Your Personality’s Role in Healing Intimacy Issues and Improving Self Esteem

Your personality plays an important role in your intimacy and also your self esteem!  Your personality should be about who you are instead of reflecting any problems that you have.  Understanding your true personality is at the heart of of your freedom to change.

Your fusion and confusion regarding love, longing, and fear, is a strongly felt phenomenon.  You often desire closeness and connection but your lack of basic trust in others can cause internal conflict.  This conflict may be driven by a fear of abandonment. Your emotional conflicts may come from misattunement (lack of rapport between parent and child) or inconsistency in infancy and abusive childhood experiences.   Your childhood traumas are absorbed by your body, the nervous system, and heart, long before it is capable of being understood. This hurts your ability ability to self-soothe, regulate, and form secure attachments throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. In adulthood this will affect how you are intimate with the people you love and how you view yourself.  As you develop physically, a constellation of motives, fantasies, ways of coping and defending, characteristic patterns of thinking and feeling, and how we experience ourselves and others, are also developing.   In short this is your Personality!

Tell me about Personality?

  • Personality acts as a map and helps individuals find their bearings, orient themselves, and navigate their lives.
  • Understanding personality is synonymous with understanding our greatest intentions, strengths, feelings, and beliefs. It gives us a peek into how we have learned to cope with our environment and what we value (i.e. love, mastery, security, achievement, control, etc.).
  • In many ways, personality is at the heart of psychodynamic therapy. Through therapy, this conscious and unconscious content becomes known and allows for: the freedom to change and to manage, cultivate compassion for long-held struggles, and self-efficacy and self-agency in managing discomfort and major life transitions.
  • Finding your optimal personality is an intimate journey that is reflective of a more intimate understanding of self that may now be narrated to others.

Personality has long been viewed through a medical lens – through diagnostically classified pains, as a “disorder” for clinical convenience. (Even though most personality organizations could fit into PTSD and CPTSD conceptualizations). The medical approach can stigmatize you because it only points out problems.  Emphasizing what is wrong can make you feel shame, sadness, and helpless.  That makes it harder to see your real problems because we are just seeing the emotions that you are more vulnerable to experiencing (i.e. anxiety or depression or anger and aggression).
It is more accurate to define your personality by the themes in your life.   We prefer the sensitive approach where we look at your qualities, preferences and values.  Let’s explore who you are now, what is good and what could change.

Change is possible!

It is true some personality dynamics become fixed over time, but change is possible!  

  • You are fully capable of controlling your emotions.
  • You can make transformative connections between one state of mind and another.
  • You can learn new skills in making choices when it comes to intimacy and relationships.
  • Your new knowledge will create an internal experience to provide you with increased awareness of your identity.
  • You can become more resilient, negative experiences may not bother you as much.

Getting Started With Counseling in Lakewood & Longmont Colorado

We invite you to call us at 720-551-4553 for a free 20-minute phone consultation. You can schedule your appointment via phone, email, or the contact page on our website. We offer both in-person and online counseling. We’re open to whichever option you feel more comfortable with.  We look forward to hearing from you!