Nature and nurture: Understanding personality in girls
As many of us can relate, understanding our girls as they grow into young women can be one of the biggest challenges we face. A Her Guide reader recently requested an article on personality types and how understanding personality could help her develop a stronger relationship with her daughter.
To learn more about personality, Her Guide connected with N’Shama Sterling, a certified Enneagram teacher. The Enneagram is a map of nine personality types. This is the first of a two-part series focused on building an understanding of personality and enlisting the support of the Enneagram as a map to build mutual respect and understanding with our girls. In the second half of this series, N’Shama will share information about the Enneagram and how it is a powerful and useful guide in the exploration of personality.
Understanding personality
N’Shama offered four key takeaways on understanding personality and how as parents and caregivers we can support our girls. You can read through the full interview below:
Personality is a combination of nurture and nature. If a girl is raised in a supportive environment with structured guidelines and loving caregivers, it is more likely that she will grow and develop into adolescence with positive traits and characteristics of personality.
Building open lines of communication better enables a girl to express her true self and lessen her need for personality defense mechanisms.
Families can have a variety of personality types. Understanding these differences and recognizing your own personality traits and behaviors will help you build a better relationship with your girl.
Helping your girl recognize her personality traits and validate what she is experiencing will help build her confidence and self-esteem.
Her Guide: What is personality and how is it formed?
N’Shama: Our personality is what makes us knowable, makes us unique and charming, causes us happiness, laughter and grief. It triggers our responses and makes us angry, defiant and ultimately lovable. It unconsciously moves us to be attracted by some people and to be repelled by others. It makes us strive to be and act in ways that we consider positive or useful and to avoid ways that we judge as harmful or unfruitful.
Personality arises from both nature and nurture. We come into this world with an innate neuro-biological preference for the fight/flight/freeze response. Even before we are able to speak, we are predisposed to respond to our early surroundings in ways that we unconsciously believe will result in receiving care and comfort. These early habits crystallize into a fixed perception of the world around us, how it works and how we need to act and respond in order to give and receive love.
Environment, or nurture, especially in the very early years of life, also plays a critical and important role in the development of personality. If a girl is raised in a supportive environment with structured guidelines and loving caregivers, it is more likely that she will grow and develop into adolescence with positive traits and characteristics of personality — ready to acquire an awareness and curiosity about the many inner, and sometimes conflicting, parts of herself. This inner tension becomes increasingly active in the preteen years.
HG: How does personality shift during a girl’s adolescent years?
NS: To say that raising an adolescent girl is challenging is, of course, a gross understatement. In adolescence, the social drive of belonging to the group becomes more active, partially due to the surge in hormones and partially to the increased complexity of social interactions. The behaviors and patterns that previously worked in a less complex environment become challenged. The preteen girl, in an attempt to “fit in,” may unconsciously abandon her authentic self in an effort to match the societal image of how to look, dress, behave, etc. in order to be accepted. During this time, her uncertainty about who she is and who she wants to become activates defensive responses as she strives to avoid feeling hurt, abandoned and powerless.
This is a critical and tender age when family and social structures can provide a network of caring, holding and acceptance, and build a foundation from which girls can venture into the world seeking their own pathways, experimenting, exploring, learning, making mistakes and being triumphant.
At this time, with COVID-19 rampaging on the one hand, and the horrific incidents of violence based on racial bias on the other, it becomes even more crucial to build open lines of communication and mutual acknowledgment and exploration of our emotions, our judgments, our prejudices and our fears. The intensity of external circumstances activates our deepest fears, causing an amplification of our personality traits, both the healthy responses and the unhealthy ones.
HG: How does personality impact behaviors and vice versa?
NS: Behaviors are rooted in our personality, and they impact all our relationships, for better or worse. Sometimes we will notice the effect of our actions, and this might prompt us to want to examine or change some of our behaviors. It then becomes important to grasp why it is we do what we do, to look beneath the surface of our actions and come to understand what truly motivates us, to recognize what we are seeking through our actions. Understanding our personality structure can offer insight and compassion for our own behaviors and pique our curiosity towards understanding the behaviors of others.
Personality traits are more ingrained than behaviors. Many of our behaviors arise in the moment, as kind of a gut reaction to what just happened — even our small acts of kindness spring from a personality trait of wanting to be helpful and thoughtful. When I pluck an especially lovely rose or peony from my garden to give to a friend, my motivation is usually two-fold: I want to do something kind, letting them know I care, and I also want to share the beauty and scent of this special flower. Part of my own personality style includes a deep appreciation of beauty in all its forms … art, music, nature. I want to connect with others in the experience of that. If I am honest with myself, part of my underlying motivation is the hope that the person to whom I have gifted the flower will think of me with kindness.
One of the primary benefits of understanding personality is the realization that, while in many ways, we have many similarities, we are, in fact, all very different. We see the world through our own unique set of filters that make it difficult to understand or validate any other points of view. This may be very different from the way others perceive the world. Even in our families, or maybe especially in our families, each person has his or her own unique internal structure and patterns of thinking, feeling and sensing that drive their behaviors.
As a parent, you might be surprised at how disenfranchised or misunderstood your own tween or teenager might feel inside her very own family. It might help to recall how you felt as an adolescent, shedding light on the emotional ups and downs of your own daughter. Imagine that she might suddenly be feeling as if she has plummeted to earth from an alien planet. Perhaps you have felt that way yourself at times.
HG: How can I support my girl and understand her better?
NS: As a girl moves into adolescence, the desire to belong to the “group” intensifies, her behaviors may suddenly change, challenging some of the family norms, and you may not even recognize her as she traverses the intensity of new emotions and experiences. It is important to validate the reality of her world so that she can maintain confidence in her sense of self. She has her own internal struggle in keeping her sense of identity from being taken over by conforming to the social norms of the group. When she can recognize her personality traits and intentionally choose to honor what is true for herself, she will grow in self-esteem and solidify the conscious building of her character.
Helping an adolescent girl understand and accept her feelings as natural, as part of who she intrinsically is, can help her have compassion for herself. Helping her bolster her sense of self-esteem and self-confidence can help alleviate the feelings of insecurity, of not belonging, of feeling powerless. Offering support for her inherent gifts and providing useful, compassionate feedback can strengthen her self-esteem. While you may want to protect your children from suffering, speaking the truth about “what is” can be powerfully reassuring and provide a reality check for all concerned.
As a parent, you may struggle with loving and accepting the behavior of your child. This is a natural response to someone who is not operating according to your values or norms. You may sense your own internal struggle as you walk the line between loving acceptance and the desire to build character. You may encounter feelings of guilt or inadequacy or confusion — all part of the experience of being a parent.
Understanding defensive patterns can help relax internal tensions, relieve anxiety and feelings of alienation and open the pathway for new choices of response. As a parent, when you understand your own patterns of behavior and hold yourself in compassion, your heart may open to feelings of compassion and understanding for your adolescent daughter and may help you create a non-judgmental holding for healthy development.
It then becomes critically important to explore and understand your own personality structure — the patterns of thinking, feeling and sensing that drive your own behaviors. This will help you grow in compassion for the common human dilemma — the fear of not belonging — the fear that your pre-adolescent girl is particularly sensitive to as she begins her transition from girl to young woman. As you build your capacity to search underneath the surface of behaviors to see and understand what drives her, you will grow your capacity to appreciate the ways in which everyone strives for love, acceptance and belonging.
Resources
Here are some resources you may find valuable. While I have only touched peripherally on the Enneagram in this first article, you may want to begin your own exploration.
Pipher, Mary, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Adolescent Girls, G.P. Putnam Books, New York, 1994.
David N. Daniels, M.D. and Virginia A. Price, Ph.D., The Essential Enneagram: The Definitive Personality Test and Self-Discovery Guide, Harper, San Francisco, 2000.
Riso, Don Richard, The Wisdom of the Enneagram, New York: Bantam Books, 1999.
Heuertz, Christopher L. The Enneagram of Belonging, Michigan: Zondervan Thrive, 2020.