What do you think are the factors that shape a person's personality?

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So, I’ve been trying to wrap my head lately around the concept of personality, where it comes from, what it does, and how to develop it. There’s these things the medical community has dubbed “personality disorders,” what are they describing and how does it relate? There’s these things called “surrender” and “spirituality” and “spiritual enlightenment,” what do they mean and how do they relate?

Going this deep it seems to be best to just drop in a platform so I can build off of it. If you haven’t been following my recent answers, here’s the last one: Vincent Guidry's answer to 'Loss of self' through meditation versus dissociation: what's the difference? There’s another answer link in there and if you’re really hungry, you can just scroll through my recent answers on my profile.

So what is personality? Wikipedia is almost comically vague, so allow me to provide my own definition. Personality is the set of patterns that drives your motivation. What does ‘you’ come from, where is that generated in the brain? What are the mechanics that govern how you relate to others and make decisions and reason about stuff? How are you different from other people?

We can approach what personality is by examining how it breaks down. The medical community in the US these days divides personality disorder into three types. Clusters A, B, C, generally referring to ‘odd’, ‘dramatic’, and ‘anxious’ accordingly. Odd reflects a particular inability to perceive reality, dramatic largely shows up in your patterns of relating with others, and anxious denotes consistent, dreadful, existential fear.

The one thing that ties all of it together is that the person’s sense of self revolves around the issue. Their words and thought’s return to the broken patterns, time and time again, because their very brain is driving them. No amount of talk, discussion, honesty, self-development, even spirituality can dislodge the issue. It’s core to the self, driving the sense of it.

So now that we’ve broken down personality, let’s build it back up. The brain is amazingly plastic and can rebuild whatever it senses it needs in another part of the brain. When a part of the limbic system gets shut off, the person can examine other people very carefully and come up with a rational framework that serves the purpose that the shut-off part of the brain served.

And so you can see a functioning human being as having access to all the functions of the brain. A flaw in the brain causes the personality to orient around it. Personality development means to have all the functions in the brain talk to each other and inform their operation. The linked answer has a link to another one that shows how self-awareness leads to empathy. If you can’t be self-aware, meaning you can’t rationally understand your own emotions, then you can’t be empathetic, meaning you can’t understand other people’s emotions.

People can’t stop themselves from trying to learn and grow, it’s intrinsic to what it means to have agency. As one grows and matures, they gradually become aware of the power they possess, or rather, that they would possess, if only they could gain control over the self. Efforts to obtain self-control and understanding can all be shown to observe the same basic pattern, one that spiritual seekers term surrender.

Surrender means to gain control by giving it up. The deep motivations driving behavior don’t have to stay fixed, one can become aware of them. Once you become aware of them, you can choose to give them up. By giving them up, the mind finds alternative expressive paths for the generation of self. The cognitive mind holds on to patterns and surrender clears them away. A new sense of self gets constructed out of the ashes of the old one, with a different structure. This lasts until another surrender event.

If you keep moving through surrender after surrender, you eventually gain full self-awareness and function. All the parts of the mind that are shut off are either restarted or cognitive replacements are created. One can see the self in others reflected at you and the self that gets reflected back at others when they look at you. You can use these reflections to further create surrender events.

We call this authenticity. The ability to share self with others without creating problems either in yourself or that other person. A step on the road to enlightenment.