“That's Just Who I Am”: How the Ambiguities of Language Influence Our Concept of Personality and Negatively Impact Couple Relationships

Abstract

Informed by the insights of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, this article aims to uncover how the ambiguities of language engender misleading but commonly held assumptions and beliefs about personality as a fixed and unchanging entity that contribute to significant problems in couple relationships. Henry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal theory is used to provide a framework for an alternative understanding of personality as a malleable entity that is rooted in experience and shaped by learned behavior, with the further implication that personality therefore is subject to change through new experience and newly developed patterns of behavior. A clinical example provides an illustration of how a couple can become ensnared into an impasse in their relationship because of how the ambiguities of language lead them to assume that personality is fixed and unchanging, and how the clinician, informed by Sullivan's theory of personality, can help the couple break free from the impasse so that they are enabled to be more responsive to one another's concerns through a process of reciprocal change. Implications from this analysis are drawn relative to Andrew Christensen and Neil Jacobson's acceptance theory of change as well as John Gottman's theory about perpetual problems.