“We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.”
— Sally Field, actress and trauma survivor
We think of personalities as people, not just attitudes or presentations. Most of the time there isn’t much more to us than our attitudes and behavior. If you stop right now and look at what ideas are guiding you, you might find one. More likely, you won’t find any. We rarely think thoughts of any consequence. Our fleeting thoughts arrive with no explanation.
Disconnection
Disconnection between thoughts and feelings lies at the root of many people’s inability to act or change. They’ll claim to know what needs to be done, yet they’ll want something else. As a result they take no action, excuse themselves, and argue they’re doing the right thing.
This morning my ex-wife claimed, “I’m a nice person.” I thought, “Is being nice something one claims for oneself?” I recalled the serial killer Normal Bates, in the final scene in the movie Psycho, asserting his piety as he says to himself, “They’ll see…They’ll say, ‘She wouldn’t even harm a fly.’”
And then there’s the strategy of contradicting another person’s reality in an effort to make them question their sanity, otherwise known as gaslighting. There is also reverse gaslighting, the strategy of asserting a delusion in an effort to get other people to endorse it.
Is my ex-wife a nice person? Are you a nice person? Is being nice an attribute one assigns to oneself? “I'm a much nicer person than people would think,” Donald Trump has said. Assigning oneself the attribute of niceness is like smiling at yourself in the mirror. It makes no sense.
People can reasonably disagree on factual matters, but emotional matters represent different versions of reality. When a person says they’re motivated to one end but their actions lead to another, who is in charge? What about the case when a person’s consistent acts and attitudes at one time contradict their contrary but otherwise consistent acts and attitudes at another?
When Presentation Conflicts With Reality
We all have these two personalities. They manage different worlds and largely stay out of each other’s way. The parent who loves their child and the parent who beats their child are usually the same person. The 1996 movie Shine is about a father, Peter Helfgott, who obsessively protects his family while simultaneously destroying it. Peter and Norman have the same mental disability differing only in the degree. Both are pathological and delusional.
My mother used to tell me, “Be nice!” as she fashioned herself to be. The fact that she was both nice and an inadequate mother never bothered her, but it caused me distress. She was nice but absent; a nonresponsive robot.
Now, as a therapist, I have little use for being nice, and suspect as dishonest anyone who looks for credit in being nice. I find fabricating an image of being nice is often a screen beyond which bridges are burned and bodies buried.
Be careful about the virtue you claim for yourself. Don’t confuse self respect, which is a right, with self virtue, which is a fantasy.
Honesty of Facts and Honesty of Feelings
If honesty is what is true, then there is one world of true facts and another of true feelings. Truth of fact enables you to build reliable bridges; truth of feelings enables you to build reliable relationships. These are different bridges to different destinations.
Facts are elusive and interpretations uncertain. Simple honesty is the world of facts, with accommodations made for uncertainty. You’re considered honest if you tell the truth or think you do. You don’t have to be right, you just have to be sincere in wanting to be.
Little kids are honest even when their facts are wrong. I have a client who is certain I’ve said things completely unlike anything I’ve ever said or would say, but she believes I said these things. She’s wrong but honest.
Emotional honesty can’t be judged objectively. You’re the only person who knows what you feel. This does not mean all you claim to feel is honest, as your actions must support your claim. If you claim to be kind but destroy people, then you’re either lying or unwell.
It is a common misconception that brutal threats create progress. This “spare the rod and spoil the child” attitude seems to be making a comeback. It’s particularly stupid, yet we see it flourishing in both democratic and anti-democratic politics. Don’t blame the politicians or the ideologues, they just exploit peoples’ attitudes.
Consensus in Communication
Scientific facts can only be established to a degree. Specific details are fuzzy when examined carefully, and they rarely are. It’s enough to get things mostly right. We believe that it’s your intention that is the key. This attitude prevails even in cases of complete bullshit.
Consider Attention Deficit Disorder. This diagnosis appeared 50 years ago and the percent of the population to whom it has been applied has more than doubled in the last 20 years. 25% of teenage boys are now diagnosed with ADHD and can be given long-term prescriptions for amphetamines, which are addictive drugs that are known to cause brain damage.
“National population surveys reflect an increase in the prevalence from 6.1% to 10.2% in the 20-year period from 1997 to 2016 and experts continue to debate and disagree on the causes for this trend.” — Abdelnour, Jansen, and Gold (2022), psychologists
I analyzed the fallacious nature of this diagnosis ten years ago (Stoller 2014) but only now is it becoming fashionable to question it (Kushner 2025, Tough 2025). ADHD does not exist, it’s just a description. What exists are brain states, but diagnosticians don’t know anything about those.
Intentions are not enough. What you think you’re doing and why are poor explanations. People have explanations for the most dangerous ideas. For example, consider the deranged explanations of Donald Trump, who is a classic psychopath. We would all be better off if we were less cocksure and less gullible.
I’d be happy to help you become more of who you are, schedule a free, short zoom appointment in my web-based calendar:
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