4 Character Issues That Hold You (and Your Relationships) Back

If we are afraid of the truth about ourselves and have a character “stance” to hide, then we are headed in the wrong direction, away from reality. Think of the character issues that get in the way and create this kind of fear:

• Fear of seeing that I am wrong or have faults that are ugly. Those lead to guilt, or fears that I may lose love, approval, or standing with the people I care about.
• A fixed view of myself from past experience, either positive or negative. Our early relationships give us a view of who we are, and to look at new input means challenging those views, which leads to anxiety. 
• A lack of skills or resources to deal with what I find. If I open Pandora’s box, what will I do with it? 
• A need for a total redo of a life plan or script. What if Mom or Dad made me believe that I was gifted in some area or should be able to do so and so, and the reality is that I am not? Now what? Or if this was my own dream, but I am out of touch with my true areas of giftedness? 

The character who seeks reality about himself or herself has the courage to embrace whatever reality he finds. When we talk about “character that meets the demands of reality,” part of that is meeting the demand of the truth about ourselves. The promise of that pain is that when we do that, we can meet the demands of the external world even better. The one who is true about herself is the one who is most able to negotiate things outside of herself as well. 

First, people tend to hold back on feedback that might be difficult for someone to hear and do not always express their full critique of someone’s performance. They might, for example, say, “It was OK, not your best, but OK.” But the part they are holding back, the last 10 perfect is “OK, if I am totally honest, you need to go back to the drawing board and start over.” Or: “Before you ever do that again, get some help.” Second, we need the last 10 percent to be the best that we can be. I am convinced that one aspect of their huge success in reaching their goals has been to develop a culture of characters who desire to hear the last 10 percent. 

To do that requires a character that hungers for the truth. The issue here is that a character of integrity has a hunger, an appetite, to know the truth about itself. And that has to come from reaching for outside sources and being open to hearing it. 

Sometimes it is even positive. Sometimes people ward off positive reality about themselves because it would mean a lot to take responsibility for it. “You have some gifts and some abilities that you have not been using, and we are going to promote you to head a division” may be frightening news for some. And they may ward it off or not see it, unless it breaks through from the outside. Left to their own self-appraisal, they may never take the growth step needed to become the person they could be. We avoid the truth sometimes in both directions, positive and negative. The winners seek both, even the kind that would stretch them out of their comfort zone.

And third, they seek the truth about other people. Not only do we avoid seeing reality about ourselves, but sometimes because of past experiences, and sometimes to keep our own internal stability, we do not see others in the reality of who they are. 

From the lonely individual who falls in love with a nutcase–even when his or her friends are saying, “What are you thinking?”--to people who make bad hires in business or forge bad partnerships, our tendency to distort others is a big part of how we run into trouble. And we typically do it for a few reasons that have to do with our makeup.

First, we are blind to correctly seeing others who somehow remind us of unresolved figures from our past. You have heard this referred to as transference. It is our tendency to see others through the lens of people from previous experience. In a good way, it can cause us to be more attuned to things that others might miss, in that we can be vigilant in seeing hurtful patterns that we may have grown up with. But, if we have never worked those through, it can cause us either to be blind to them or to overreact when we are faced with them. Almost everyone can relate to this experience, in that we have more difficulty with a certain kind of person than others. Yet, other people may just experience that person as having a quirk and are able to work around it. But it gets us off course because of unresolved hurt or issues with a person like that from our history. 

Second, we distort them out of our own needs. Or the lonely person who needs a relationship so badly that anyone looks good. Or if we are feeling overwhelmed, for example, we might idealize people who present a lot of strength. They give us a secure feeling in all of the chaos. What we miss is that they might be bulldozers and insensitive to people’s needs. The love for the strength wears off and we are left with a jerk. Or, the opposite can happen. If you have recently been through a period of getting beat up by the bulldozers, then you are really drawn to a person with some people sensitivity. But, you miss that in their niceness they are overly passive, and you lose respect for them after the initial relief wears off. 

Third, we distort them sometimes because we are not in touch with something about ourselves. I remember a client of mine one time just railing on irresponsible people and deceivers. They just drove him crazy. And some of the people he would label that way were really not bad. They might have a few quirks, but they were not irresponsible or deceptive. But he had them labeled that way. I remember thinking that he was seeing them in such a distorted way, and yet when I would confront it, he would have nothing to do with what I was saying.

After a while, though, others who worked around him came forward with some truth about him that he had not been disclosing. He was not paying attention to many of his responsibilities and was deceiving people all along the way into thinking things that were misrepresentations. In psych parlance, he was “projecting.” He was projecting onto others what he was blind to in himself. As a result, he was not seeing reality in them and was missing a lot of good people along the way. He could not see their good parts because he was projecting onto them his own faults. 

In contrast, people of integrated character tend to delude themselves less about others. They have worked through their own issues and distortions about other people to a degree that they can see pretty clearly. And, as a part of that, they seek to know more. Wise people are “cautious in friendship” as the proverb says. They seek to get to know a person clearly, as the person truly is, before they hire him, marry him, become partners with him, or divorce him, fire him, or not go forward with him. We can be off in either direction, and the complete character is always asking, “Is this me, or him?” They are checking to see where the perception is coming from and trying to find out what is true. We have all heard both “I underestimated her” or “I overestimated her”. People who have integrated their character tend to do both of those less because they are seekers of reality and desire to see it, even if it is going to be uncomfortable or make them deal with some things.