this matter. Religion however very much does know what it is doing. Religion teaches people actual values and actual character. And that makes it a far more viable force than personality psychology.

So it is time that character problems be seen for what they are and dealt with correctly. Character problems are not the same thing as personality problems. Once again, one is your relationship with yourself, the other is your relationship with other people. Fix your character, and then your relationship with other people will follow.