Below the surface everyone is pretty complicated. Based on your answers, we think the following three traits are important strands in your personality:

  • RATIONALITY
    • You like clarity and intelligent simplicity and you get frustrated at messy thinking. This can make you seem unreasonably pushy to some, but it is actually a virtue: you are motivated by a horror at pointless effort and a longing for precision and insight into how things and people work. Your ability to synthesise and bring order is essential in producing thinking which is truly helpful.
  • AGGRESSION
    • One part of your character is anger in all its forms: frustration, outrage – and when anger is suppressed – bitterness, grumpiness, and bodily aches. Fundamentally, frustration comes from hope: you get upset because you expect your life will be more than a valley of tears. One way to deny aggression is to direct it inwards, as self-criticism. But you’re at your best when you acknowledge anger, and act it out clearly and in a focussed way, with honour.
  • DEFENSIVENESS
    • One tendency in you – which is of course normal to the human race – is to bristle when criticised, and to defend yourself when you feel under threat from aggression or blame. Defensiveness can make you conceal your less honourable motives, from others, and from yourself. The habits once made sense: they all derive from past efforts to protect yourself. And most of the time – because we don’t get much help in loving ourselves – you still need them to feel secure.
mar 1 2017 ∞
oct 26 2018 +