The Personality Excuse: When Pop Psychology Becomes a Prison
Why some of the most popular psychological frameworks are preventing real change in struggling marriages
When someone in a marriage crisis says “I’m just Type A” or “I’m an Alpha male” or “I’m anxiously attached — that’s just how I am,” something important has just happened.
Growth has stopped.
After over three decades of coaching people through marriage crisis, I’ve noticed a pattern: certain psychological frameworks, no matter how popular or seemingly legitimate, become obstacles to change when people adopt them as fixed identities rather than descriptions of changeable patterns.
The frameworks I see most often? Type A/Type B personality theory, Alpha Male ideology, and attachment styles. All three share a common trajectory: they move from description to prescription to excuse.
Someone learns the framework. They identify with it. The identification becomes identity (“I AM this”). The identity becomes explanation (“This is why I do what I do”). And the explanation becomes excuse (“I can’t change this”).
Right there, the marriage stays stuck.
Let’s look at what the research actually says about these frameworks, why they persist despite limited evidence, and what happens to relationships when people use them as shields against growth.
Type A Personality: The Hostility We’ve Renamed
Where It Came From (And Why It Doesn’t Hold Up)
The Type A/Type B framework emerged from the work of cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman in the 1950s. They were trying to predict heart disease risk, not describe comprehensive personality types. The theory suggested that “Type A” individuals — characterized by competitiveness, time-urgency, and hostility — were significantly more prone to coronary disease than their relaxed “Type B” counterparts.
It was a compelling idea. It became wildly popular.
And then the research failed to consistently support it.
When meta-analyses examined decades of data across thousands of participants, the correlation between “Type A personality” and heart disease proved much weaker than originally claimed. But researchers did find something significant: when correlations existed, they were driven by one specific component of the Type A pattern.
Not the drive. Not the competitiveness. Not the time-urgency.
Hostility. Chronic anger and antagonism toward others.
Current personality psychology has largely moved past the Type A/Type B dichotomy in favor of the empirically-supported Big Five model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). And still, the Type A framework persists in popular culture, but not in serious psychological research.
Interestingly, “Type A” is generally seen as a “badge of honor” in culture… nowhere near the original hope of helping people avoid a heart attack!
The Mislabeling Operation in Marriage
Here’s what happens when someone adopts “Type A” as their identity in a marriage:
Behaviors that might more accurately be described as:
Impatience with a spouse’s different pace or approach
Irritability when things don’t go according to plan
Controlling tendencies
Chronic frustration
Inability to be present or relaxed,
get renamed as: Drive. Ambition. High standards. “Just how I’m wired.”
This is what I call a mislabeling operation — taking behaviors that are problematic in relationships and recasting them as personality traits, making them seem both inevitable and value-neutral.
The cost to the relationship is significant. A spouse can’t address what isn’t named correctly. “You’re being hostile and controlling” invites (or demands) change. “I’m Type A” suggests immutability.
When Both Partners Claim the Label
A particularly revealing variant emerges when both partners identify as “Type A.” The claim typically sounds like: “We’re both Type A, so we clash. We can’t make decisions together.”
Here’s what is often actually happening: Both individuals are stubborn, struggle with flexibility, and prioritize being right over finding solutions that serve the relationship. Neither has developed strong collaborative skills. Both approach decision-making competitively rather than as partners.
The framework provides cover for what might more accurately be called an inability to build WE — to move from competing individual priorities to genuine partnership.
The irony? High-performing people collaborate effectively all the time in professional contexts. They negotiate, integrate perspectives, defer to expertise, and prioritize team outcomes. But in marriage, suddenly these same individuals “can’t make decisions together”?
That’s not a personality type problem. That’s an intimacy and vulnerability problem disguised as a compatibility issue.
The Actual Health Cost
There’s one more dimension worth noting: the research that does support a connection between personality patterns and health outcomes points specifically to chronic hostility as the risk factor for cardiovascular disease, inflammation, immune dysfunction, and mortality.
So when someone adopts “Type A” as identity and uses it to justify hostile, aggressive, or chronically irritable behavior, they’re not just creating relationship problems. They’re choosing a behavioral pattern that research suggests will quite literally shorten their lifespan.
The protective factors from those health risks? Emotional regulation, secure relationships, genuine connection, the capacity to be calm and present. The very things the “Type A” label often excuses people from developing.
Alpha Male Theory: Bad Science Justifying Bad Behavior
The Wolf Study That Wasn’t
The “Alpha Male” concept has even shakier scientific foundations than Type A theory because it’s based on research that the original researcher spent decades trying to retract.
The framework originated from studies of captive wolves conducted in the 1970s. Researcher L. David Mech observed unrelated adult wolves that were forced together in enclosures, and documented dominance hierarchies that emerged in these artificial conditions. The “alpha wolf” concept was born.
Then Mech studied wild wolves in their natural habitat.
What he found: Wild wolf packs don’t operate on dominance hierarchies at all. The “alpha pair” are simply the parents. It’s a family structure, not a power struggle. The dominance battles Mech had observed in captivity were artifacts of putting unrelated adults in confined, unnatural conditions.
Mech has spent the last 40 years trying to correct the record. He literally requested his original book go out of print because the conclusions were wrong.
But the pop psychology world barely noticed. “Alpha Male” had already become too useful a concept to abandon. Even though it is a scientific fallacy.
Why It Doesn’t Apply to Humans Anyway
Even if the wolf research were sound — which it isn’t — it wouldn’t translate to human social dynamics.
Primate research shows vastly more complex social structures than simple dominance hierarchies. Human status is context-dependent, culturally variable, and multidimensional. What predicts success or attractiveness in one domain doesn’t necessarily transfer to others.
Research on human mate preferences consistently shows that women value:
Kindness and emotional stability
Competence in valued domains (which varies by context)
Reciprocity and investment in relationships
Social intelligence and collaborative capacity
Not dominance. Not aggression. Not the performance of superiority.
The Permission Structure
So if the research doesn’t support Alpha Male theory, why does it persist?
Because it provides a permission structure for behaviors that would otherwise be recognized as problematic.
When someone identifies as an “Alpha Male,” certain behaviors get reframed:
Dominance becomes “natural leadership”
Refusal of emotional labor becomes “not my role”
Lack of vulnerability becomes “strength”
Control becomes “taking charge”
Lack of empathy becomes “logic over emotion”
It’s a framework that justifies what might more accurately be called psychologically-justified bullying.
The Cost to Intimacy
Here’s what happens in marriages where one partner has adopted Alpha Male identity:
Genuine intimacy requires vulnerability — the willingness to be known, to admit uncertainty, to share fears, to acknowledge mistakes. The Alpha framework positions all of these as weakness to be avoided.
Partnership requires collaboration and mutual influence. The Alpha framework positions these as threats to necessary dominance.
Emotional connection requires presence and attunement to a partner’s inner world. The Alpha framework often dismisses emotional needs as unreasonable or excessive.
The result: a marriage where one person is performing strength while preventing the very conditions that create actual connection and security.
What’s Being Protected
It’s worth considering what draws people to the Alpha Male framework in the first place.
Many men genuinely feel lost about their role in modern relationships, uncertain how to express masculinity in ways that feel authentic without causing harm, unsure where their value comes from beyond traditional provider or protector roles.
The Alpha framework offers clear-cut answers. It provides purpose, community, and a coherent identity at a time of cultural uncertainty about masculinity. Even without any scientific backing — with wolves or humans.
In the end, more often than not, it is a justification for bullying behavior… which absolutely does not come from a place of strength, but from fear.
The tragedy: it’s offering answers that prevent the very things most people ultimately want — deep connection, genuine partnership, being truly known and valued for who they actually are rather than what they perform.
Attachment Theory: Valid Research, Invalid Application
An Important Distinction
Attachment theory differs from Type A and Alpha Male frameworks in a crucial way: the underlying research is actually solid.
Attachment patterns in infants and young children — secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized — are well-documented through decades of developmental research. The “Strange Situation” experiments and subsequent studies have established that early caregiving experiences shape how children approach relationships and regulate emotions.
Adult attachment theory, developed by Hazan and Shaver in the 1980s and refined by many researchers since, shows some continuity from childhood patterns into adult romantic relationships.
So the problem isn’t that attachment theory is “bad science.” The problem is how it’s being used.
Children Are Not Adults
A critical distinction that often gets lost. This is that infant attachment and adult attachment operate under fundamentally different conditions.
A child attaching to a caregiver:
Literally cannot survive independently
Has no choice in the relationship
Has limited capacity for self-soothing or emotional regulation
Develops patterns based on whether survival needs are reliably met
An adult in a committed relationship:
Can survive independently
Chose this specific partnership
Has developed (or can develop) adult capacities for self-regulation
Can consciously work to change relationship patterns
When someone in a marriage crisis experiences anxiety, that’s often a situational response to real relationship threat — not necessarily evidence of a fixed “anxious attachment style.” The anxiety makes sense given the circumstances.
The danger comes when normal crisis responses get pathologized as permanent personality structures.
What the Research Actually Shows About Change
Here’s what attachment research reveals about adult patterns:
Approximately 25-30% of adults change attachment classifications over time
Secure relationships can shift previously insecure attachment patterns
Therapy and conscious effort can modify attachment behaviors
Attachment patterns can vary across different relationships and contexts
The dimensional approach (viewing anxiety and avoidance as continuous variables, rather than rigid categories) has stronger research support than typological thinking
In other words, attachment patterns are more malleable than pop psychology suggests. They describe learned tendencies, not permanent wiring.
From Map to Jail Cell
When used well, attachment theory provides a map — a way to understand default patterns under stress, recognize triggers, and make sense of disproportionate reactions. This kind of insight can motivate growth.
But I’ve watched people use attachment theory as a jail cell, a way to explain why change isn’t possible.
The map version sounds like: “I notice that when I feel disconnected, my first impulse is to pursue and demand reassurance. That’s my anxious pattern showing up. I can work on self-soothing instead.”
The jail cell version sounds like: “I’m anxiously attached, so of course I need constant reassurance and get upset when you don’t respond immediately. That’s just how I am. You need to accommodate this.”
See the difference? One uses the framework to build self-awareness that enables choice. The other uses it to justify behaviors that harm the relationship while avoiding responsibility for change.
The same pattern appears with avoidant attachment:
Map: “I notice I withdraw when conflict intensifies. That’s my pattern. I can work on staying present even when uncomfortable.”
Jail cell: “I’m avoidant. I need space. You’re being too much. I can’t help how I’m wired.”
The Anxious-Avoidant Dance
One particularly problematic application of attachment theory: the idea that anxious-avoidant pairings are somehow inevitable or represent irresistible “chemistry.”
These pairings do occur — but not because of fate or biological compatibility. They occur because familiar patterns trigger each other. Someone with anxious patterns finds someone with avoidant patterns familiar, and vice versa. The nervous system recognizes the dance, even though it’s painful.
But research consistently shows these pairings have worse outcomes unless both partners actively work to change their patterns. Treating the pairing as destiny, rather than as a red flag requiring conscious intervention, condemns the relationship to cycles of pursuit and withdrawal.
What Attachment Theory Should Enable
When someone recognizes anxious or avoidant patterns in themselves, that recognition should motivate specific developmental work:
For anxious patterns:
Building self-soothing capacity
Developing tolerance for uncertainty
Learning to distinguish between actual threat and triggered response
Practicing secure attachment behaviors even when anxious
For avoidant patterns:
Increasing capacity for vulnerability
Staying present during emotional intensity
Developing comfort with intimacy and interdependence
Practicing engagement even when the impulse is to withdraw
These are all learnable skills. But learning them requires treating attachment patterns as current defaults that can change rather than fixed identities that explain everything.
The Pattern Underneath: From Description to Excuse
The Common Trajectory
All three frameworks — Type A personality, Alpha Male identity, and attachment styles — share a common path to becoming problematic in relationships:
Stage 1: Description
The framework offers language for a pattern. “Oh, I do tend to be impatient / want to lead / get anxious when disconnected.”
Stage 2: Identification
The person connects with the description. “Yes, that’s me.”
Stage 3: Identity
The description becomes who they are. “I AM Type A / Alpha / Anxiously Attached.”
Stage 4: Explanation
The identity explains behavior. “This is why I act this way.”
Stage 5: Excuse
The explanation prevents change. “I can’t help it. This is just how I am.”
At each stage, the framework becomes more rigid and less useful.
What’s Really Being Protected
When someone clings tightly to one of these frameworks despite evidence that it’s harming their relationship, what’s actually happening?
The framework is protecting them from something more frightening than relationship failure:
The terror of facing their own fear and insecurity without a label to hide behind
The responsibility that comes with admitting “I could be different if I chose differently”
The vulnerability of trying to change and possibly failing
The discomfort of acknowledging harm they’ve caused
The loss of a coherent identity structure, even if that structure is preventing growth
It’s intellectual bypass of emotional work. The framework provides understanding without requiring transformation, explanation without demanding change, identity without responsibility.
The Defensive Response as Information
When someone becomes intensely defensive about these frameworks, like when presented with research that questions the framework, triggers hostility rather than curiosity — that response itself is revealing.
It’s not the research being defended against. It’s the threat to the protection system.
If the framework isn’t true, or isn’t fixed, then the person has to face what the framework was protecting them from: responsibility for who they’re choosing to become, accountability for the impact of their behavior, the possibility of change.
That’s terrifying. Much safer to defend the framework.
The Cost to the Relationship
Meanwhile, the marriage pays the price.
When one or both partners are more invested in maintaining their identity framework than in examining how their behavior affects the relationship:
Problems get explained but not solved
Patterns get named but not changed
Understanding increases while growth stalls
The relationship deteriorates while both partners point to their “personality type” or “attachment style” or “natural way of being” as explanation
The frameworks become barriers to the very thing struggling marriages need most: the willingness to question, to grow, to choose differently even when it’s uncomfortable.
What Actually Enables Change
The Alternative to Identity-Based Thinking
If psychological frameworks can become prisons, what enables actual change in relationships?
The shift from identity-based thinking to choice-based thinking:
Not: “I AM this type of person, therefore I do these things”
But: “I’ve learned these patterns, and I can learn different ones”
Not: “This framework explains who I am”
But: “This framework might describe my current defaults. What do I want to choose instead?”
Not: “I can’t help how I’m wired”
But: “What kind of person do I want to become? What does that require from me?”
Values Over Identity
When people shift from defending identity to clarifying values, different questions become possible:
What kind of marriage do I actually want to build?
What kind of partner do I aspire to be?
When there’s a gap between my values and my behavior, what needs to change?
What am I willing to be uncomfortable with, in service of growth?
These questions require vulnerability — the willingness to admit that who someone currently is might not be who they want to become. But they also create possibility that these identity frameworks foreclose.
From Self-Justification to Self-Coaching
Let me make one useful distinction: the difference between a self-justifying voice and your self-coaching voice.
The self-justifying voice says:
“I’m Type A, that’s just how I am.”
“I’m Alpha, I can’t show weakness.”
“I’m anxiously attached, I can’t help needing reassurance.”
The self-coaching voice says:
“I notice I’m being controlling. What am I afraid of? What would trust look like here?”
“I notice I’m withdrawing. What’s threatening about staying present? What would courage require?”
“I notice I’m getting defensive about this framework. What’s that protecting? What would growth look like?”
One voice protects current identity. The other creates space for becoming someone different.
Building Actual Collaborative Capacity
For couples who struggle with decision-making and claim it’s because they’re “both Type A” or have incompatible styles, the real work involves developing skills that don’t depend on personality frameworks:
Genuine curiosity about a partner’s perspective (not just waiting to argue)
Willingness to be influenced by a partner’s reasoning
Trust in a partner’s judgment and care for the relationship
Flexibility rooted in values rather than rigidity rooted in fear
The capacity to prioritize “us” over “me”
These are learnable collaborative capacities. But learning them requires admitting they haven’t been developed yet. Which the personality framework often prevents by suggesting the problem is compatibility rather than skill deficit.
The Real Strength
Popular frameworks often confuse strength with invulnerability, leadership with dominance, security with control.
Actual strength in relationships looks different:
Facing what’s uncomfortable rather than avoiding it
Being vulnerable when it matters
Admitting mistakes and making repairs
Choosing connection over being right
Staying present when every instinct says to flee or fight
Changing patterns when change is needed
That’s harder than adopting a label that explains why change isn’t possible. But it’s the only path to relationships that actually work.
The Readiness Question
When Frameworks Become Filters
Here’s what I’ve observed over 25 years: a person’s relationship to these frameworks reveals their readiness for change.
When someone can hold these frameworks lightly — using them for occasional insight while maintaining agency over their choices — they’re usually coachable. The framework is a tool, not an identity.
When someone clings to the framework defensively, needing it to be true and fixed, they’re protecting something. They’re not yet ready to face what the framework shields them from.
That’s not a judgment. People come to readiness when they come to it. But it is information.
What Readiness Looks Like
Someone ready for change in their relationship typically demonstrates:
Curiosity over defensiveness when their patterns are questioned
Willingness to consider “what if I’m wrong about this?”
Interest in impact over investment in being right
Capacity to tolerate discomfort in service of growth
Focus on what they can control (their own choices) over what they can’t (their partner’s behavior, their “personality type,” their past)
Someone not yet ready:
Becomes hostile when their framework is questioned
Needs to prove why their identity label is accurate and immutable
Focuses on explaining behavior rather than changing it
Prioritizes protecting self-image over examining relationship impact
Treats personal patterns as facts about reality rather than changeable defaults
The Cost of Waiting
Meanwhile, the marriage pays a price for that unreadiness.
Every day someone spends defending their Type A identity, their Alpha male framework, or their anxious attachment style as unchangeable is a day the relationship doesn’t get what it needs: someone willing to grow, to question, to choose differently.
The frameworks promise explanation and understanding. But relationships don’t heal from explanation. They heal from change.
The Path Forward
For the Person Holding the Framework
If someone reading this recognizes themselves using these frameworks as shields, what then?
The first step isn’t abandoning the framework entirely. It’s noticing the function it’s serving.
Questions worth asking:
What would it mean if this framework wasn’t true, or wasn’t fixed?
What would I have to face if I couldn’t explain my behavior with this label?
What am I protecting by insisting this is “just how I am”?
What’s the cost to my relationship of maintaining this identity?
Am I more committed to being right about who I am, or to having the marriage I want?
Those are uncomfortable questions. The discomfort itself is information. It points to what matters.
For the Partner Watching Someone Hide
For people whose spouses have adopted these frameworks as unchangeable identities, the situation is different. They can’t force readiness. They can’t argue someone out of a framework they need for psychological protection.
But they can:
Stop accommodating behavior that’s harmful just because it’s been labeled as personality
Name what they’re actually experiencing (hostility, control, withdrawal) rather than accepting the sanitized label
Clarify what they need in the relationship regardless of their partner’s claimed “type”
Make decisions about what they’re willing to tolerate long-term
Get support for themselves whether or not their partner chooses change
Sometimes the clearest message about the cost of these frameworks comes from a partner who stops absorbing that cost.
The Broader Pattern
Beyond any individual marriage, these frameworks point to something broader: the human tendency to seek explanations that protect us from responsibility.
We want to understand ourselves. That’s healthy. But sometimes we use understanding as a substitute for growth, identity as a shield against change, frameworks as permission to stay stuck.
The antidote isn’t rejecting all psychological frameworks. It’s holding them lightly enough that they inform without imprisoning, describe without determining, create insight without foreclosing possibility.
Because who someone has been (even who they’ve been for a long time) doesn’t have to be who they become.
Unless they need it to be. Unless the framework protecting them from that possibility has become more important than the relationship that is suffering from it.
A Final Thought
When someone says “I’m just Type A” or “I’m an Alpha” or “I’m anxiously attached, that’s just how I am,” they’re making a choice, whether they realize it or not.
They’re choosing explanation over exploration. Identity over growth. The comfort of knowing who they are over the discomfort of becoming someone different.
It’s a understandable choice. There’s real terror in letting go of a coherent identity, even when that identity is causing problems.
But it’s still a choice.
And the marriage — struggling, deteriorating, fighting for survival — needs a different choice.
It needs someone willing to question. To grow. To trade the prison of personality for the possibility of change.
The frameworks aren’t evil. But when they become barriers to that possibility, they become dangerous.
Not because of what they claim about human nature. But because of what they prevent in human relationships.
Lee Baucom is a marriage coach and relationship expert who has spent over three decades helping people navigate marriage crisis. He runs the Save The Marriage System, created the Un-Pause App, and hosts the Save The Marriage podcast. His work focuses on helping people move from crisis to intentional relationship building through personal transformation and values-based action.