Person or character

Person or character. Who are we?

Estimated Reading Time: 1st part: 2 min, 14 sec | 2nd part: 2 min. 31 sec

Total reading time: 4 min, 45 sec

How many of us realize who we are: a person or a character?

If we don’t understand who we are: a person or a character, it will be difficult to understand who others are. It will also be difficult to act in the right way with them.

Character is a way of doing things that become fixed and become our dominant characteristic.

It is also “the personality or part which an actor recreates.”

“Look at that person, how strong and decisive they are and how they know their stuff!” That is the character that person is playing and that, at least for others, is obvious and easy to recognize. Everyone plays a character in life and chooses it because it makes them more self-confident.

Why does the character make us self-confident?

We believe — because we’ve noticed it in some adult who impressed us as children — that it’s the winning strategy for gaining that power (prestige, favors, obedience, etc.) that we care about.

“If it worked once, it will work again!” we think. So, we adopt it and let it manage us.

What benefit do we get (or, at least, we feel like we get)?

We no longer need to weigh things and decide when faced with situations in life. The character acts in our place, but it always does it the same way, a mechanical way.

“I often observe ways of doing things that I no longer like. I would like to change them, but I can’t…”

Who have we become? A character? How can we get rid of it once and for all?

How do we build it? Who plays the victim?

A mother wants her son to come to her house for lunch every Sunday because it pleases her and because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. She then adopts many strategies to force this habit.

She creates an expectation towards him and reinforces it by complaining or pretending to be in pain. In this way, she will make him worry and force him to obey.

She plays the victim, which is a creator of characters, and to which we all resort!

It may happen that her son succumbs and even some benevolent friend does her best to please her, moved to compassion by her complaints. The mother will then reinforce her strategies to stabilize the power she has gained. Over time, she will make this a habitual behavior.

She could play the victim when she needs and then revert to her habitual behavior; she becomes instead more and more a victim until she is a victim. From that point on, it is the character that affects her behavior.

So, it happens to those who seduce and seek power over the opposite sex. This is also the behavior of some women, who react by attacking the man they desire but are afraid of. You can also see the character in the upright man, who does not give in and does not bend in front of anything, and so on. You can find a list of characters on Wikipedia.

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