Identity Index: Agreeable

What is my relationship to being agreeable? I identify as agreeable. I have a story about myself that I am agreeable.

What does that mean to me?

This one I have spent a lot of time processing over 2022, so starting a writing about it I feel some safety in it being familiar territory. But there's still plenty of vulnerability and risk in parts of sharing my story here.

Agreeableness is one of the big five personality traits, and I've always been high on it (along with openness). A person high in agreeableness might be described as warm, personable, tactful, empathetic [see: empathetic], or prosocial.

In many ways this is a great thing, and it has served me in life in a thousand different ways. To list a few: my ability to navigate social situations and be well liked is probably the most important one, to be seen as someone who listens and cares, and even if they're not always reaching out [see: bad at correspondences], when you do connect with them there's confidence it will be with warmth and that they will validate and honor your perspective.

Hell, everybody wants to be liked, right? I'm just maybe a little more adapted to facilitating the possibility than some? What could be wrong with that, it sounds great. Studies even show it is the single most important trait for job performance and success, huzzah!

Well, the shadow side of high agreeableness is vast, and my experience of it is tremendous. To list a few potential concerns with it before diving into them, common ones are things like: putting other people's needs before your own, appeasement, conflict avoidance, overemphasis of care for others' emotional states, withholding, and masking. When these shadow behaviors run away unchecked, they lead to things like loss of self worth, festering resentments, social anxiety [see: socially anxious], loneliness and the feeling of never been really seen by anyone.

My own story of agreeableness starts so early it almost feels baked in. I was an innately calm [see: calm] and introverted [see: introverted] child, and relative to my siblings in those days, I was better behaved and less volatile. So part of my role in the family became being less needy, being quiet, being fine, and doing well by default. This was how I could add value, and prove worth.

A big part of being young for me was constantly feeling a lot of fear. Maybe that's a universal thing. The world seemed massive, everything always seemed new and strange, every new situation was risk, uncertainty, potential for conflict or tumult. Conflict and tumult didn't feel good, I wanted to avoid those. Learning to navigate people well, to listen first and adapt my behavior to who I thought this person, or this group, would want, was just common sense. It made me feel safe. It made them feel good too. Everybody wins.

In school I got really good at this. I managed to be both introverted, get excellent grades, and be popular and well liked by my peers. Who I was felt opaque, something to be experimented with, and each interaction was a way to test a version of myself out with someone. But the results were clear: different people preferred different versions!

Teachers were most impressed by the version of me that was smart and studious and learned quickly and completed work on time. At church being seen as well behaved and learning bible verses quickly mattered the most. Among friends and peers, it varied as well. With some being good at a sport might be the way to get them to like me, with some it might be being funny, with others it might be roughhousing or cursing or being rebellious.

I honed and refined this adaptive skill over the years, never considering it as a thing that might also be doing me harm. But I did eventually in mid to late teenage years, begin to recognize more fully part of it's impact: several distinct versions of myself had emerged, and I would code-switch depending on the context of who was in the room. This only felt uncomfortable or tense to me though in moments where contexts collided, for example when a teacher put me on the spot in front of a friend I wanted to see me as rebellious, or someone from my church walked into a restaurant where my friend and I were eating.

My agreeableness, paired partially with growing up as a third culture kid [see: third culture kid] also led to a distinct pattern when meeting a new person. I learned to start off in a new interaction with a sort of blank slate version of myself, presenting neutrality and revealing as little as possible other than curiosity. The goal was to learn as much as possible about them as possible, their personality and energy and intentions, then adapting what I might reveal about myself to suit what I thought would evoke affirmation from them.

The consequences of this over time became enormous. First and foremost it was simply exhausting. The energy required went up exponentially depending on how many new people were involved at a time, and I developed a core story of having a social anxiety that was proportional to the number of less familiar people in the room [see: socially anxious]. I connect my feelings of social anxiety directly to taking on a need to manage other people's experience of me.

There has been a deeper, more tragic paradox to the whole thing though. This entire story and posture evolved from a desire to be accepted and liked and seen as worthy, but by constantly being in the masks of falsified versions of myself to accomplish that, I was left feeling deeply lonely regardless of how many people said they liked me.

Even worse than others not really knowing me though, than my feelings of isolation from never fully being seen, is the fact that over years and decades of doing this, I gave up deep connection to myself and lost all sense of who I really was. The truth I can see now is, instead of a deeply felt transmission of myself into the world based on being connected to myself, I relied on masked interactions and virtuous signaling [see: virtuous]. Who I was to myself became little more than the identity markers I clung to, the ones I most wanted to be seen as: smart [see: intelligent], calm [see: calm], pleasant, worldly [see: third culture kid], virtuous, etc.

One of the most corrosive ways this has impacted the interpersonal dynamics through my life is in romantic relationships. The conflict avoidant and appeasement aspects of my agreeableness were recipes for relational disaster. But each time in the moment, they could be easily rationalized away: "oh it's not that big of a deal, it's just a small thing anyway that doesn't really matter, let her have her way." "Saying nothing got us back to normal and now we can move forward, perfect." "It doesn't really matter that much to me (i.e. it matters less in this moment than getting away from this uncomfortable feeling), so fine, you're right."

In precisely the relationship where I most wanted to be seen, I was sabotaging myself and justifying it as being on their behalf. In short, I was fucked.

Facing this fully is not completed work, it's ongoing and some of the most difficult of my life. What it looks like, first and foremost, has been recognition of the shadow side of this part of myself, loving and honoring the reasons for it and my wholeness in it, and moving towards awareness and curiosity of it in real time.

That awareness honing has required a broad swath of strategies for deepening in connection to myself, from embodiment practices like exercise, yoga, and contrast therapy, to mindfulness practices like meditation and sensory deprivation tanks, to deep introspection through therapy, shadow work, and journaling, to social rewiring via authentic relating practices like circling.

Beyond just the awareness to notice when I'm withholding something out of a perceived care or management of a social situation, the key shift is finding the willingness and courage to pattern shift instead: move towards the discomfort, name the tension, say the difficult thing.

It's a work in progress, I still fail a lot. And the impact has been mixed. Some people truly don't want to hear that thing and be with the discomfort that might arise when I'm being more honest. That is fair. It has caused rupture, it does lead to open tensions, and sometimes that can cause the other person to withdraw from a relationship. There is a cost to being more fully myself, I won't pretend that's not the case.

But the benefits even in moving that direction are amazing. The first is just a feeling of liberation! Carrying less energy of feeling this need to manage everyone else's experience of me in any situation is like a massive weighted blanket that's been removed from around me as I move through my life, I feel freer and like I have more agency in the world.

For most of my relationships, as well, the impact has been profound. It turns out many people appreciate being challenged and having more honest relationships, even if it sometimes means more discomfort in the moment. Ultimately it leads to deepening connection, more trust, and both parties feeling more honored. For me to say the uncomfortable thing to someone requires vulnerability on my part, and that also equates with trust: I am trusting your capacity to be with my vulnerability and the discomfort that may arise with what I'm sharing.

In those moments when my connection to myself is high and I'm in a clear flow and transmission, my social anxiety ceases to exist. The consequences can be whatever they will be, and it will be okay, because at least I was living my true self.

Lots of work here remains, but the value proposition is obvious to me.

One last thing I'll say, the shadow work I've done around this has proven important at another big meta level: it has shown me that aspects of my personality I would have considered absolutely core and unmovable are actually possible to change. In this case I mean my social anxiety, which felt so foundational and long-standing that I imagined it was simply a part of me.

This discovery is a key motivation in this entire writing project. Knowing that deeper understanding and potentially pattern interruption of long held identity markers in myself is possible and potentially liberating, I feel called to dive deeper, to see what else might need similar work.

Anyway, this all feels true and real to me. What more can I share? I'll revisit this later and see if more comes up.

For now: Agreeable Matt, I love you and am working on accepting all parts of you fully. You're a part of my wholeness and also you don't need to be forever. The story can change but right now it's great and complete.

Meta Reflection

On pressing publish: There's a fair amount of vulnerability in this post but also it's a story about which I feel a lot of pride, which assuages some of my fears here. There's also a part of me that wants to be seen as having healed, progressed, evolved, and then the self judgmental part that knows this is a practice and not a destination, and I still fail constantly.

The part about impact on romantic relationships feels especially vulnerable to share, and it's also where I continue to feel the most ongoing risk in my agreeable tendencies today. Precisely when the stakes feel the highest it can be the easiest to rationalize withholding. It's my responsibility to say the thing anyway.

Just like how I'm going to hit publish, right now.