‘Which of you said that …?’

You Can't Be Serious By Bernie Comaskey

Tom T Hall declares in one of his songs that ‘big preachers know a lot more than I do’. Nonetheless, Tom T had his own belief as to the role that Clayton Delaney would play in the great beyond.

The beauty of being a columnist rather than a journalist is that, like Tom T Hall, you have the right and the platform to contradict those that ‘know a lot more than I do'.

What do you think of split personalities, dual personalities and multiple personalities? Is the person with a dual personality two people, or two sides of the same person, or sort of like a sheep with two heads? The most extreme example of a split personality is of course the Jekyll and Hyde story.

I recently met up with a distinguished author and broadcaster who is in the process of writing a book on the life of a person who demonstrated acts of unselfish, generous service on one hand, coupled on the other with the astonishingly cruel and cynical betrayal of good and trusting people. Again, we ask: is this a split personality - two different people in the same skin – or just more of the impregnable mystery that devises the human mind?

One of the most deviously dishonest and damaging people I ever met, is also the most plausible and charming man you could meet today. So, who can tell the difference?

A New York architect, a family man and a pillar of his community, is currently being charged with being a serial killer of several women over more than a decade. There are loads of such stories on TV every night, where a ‘Mr Nice Guy’ fools a partner and friends for years whilst his ‘other half’ is a rapist and killer.

Many who ‘know a lot more than I do’, would argue that these are clear examples of a split personality … but is this a cop-out and a way of trying to put a simple label on a baffling, but not all that rare, duplicitous mind?

The vast majority of us do not slink out at night to kill somebody, but what if each of us pause for a few moments and do an honest stocktake of our inner mind and compare the worst thing we ever did against the good deed we are proudest of. Some difference … eh? If you were to tell your two stories, wouldn’t it sound very much like two different people?

I can look back on how I handled or responded to similar situations on different occasions and the view from here is quite staggering. Like that author told me about her subject, I have at times shown a meanness of spirit, spite, and self-righteousness that I regret. Not a mass-murderer, mind you, and the strange thing is that in the same circumstances at other times I have, in more than equal measure, been charitable, generous, forgiving and done a few good deeds. I am not a split personality … and yet, I can almost be two very different people.

Have you managed to figure it out yet? My verdict is that I don’t believe that anyone has a split personality. Everyone has just that one elastic personality. We do have many ego states within our personality to handle different situations. How we react to a situation can be governed by how we feel about other things around us at that point in time. Even small things …. I am still haunted by the fact that I once refused to give a young English student the price of a meal one time in Spain. Why did I do this – and yet often walk up and give a few bob to someone on the street without being asked? This isn’t a dual personality … it’s just demonstrating a complicated personality that we all have. We act differently when shouting for Westmeath than we do when playing with the children in the garden!

People display a different personality at work than when they meet the ‘gorls’ and lads in the pub. In reality, we spend the greater part of our lives ‘playing a part’. Our personality traits are governed to a large degree by convention. We are taught how to behave in situations, and going from one to another can seem like two entirely different people.

In simple man’s language, there are a lot of different divides in our head and this is all part and parcel of just one personality … the only one that we’ve got. So next time you get ‘caught out’, don’t try to extract yourself with the claim that it wasn’t really you, but the other guy – the bad side of your split personality! And yes, I do believe there is such thing as a warped personality …

Don’t Forget

It is extremely difficult to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.