How Personality Changes in Silence

In the past year or two I have discovered the world of silence through silent retreats and meditation. Many realizations have ensued.

When people interact at length in silence, their personalities appear to change. In fact, they do change. After a couple days of silence, the brain stops bringing so much verbal thinking into conscious awareness because it is found to be irrelevant and a waste of mental energy. "Use it or lose it." This frees up a great deal of attention for experiences and interactions in the hear and now. It also releases the individual from the grips of something which might be called "the False Personality."

If you think about it, words are only necessary for communicating information about what is not here and not now. Everything else—pleasure and displeasure, intentions, desires, feelings, actions—can easily be communicated through sound, touch, and movement without any need for words. Try it and you'll discover this for yourself. You'll experience a very clear state change. In my case the best illustration of this was at a week-long silent contact improvisation festival.

During the silent part of the festival my social role appeared to change. I became more dominant than normal, and my relative status seemed to rise. I felt more of a connection with people. I showed more initiative and interest in taking care of other people.

When the week of silence ended and people began talking again, I soon began to feel somewhat marginalized and estranged, with lower relative status, less connection, and less interest in taking initiative and taking care of other people.

This and other related experiences led to the following hypothesis.

Personality seems to consist of two layers. The more superficial one expresses itself through verbal interactions, the deeper layer through nonverbal interactions. I'll call them the False Personality and the Essence. I believe socionics expresses itself about 50-50 in these two realms, but possibly more in the realm of False Personality where verbal information is exchanged.

LEVEL ONE: The False Personality

When a child becomes self-aware, he/she begins to experience a need to "know" something about Reality, which cannot actually be known. This knowing is needed in order to manipulate reality to make it conform to how the mind thinks things should be.

The child's most prominent experiences form the locus of this knowing. These could be feelings of acceptance or resistance, a general openness or closedness, etc. As the mind develops, mental constructs emerge to elucidate these ongoing experiences and devise ways to obtain more of what is lacking: more love, more safety, more comfort, more goods to consume, more space, more experience, more stimulation, less stimulation, etc.

The False Personality arises as a kind of stance towards human society which encapsulates the growing individual's strategy for obtaining what is lacking. This could be an air of aloofness or of bubbly expressiveness, repressed or exaggerated sexuality, an attitude of knowing all the answers or of mental incompetence, clinginess or non-attachment, of belonging to something or not belonging to anything, etc.

All of these supposed stances are illusory, but are treated by the False Personality as real. Not only is every descriptor inaccurate (there are no 100% aloof or 100% attached people, yet this is how words are used), but there is actually nothing in Reality that fully corresponds to any descriptor we could possibly give it. The False Personality is based on the assumptions that 1) Reality is equal to our concepts of it and that 2) specific verbal descriptions are accurate.

These two assumptions are what I mean by "knowing." But nothing can be known except for mental constructs.

Socionic type describes in very general terms the kinds of mental constructs the mature mind might accumulate over the years to justify the False Personality. These might be notions of "usefulness," of "inherent traits," of "emotional pain," "kinship," "estrangement," "love," "desire," "principles," etc. etc.

Therefore, there is a connection between socionic type and the False Personality, but it is a loose one. An SLE who felt abandoned as a child and one who felt loved will develop different False Personalities. Aside from socionics, important traits such as sensitivity, intelligence, and somatotype will influence both the likelihood of different kinds of prominent experiences and the way the False Personality is expressed.

To summarize, the False Personality is a mechanism of psychosocial adaptation built around prominent early experiences and personality characteristics.

LEVEL TWO: The Essence

When people interact in silence for extended periods of time (>2 days), the False Personality diminishes in strength and may fall away completely. What is left? The Essence, or true personality.

The Essence may be inquisitive, but it has no interest in the kind of "knowing" that the False Personality promotes. It has no stake in proving anything. "Proof" can only exist on the level or words anyway. The insistence on knowing and on the reality of what is known is the primary feature of the False Personality.

Without the need to know, things just unfold as they do. They don't have to conform to any notion of how things should be. When something needs to be done, it is simply done.

When everyone is silent, coalitions and power games can still arise. However, if everyone is physically together most of the time, this tends not to happen much.

When people are together, everyone sees who captured the prey, who prepared the food, who fed the others, who built the shelter, who fixed the broken gate, who provided protection, who solved a problem, who made everyone laugh, who provided entertainment, who acted selfishly or selflessly. The value of each person's contribution becomes apparent.

Words and physical separation mask and distort contributions, allowing some people to exaggerate their contributions, while others' go unrecognized. If you exaggerate yours through verbal domination and attention getting, in silence you will experience a loss of status. Everything evens out.

In silence you might discover that you are deeply attentive and caring, that you are a problem-solver, a manager, or a strategist, that you are emotional, sensual, spontaneous, active, initiative-taking, etc. Of course, these are just words. In silence you will make the observation without the pressing need to label it in order to convey the story to someone else or to try to convince yourself that the observed trait is real—that it is solid and can be relied on.

What emerges in silence will probably contradict your False Personality.

In my experience, an individual's Essence does not reduce to socionic type. Instead, it relates to:

- level of sensitivity
- IQ
- somatotype, i.e. degree of ectomorphy, mesomorphy, and endomorphy
- socionic type
- age and health
- "chakra development" or whatever you want to call it, i.e. how well-integrated different body systems are in conscious awareness and behavior patterns

I'm sure there are other factors, but I can't think of any right now.

From this list we can imagine that different people of the same sociotype could have quite different Essences and False Personalities. In fact, this is what is observed. There is no way that a physically frail individual and a physically robust individual of the same type will provide the same contributions when made to be silent for a long time. However, it's conceivable that they could have very similar False Personalities in everyday life if the False Personalities of both coalesced around their intellectual or emotional capacities with no regard for physicality.

The meaning of words for rational and irrational types

Rational and irrational types seem to have different relationships to words. Rational types tend to "trust" words spoken by themselves and others, while irrational types "mistrust" them.

In conversation, rational types seem to pay more attention to words and treat them as accurate indicators of what a person really thinks, feels, and experiences. Irrational types seem not to focus much on words and pay attention to something entirely different. They treat words as approximate indicators rather than accurate reflections of subjective reality.

So, when an irrational type communicates with a rational one, the rational type will try to "latch onto" words spoken by the irrational type and will, in the irrational type's perception, misinterpret what the irrational type was trying to say. If the rational type repeats what the irrational type said, they will actually leave out certain words and end up distorting the message.

I suppose the same is true in the other direction, though irrational types seem less inclined to paraphrase and repeating verbal messages since they are seen as less important. Most likely, the irrational type will look for a way to sum up what was said—something like, "it sounds to me like you're saying X" or "so you're saying that X."

What I've written so far is probably obvious to most readers. But what is the reason for this different attitude towards words?

On the surface it would seem that in rational types the brain's verbal faculties are more closely linked to the subconscious mind than in irrational types. In other words, their words indeed are more accurate indicators of their subjective reality. Because of this, they spend much less energy trying to go beyond words, which is a perpetual interest of many irrational types.

With weaker links between their verbal faculties and the subconscious mind, irrationals feel that words are a kind of smokescreen which needs to be seen through in order to understand what's actually going on. It may be hard for them to fathom that rationals could actually mean what they say.

Another possibility is that irrational ("perceiving") functions are centered in the right hemisphere, while rational ("judging") functions are centered in the left, and that language is, by nature, more a tool of judging than of perceiving. If verbal faculties in all types are mostly centered in the left hemisphere, than rational types would, in fact, have greater verbal access to their "accepting" functions (#1, 3, 5, and 7) than irrational types. In irrationals, signals would have to jump from the right to the left hemisphere to be verbalized, creating an experience of distance between reality and verbalizations of reality.

But, of course, I'm a dilettante in brain physiology, and any neuroscientist would say, "well, it's more complicated than that."