Which personality traits do you think that you share with your mom/dad? Which ones are a result of your up bringing? Which ones were you just born with?

From Mam - Hard-working (and working for the sake of working out of a kind of "need to be productive" - I never want to retire)

  • Ambitious

  • Interest in making life "magical" (for her, it's actual magical things, like spiritualism and fairies and whatnot; for me it's more your day-to-day "how can I make this more fantastical?")

  • Tendency to keep going until I burn out/not take enough breaks

From Dad - Mannerisms/body language (we both tend to play with our neck when talking, for e.g.)

  • Tendency to "flee to logic" and divorce from emotion when stressed or in conflict situations (which can come across as patronising, unfortunately)

  • Broad/academic interests

  • Interminable talking (sorry world)

  • Focused attention (getting stuck on one thing and totally absorbing into it)

  • Tendency to daydream at length and have a whole different world in my head that I can spend all day in

From both - Being a bit of a "loner"

  • Being self-reliant and worrying about being a burden

  • Difficulty feeling/expressing vulnerability

  • Social awkwardness

  • An adolescent need to be different/individualistic (although I'm growing out of this nowadays)

  • Mental health problems, in particular anxiety (from both) and eating disorders (my Mam was anorexic too).

Nature/nurture I think most of the traits to do with actual behaviours (self-reliance etc.) above are nurture, but some will have nature involved too. I think traits to do with being imaginative are mostly nature. But some of my traits don't even align with my immediate family, but do seem to align with previous generations (who I didn't know), so they seem nature over nurture.

They include:

  • Ease of empathy/high empathy - I've just always seemed to find it slightly easier than other people to 'know' what another person thinks and feels and to understand their motivations and POV

  • Musical interest/ability - my parents can't play any instruments, nor did they ever feel the urge to learn, but both me and my brother had already begged for and begun to play instruments before we started school. This seems to come from my great grandfather, as far as we can tell!

  • Writing interest/ability - there's a long history of writers on my Mam's side and I started enjoying this from when I first learned to write, but my parents don't write (my Mam sometimes does but she was more a visual artist - a talent she passed on to neither of her children!)

  • Patience

And some that are in my immediate family that I feel are definitely nature:

  • Introversion

  • Cool temperedness/non-intense emotionality (emotional suppression was also encouraged by my home environment, but I think I took to it very easily because I didn't feel my emotions intensely, while my brother, in the same environment, was hot-headed and found it difficult to suppress emotion so he kind of went in the opposite direction).

/r/AskWomen Thread