How are Aristotle, personality type, and health connected?

As parents, we give everything to our kids and families, often putting our own well-being last. Antidote ideas: Explore your "truest nature" and find inspiration in Aristotle's golden mean.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personality, helping, health… and Aristotle.

As my family adapts to the departure of my older daughter for college, I recall all the things I used to do with her and for her while she was home. She is a very capable young person, so helping her out didn’t feel burdensome recently. And after all, as a mom, I always happily devote myself to my kids and to my family, right? Yes… and yet, there’s a side to this way of thinking that’s not always great. I was pondering that when I came across the idea of the Type C Personality.

I read about it in a book about health, and then I looked it up online. Healthline explains that people with Type C Personality “may have trouble opening up emotionally and expressing needs, preferring to let others have their way in order to maintain group harmony.” The webpage article asks a series of questions to help identify this personality type, starting with: “Do I try my best to help others, even if it has a negative impact on my work, mood, or well-being?”

This question has huge implications for parents, especially moms.

Let me put it into context. I’ve been reading Gabor Maté’s book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, and parts of his earlier work, When the Body Says No. They are filled with examples of patients he has encountered who suffer from diseases and disorders, especially autoimmune problems, that appear to be linked with this personality type. He describes people who put everyone else’s needs far ahead of their own, many of whom have suffered abuse in their past. They have suppressed anger, frustration, and resentment. The patients’ issues with traumas and their extreme selflessness are painful to read about.

Yet when I learn about this kind of personality, I can’t help but think about some of the moms and caregivers I know. If you ask yourself the question in the Healthline article, how would you answer it? Here it is again: “Do I try my best to help others, even if it has a negative impact on my work, mood, or well-being?”

Mothers in particular our culture are expected to put everyone else’s needs first. Parents as a group tend to get caught up in Type C behaviors. I’d wager that many of us would say “yes, I’m always trying to help my children, my spouse, and my family. I do it no matter the impact on myself.”

And for many moms, this is natural—after all, newborns won’t survive without constant care, and many of us feel a strong desire to nurture our babies. If you’re nursing a child, you’re that infant’s whole world. And without large extended family groups or communities to help raise our babies, toddlers, and young kids—as would have been a norm in the vast earlier eras of human pre-history—many of today’s parents are left to do it themselves (or with paid help). In the big picture, our modern emphasis on individualistic child-rearing has created a situation that’s suffocating to parents, especially when you add on financial pressures to provide for kids, achievement-oriented schooling and kids’ sports, parental responsibilities around technology and social media, etc.… it’s never ending.

So, as caregivers, our needs as humans come after the needs of our children, family members, and even (especially, in our economy) our employers.

It’s not healthy, and it’s affecting mothers’ and women’s well-being in serious ways. Women have more chronic diseases, pain, and autoimmune conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. Women are more likely to get multiple sclerosis and lupus, and Maté’s book relates that women have double men’s incidence of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

So what should we do?

This topic needs a LOT more exploration. But I’ll turn back to the book I mentioned to find the outline of one possible approach: Maté, in The Myth of Normal, advocates that we put effort into listening to ourselves more and better. He explains that we can change. Rather than staying wedded to personality characteristics that are making us less healthy, we should view our personalities as “adaptations”—which he labels “a jumble of genuine traits and conditioned coping styles, including some that do not reflect our true self at all but rather the loss of it.” We could instead to tune into our “real needs, deepest longings, and truest nature.” Some folks turn away from probing or expressing those needs and desires, and Maté’s suggestion is that these people could end up suffering physically from that suppression. He also cites the well-known book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: “If the authentic self can be covered by many layers of limiting self-belief and conditioned behavior, it is never obliterated. It continues to speak to us through the body. We can learn to heed the messages the body sends by learning its language.”

This means that we can change. We have the opportunity to shift our “personality” and how we behave. We have agency, if we can act to take it.

The concept of finding the “true self” and the messages of our “truest nature” inside reminds me of the inner genius or daemon that the Stoics talk about, a sort of guiding spirit or voice, and the inner citadel of Marcus Aurelius, a place to retreat to in our minds. We need to dig deep to do this work, and it is work that needs time and space (which most moms and dads do not have, unfortunately). If we can find the energy, we could tune into what our inner being has to tell us. It’s not an easy task in our heavily distracted world, where we’ve layered up our defenses and demands on our time… where there’s always a million ways to stay superficial and fall back on habits… and there’s always more work to be done for others.

Overall, though, it’s a Stoic-supporting message, though Maté’s and van der Kolk’s emphasis on the body would likely seem foreign to ancient Stoics.

Reaching deeper to listen to ourselves is hard, and it’s a massive challenge for parents and caregivers. It’s like being actively pulled in two directions during a game of tug of war. We, as moms, dads, and caregivers, are stretched between two extremes. Of course we WANT to help our kids with their needs, and, we have a duty to do so. Yet we can’t “obliterate” ourselves and our needs and longings in the process, or else we risk our long term well-being.

For me, another interesting answer to this dilemma could be found in a theory of Aristotle’s: the golden mean. At the Lyceum, Aristotle taught that we should aim for a middle way when seeking to be virtuous. An excess of any virtuous attribute is too much; and a deficit is too little. For example, take the virtue of courage. Too much makes you rash and foolhardy, risking your life or your relationships. But too little makes you fearful and unable to defend yourself, and could even get you labelled cowardly. Courage is in-between the two. Finding the right place in the middle is the discipline of the mean.

Could we do this with our parenting, and our family roles? Find the golden mean, between the Type C (as a deficit of self-love, and empathy that focuses only on others) and Type A (as an excess of focus on ourselves and ambitious striving for our own needs and wants above others)?

It’s promising. I would like to do this more in my own life. Take just one example of the mind-body connection and the impact of trying to help others constantly at work: I sometimes find myself holding my breath, from stress, during my workdays. Recently I went for physical therapy and the therapist asked me if I had breathing problems. She recognized that the pain in my upper back actually originated, in part, in my top ribs, where breath is taken in. We agreed that I should breath more deeply, and become aware of holding my breath as I slouch during my many hours at the computer. (And she also gave me loads of contortion-like exercises to do, too!)

And at home: I’ve noticed my tendency to take on a heavy load emotionally for my children, to try to protect them from pain. But parents can’t prevent kids’ suffering and tough experiences. They need to face adversity and learn to handle with it. Since the pandemic, I have been encouraging my kids to do more things for themselves, and also to find community and support from family members (including each other!), teachers, other students, and friends, in addition to me and their dad. There’s a lot that still falls to me, and that’s OK.

My younger daughter’s fourth grade teacher had a great saying: “Ask three before me.” She wanted students to help each other, rather than continuously come to her for guidance on all matters. I love that idea! Kids can help each other (and themselves) more than they sometimes give themselves credit for.

It’s not always easy to let go, though, when you envision yourself as the caregiver providing constant support. My Stoic parenting approach has helped me to acknowledge that I can’t help all the time, and I can’t always be there; I also have needs, and my own hopes and goals I don’t want to be in the business of rescuing my children for things that aren’t actually necessary (you forgot your homework at home? figure it out!). I can’t do it all for them, and I have obligations and projects and, yes, fun activities of my own. Over the years, I’ve worked on the feeling of guilt that I, as a caregiver, have when I need to say no and set boundaries to protect my own needs or inner daemon. Some of these boundaries are unavoidable: I simply cannot help my daughter with AP Physics! I don’t even understand the first chapter of her textbook, let alone her page of problems. Boundary set! ✅

It’s a long road. Sometimes both at home and at work I can see that I “care too much” and get stressed about things I can’t control or manage for other people, that I wish I could solve for them. I spend time and energy castigating myself for not doing better. But this work from Maté and others serves as an important exploration of the roles of our personalities, our needs, and our health—a wake-up call to take this seriously.

And Aristotle sets us a valuable model of navigating a middle way. We can still care, but not to the point of becoming selfless martyrs. Still help, but not to the point of over-identifying with all our kids’ challenges, or acting as a bulldozer parent. Still support, but not to the point of solving every problem for our children, or taking away their grit to persevere in their own way. We could ask ourselves: what’s a reasonable intervention here? What’s an action that will not take away my children’s own agency, but will show my support, care, concern in a healthy way?

In other words, how we support and prioritize others’ needs in relation to ourselves could, like Aristotle’s virtues, walk the line between an excess and a deficit, finding a golden mean.

I recently spoke with a couple of moms whose kids are in their mid-twenties. They were remarking on the difficult balance of trying to help children who are full adults, but who have their own struggles. It’s never easy. So as a mother I’ll keep trying to learn this lesson sooner rather than latter. We as caregivers should not put ourselves and our needs last all the time, and we should need to spend time understanding ourselves and our own longings better. It is critical that we not completely obliterate and suppress ourselves in our work for others… If we do, we could risk our health and well-being, and that wouldn’t help anyone.