Naming Things About Ourselves
And why personality tests can make us uneasy
Recently, Christian author and podcaster
shared a bit of self-knowledge in one of her weekly essays.“Kendra and I sometimes joke about the reality that, even on our very best days, no matter how good things are or how settled we may feel, she’s always going to be a little bit angry and I’m always going to feel a little bit sad. We laugh when we say it while still holding respect for our personalities. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. (Most of the time.)”
Her honesty struck me, as did her ability to hold the tension between not taking it too seriously and not disregarding it entirely. And then she went on to say:
“I realize this always-a-little-bit-sad business sounds terrible. (I also realize you most likely know exactly what I mean.) But there are gifts here, too. Being familiar with sadness means it doesn’t scare me when it shows up so I have a lot of capacity, not only for my own sadness, but for yours too. It doesn’t make me squirmy, I don’t feel compelled to fill silent sad space with a lot of words, and I don’t have a compulsion to fix it (or you, thanks be to God.)”
These are the words of a woman who has made peace with who she is. It’s not that there isn’t room for growth and change (what is life without that?), but she can see how God made her; how her choice of disposition towards that design affects the weight it bears in her life (at least in part); and how, despite its difficulty, it can be a gift for others (without becoming a kind of ‘Savior complex.’)
This is wisdom, and we can learn from it.
A lot of my client work involves helping people to know themselves, not so that they can become egotistical maniacs,1 but so that they can become fully the person God made them to be, and in so doing, become a gift to others.
The Power of Naming
A large part of self-knowledge (like other kinds of knowledge) involves naming: giving words to the things that we sense under the surface, perhaps with hopefulness, perhaps with unease. Naming brings that thing - the trait, the desire, the disposition - into the light. It stops it from becoming a shadow monster or dream fantasy. It helps us to hold it up in prayer and in conversation with others, so we can learn more about it and understand it better.
Imagine if you didn’t have a word for the color red. Looking around in nature, you might notice that some berries, some flowers, some birds are all a little bit alike. Only, they aren’t alike at all. And yet, they kind of are. It’s hard to explain. They have something in common, but it doesn’t make sense, because they’re very different things. In fact, some of them are dangerous. Are they dangerous because of that thing? Does that mean they’re all dangerous?
Do you see the difficulty? Without a name for a thing (and the concept behind the name), we’re left grappling with how everything relates to everything else.
Names help us grasp the concept of a thing. They help us categorize and make sense of the world around us. They aide us in trying to communicate with others.
Naming Things About Ourselves
When it comes to naming things about ourselves, though, I’ve noticed that the approach we take can determine how helpful it really is.
Sometimes we take a personality test with results that give us a name for a certain aspect of ourselves. We discover that we’re “introverted” or “a thinker” or “perceptive.”
This discovery then often goes one of two ways. Either we feel freed, or we feel trapped.
Feeling freed means that we say to ourselves: “Yes! That’s it. That’s the word I’ve been looking for all along. I am like that.” We’re delighted to have discovered our own version of the color red. It helps us make sense of ourselves and communicate with others.
Feeling trapped means that we say to ourselves: “Really? Well, I guess I am that. Now I’m like this for the rest of my life.” We feel limited rather than freed because the language feels prescriptive rather than descriptive.
How Do The Names Shape Us?
Regardless of how we feel, we have a choice about how we let these names shape us. We can choose to let them be helpful or harmful.
Do we use them for excuse-making (“I’m just like this, ok? I can’t help it”) or for reason-giving (“I’m like this, so sometimes it’s more difficult for me”)?
Do we use them to grow more self-obsessed or do we try to see how they can help us serve others?
Do we wear them like a straight-jacket that can’t be escaped, or do we allow them to drape over us gently without confinement?
Experience Brings Perspective
I’ve noticed that it’s often easier to navigate these waters with age, for the simple reason that we’ve had longer to get to know ourselves! There’s a reason that wisdom is associated with years: it takes life experience - our own, and observing that of others - to be able to make wise judgments about things. Years of life give us a chance to observe a lot of red, so to speak, and to notice when it’s dangerous and when it’s not.
Sometimes we can go decades without having a name for something, so that when we finally do get a name, we think, “oh of course, that makes sense!” without feeling that it now determines our future. Similarly, sometimes being new to a thing, or not having a lot of experience, can lean us towards feeling more trapped by a name.2
It can be helpful to borrow from the wisdom of others: to find people we admire, and note how they use language to describe themselves, and the disposition they bring to it. Hopefully in so doing, we can find a way towards peace, and maybe even laughter.
Tell me: what’s your experience of naming things about yourself? Has it been helpful? Hurtful? Has your experienced changed over the years?
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I put this caveat in here because occasionally I’ll meet a Christian who will ask: why all this focus on the self? Aren’t we supposed to die to ourselves? To which I will respond: yes, handing over ourselves to the Lord is a universal calling. But we ought to know what we’re handing over, and moreover, value what we give. We aren’t called to just dump ourselves into a trash bag and hand it over without looking or caring. The call to die to self comes in the context of understanding ourselves to be unique and made in the image and likeness of a God who is goodness, truth, and beauty. Otherwise, it’s not much of an offering from our perspective, is it?
If someone had given me a serious medical diagnosis in my teens, for example, I may have balked at it, feeling like it was “destining” me to a limited life. But after decades of experiencing pain and limitation, receiving that diagnosis (serious though it was) was actually relieving, because I had a name and a confirmation that “I wasn’t just crazy” and it wasn’t “just all in my head.”
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