You’ve probably heard people talk about being Type A (an organized and high-achieving personality) or Type B (a laid-back, go-with-the-flow personality), and you may have even seen videos and memes about the two personality types online and on social media.
But have you heard of Type C personality? “The Type C [personality] is one that has emerged [recently], I’ve heard a lot of it over the last year-ish in the popular literature,” said Brian Mullan, a licensed professional counselor with Thriveworks in Philadelphia.
“And I think it speaks to a lot of people who didn’t quite wedge themselves into one or the other,” Mullan noted.
It’s worth knowing that these personality types were not developed by mental health professionals, said Sam Noble, a licensed mental health counselor associate at Self Space, a therapy group in Washington. (Type A and Type B were developed by cardiologists as a way to assess heart disease risk, and Type C came up years later), but they can still be a useful way to learn about yourself and relate to others.
Type C is the personality that tends to be overlooked and doesn’t get as much attention as Type A and B on social media, but there are a whole swath of people who will surely relate to these traits.
Below, experts share the hallmarks of Type C personality and what you can do to best take care of your mental health if you fall into this camp.
1. They have a tough time with emotional vulnerability.
According to Noble, Type C people are uncomfortable with “overt displays of emotions [and] emotional vulnerability, [which] generally, can be quite uncomfortable and even sometimes scary for them.”
They tend to be very emotionally controlled, Mullan said. “They tend not to veer outwardly, at least, towards one or another emotional extreme,” Mullan added.
According to Bonnie Mitchell, the clinical director at Healthy Life Recovery in California, “they try to live in that gray area of emotion, not exuberant or excitedly happy, but not down, down, down — they try to avoid those extreme emotions.”
“So, in a way, I think of it as what feels safe and what feels less safe,” Noble noted. “I am most safe if I am in the intellectual realm, and I don’t feel as safe if there’s kind of emotional things at stake.”
2. They’re very logical and rational.
“A Type C personality … they’re going to consider their strengths to be intellectual, their rational faculties, their ability to sort of logic things out,” Noble explained.
They’ll lead with logic in their relationships, he added.
“They’re very logical, methodical. They like to have everything spelled out, [they] like very much directions,” Mitchell said.
3. They avoid conflict.
Type C people aren’t going to be the person going back and forth with their colleague or reprimanding a stranger for bumping into them. Instead, they tend to be conflict-resistant, Mullan said.
This goes hand-in-hand with the lack of emotional vulnerability since conflict often is pretty emotional.
While someone who is Type A generally faces something head-on, a Type C person is more likely to let a problem slide to avoid any kind of confrontation, Mitchell added.
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4. They’re sensitive to other people’s needs — sometimes at the expense of their own.
“I think that you’ll see folks in that Type C camp … sort of an outward, almost a passivity, like, kind of a ‘whatever you want,’ very sensitive to other people’s needs,” Mullan said.
“And that’s very genuinely sensitive to other people’s needs, perhaps to a fault even,” he noted.
Type C folks are often unflinchingly available to loved ones, he added, and this can be at the expense of their own needs. For example, a Type C person will likely agree to help a friend move even if they’re having back pain.
“Folks like this do tend to gravitate towards … helping professions; nursing, actually, behavioral health, health care, where those behaviors can often be well-suited or well-served,” Mullan said.
5. They overthink, which can lead to things like depression.
According to Mitchell, Type C people often overthink things. They may think too much about a situation they wish was different or a work project they wish they could control. This can lead them to shut down and feel internally stressed out, Mitchell noted.
This can also show up as being very detail-oriented and a tendency for perfectionism, Mullan said.
“I would say the number one thing for Type C personality that we’ve been able to document in different research is that they have been linked to more depression and hopelessness,” Mitchell said.
“They’ll display a lot of depression when something’s not met to expectations because they’re internalizing it,” she said. They may constantly ask themselves what they could have done better or how could they have responded differently, added Mitchell.
“And they really take it upon themselves that they are the ones that failed,” she said.
Here’s how best to take care of yourself as a Type C person:
As with every personality type, there are pros along with some things you may want to work on. While simply identifying as a Type C person won’t explain everything about you or offer insight into why you are the way you are, it can be a way to acknowledge your personality traits and can remind you that you aren’t alone in some of your struggles.
Noble said this is valuable as a self-discovery starting point, but it shouldn’t be used as an excuse to act in unfavorable ways.
“I think my concern is, let’s say you are in a relationship … and you find yourself getting into conflict with your partner, and when a conflict starts, you shut down, and you discover, ’Okay, so I’m Type C. That’s why I find conflict so hard to be in,” Noble said.
If that’s the end of the self-discovery process, that’s a problem. Instead of letting your Type C personality explain your aversion to conflict without addressing it, it should be used as a jumping-off point to think about where your conflict aversion came from, such as from your family of origin, Noble noted. This can be worked on in therapy, he noted, and also by practicing mindfulness, where you reflect on your emotions for 5 or 10 minutes.
Mindfulness can also help you become comfortable sitting in your emotions (something that is not comfortable for Type C people).
Mitchell added that you should give yourself grace, “which is a hard practice, because they don’t deal well with the emotional responsiveness, but recognizing when they’re starting to get depressed, when they’re unfulfilled.”
If you notice a downward turn in mood, take time to do things that bring you joy and calm, or reach out to a loved one for support.
More, between the overthinking, perfectionism and focus on other people’s needs, folks who identify as Type C may find that they feel burnt-out more often than others.
“We’re really not doing anybody any favors when we’re running into burnout. So, I think that’s where it’s important to work on … self-advocacy, getting them to feel as confident about asking for their own needs as they are fulfilling the needs of others,” Mullan said.
No matter your personality type, you deserve to feel your best and to do the things that serve you — not just spend all of your energy focusing on the needs of those around you or what you could have “done better.”
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