Pigeonholing People

Sometimes it does help to put people into boxes, to see how they fit into recognised categories. It helps if it informs your understanding and enables you to see people objectively rather than being flooded by your subjective experience of them, negative or positive.

Take me.  I like being with people, but after a while I need time alone. Conversely if I spend too much time alone, I become unhappy. Once I spent a week alone in Greece and I thought I might go mad, so uncomfortable was the loneliness of the same small rocky cove where I had delighted in the solitude, the previous summer, of a few moments of quiet wrestled from my busy family. I enjoy chatting with people, including people I have only just met. I talk to supermarket till operators and road sweepers and relish almost every experience with my clients at the advice centre where I work. I really enjoy going out with another couple for a meal or to see a film or a play or a concert. I like going out with groups of girl friends a great deal and usually come home skipping with happiness. I enjoy dinner parties where I have a proper opportunity to talk to those next to me. I am not that keen on big parties - having them or going to them - but I love putting people together and entertaining a dozen or so people at home. I am not very clubbable. I know my friends very well, and have usually met their parents and their siblings. I do not like superficial conversations and have a built in litmus test for inauthenticity. I think I am a moderate extrovert.

I tend to make snap judgments about people based on a gut feeling. I thrive on fairly abstract conversations about ideas. I am not great at remembering facts. I see the woods rather than the trees. I see things in shades of gray rather than black and white. I am very sensitive and experience highs and lows of emotion and everything in between.

If you want to put me in a pigeonhole, the category described by Myers Briggs as ENFP seems the most natural, comfortable place for me to be.

The Intrepid Explorer would probably like the arm chairs in the ISTJ lounge though I think he increasingly prefers the ESTJ atmosphere. So, between us, we have all possibilities and letters covered, but we need very good communication in order to understand each other. With love, endless good will, and years of practice, this becomes increasingly easy, and gives us an added benefit of being able to relate more easily to those of our opposite type. It is far more interesting than if we both liked to hang out in exactly the same place.

However, ISTJs are my “opposite” type and those that are particularly introverted pose the greatest challenge for me. The Relate website has an on-line personality report (not free, but well worth it, link below) that includes a section with hints on how to deal with your opposite type.  Apparently, I should:

1) Talk quietly
2) Be thoroughly prepared
3) Allow her/him time to consider all the information
4) Respect her/his role in the relationship/friendship
5) Respect her privacy
6) Let her know the unique contribution she is making

And I should NOT

1) Question her/his motives or competence
2) Invade her/his privacy
3) Try to control the conversation
4) Show impatience with, or annoyance of, her/his calm exterior
5) Ramble or become emotional
6) Substitute rhetoric for accuracy

I have just spent ten days with an extremely introverted person and it has almost driven me mad. More than anything else it has made me anxious. I wanted to make this person happy, but this person showed little or no pleasure in anything that I did or arranged or made possible. This person preferred to sit in her room with the door closed and only asked one question throughout the whole period. She would reply “I don’t know” or “I don’t mind” to every question I asked. She did not enjoy eating anything as far as I could see. Nor did she respond to television or films that she watched. She didn’t appear to enjoy anything that we saw in London when I took her there one evening last week. She did not seem to enjoy riding my favourite pony through heavenly swards of wildflowered grass in the summer sunshine. I saw almost no expression on her face. She stared a lot at us when we were looking elsewhere, but she would not make eye contact. She gave us no feedback, and no praise. I heard her say “thank you” once - when I gave her a present of a photograph album of her visit (no photos of her, of course) as we said goodbye. She like visiting Top Shops in lots of different towns. She has watched the latest Harry Potter film twenty five times. She liked Wolf and he slept on her bed one night.

I found myself in a double bind. On the one hand everything I tried to do for her failed to reach its mark and did not appear to amuse or entertain her. This made me frustrated, angry and fairly hopeless. On the other hand, I felt wracked with guilt and anxiety and sadness if I ignored her and just left her sitting in her room for hours on end.

I do not think she needed to talk. I think she preferred to be alone with herself. I do not think it occurred to her to give gifts or praise. She appeared to need nothing at all from us and to have nothing that she wanted to give us.

I tried to do all the things in the first list above, and I tried desperately not to do any of the things in the second list. But inside I wanted to scream with frustration. I checked out my reaction to her with two other sources and found that we agreed on how she made us feel, down to the murderous rages.  I think this was an extreme mismatching, but I have met other people like this person and will continue to meet similar people in the future.

Confusingly extreme introverts are sometimes capable of behaving like extroverts when they first latch on to a person that they admire, often an extrovert. The naive extrovert will be likely to misconstrue this attention as liking, but it is “admiration” not liking since most introverts aspire to be extroverts. Admiration is a colder emotion than liking, and places the admired object on a freezing cold pedestal. When the wind starts to blow around her ankles, the extrovert may eventually wake up to this truth, usually at the same time as the introvert reverts to type.  

I watched our young introvert’s behaviour with an extrovert that she coveted and it was a remarkable switch from her normal uncommunicative behaviour to almost frenzied puppy dog adoration.

I am quite happy to argue endlessly that it takes all sorts of people to make a world, and that each and every one of us can make a unique contribution, but I cannot easily deal with the anxiety that very close proximity with an extreme introvert creates in me.

How on earth do you know whether or not somebody likes or loves you when they behave in such a fashion? And why is it always me that makes the effort to cope with them, rather than the reverse?  Or do I just fail to notice the superhuman efforts they make to meet me halfway?

I remembered something I read a couple of years ago which read that things that were worth doing were often difficult, but that not everything that was difficult was worth doing. I have trouble remembering that and have a tendency to keep on struggling with things that are difficult, borne on by my hope that things will improve. It is taking me a long time to learn that some people will always find me as impossible as I find them and that I am better off not trying to make something work that was never meant to function. Some of my friendships with introverts, that began well, fall into this category. I find it easy to love, to extend myself towards people, to be friendly, and am bemused by people who do not not what love is, who shy away from people and prefer to be alone.   Try as I might to emphathise with them, I find it so hard, and when I do manage, I feel so sick and depressed and hopeless that I wonder how I am going to survive.

I think Nietzsche is a good, documented, example of an extreme introvert who needed to learn to love just as he learned how to read music.

“One must learn to love.— This is what happens to us in music: first one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life; then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity:—finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.— But that is what happens to us not only in music: that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty:—that is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way: for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.”

Nietzsche, Gay Science, 334

Portrait of an ENFP

Portrait of an ISTJ

Library of portraits of other personality types

Relate “Reveal” Personality Test

The lesson of history: The Trojan Horse

Big thanks to Xanthippa for giving me a good laugh, and, boy, after the last ten days, did I need one. Here’s what she posted on her blog. Visit her blog to find more along similar lines …

ENFP -v- ISTJ

Occasionally I wish that my blog was more anonymous than it is.  As it is, it is sometimes read by friends who live in my town and elsewhere, by relatives, by work colleagues both of myself and the Intrepid Explorer, by my daughters and their friends, and even - on occasions - by their teachers.

I posted an ugly piece about a prolonged encounter with an extreme introvert, which is no longer available for all to see in its horribleness.  I was hugely disappointed by my own reaction to this person.  I found myself in a double bind: attempts to please the person failed miserably, but I felt equally bad if I allowed the person to languish ignored.   I wanted them to have a good experience, a happy time.  I think it is likely that these patterns felt all too familiar (historical stuff) and my reaction was so strong as a result.  It was never the fault of the introvert.  Nor, being forgiving of myself, was it my fault.  We were just worlds apart, with brains wired differently and very different needs.  In a different environment it would have been much easier - several of my best friends are introverts - but up close and uncomfortable, it was difficult and painful for both of us.  My writing was an attempt to express my emotions with brutal honesty, but, as I wrote only last week in response to another comment, truth is sometimes over-rated.  I will try to write something different, more positive, later.

Whatever!

A friend bought two copies of a book subtitled “A down-to-earth guide to parenting teenagers”, and gave me one copy.  It’s good - or at least what I’ve read so far has been full of good advice well put.  There are lots of practical exercises which you might like to try with your teenager (I’ll share the fruits of our efforts in another post).  Here’s a snippet - relating to self image and how a teenager’s self image is often defined by a self-imposed heirarchy of desirable attributes or possessions - which struck a chord:

“Having this sense of heirarchy has many functions.  It helps groups of young people to bond, creates society and to some degree keeps things ticking alone nicely.  However, it can be limiting and even damaging if it is the only way a young person relates to the world around them.  If a young person believes they are worth more or less than others in their way, they may make choices about their behaviour in relation to this information.  At an extreme level we see this manifest as “isms”.  Racism supposes that race determines a person’s worth and that some people are of more value than others from birth.  Likewise sexism determines that the qualities and behaviours associated with one sex are of less value or worth in the world than those of the other.  Hierarchical thinking is also strongly ingrained in those young people who are likely to bully or use power tactics over others as it allows whatever qualities are deemed desirable by the group to be more important than broader concepts of fairness or value.

A more healthy view of the self in relation to others is to see it as recipe that contains the same “ingredients” as everybody else but in differing quantities and mixtures.  We are all unique but all made up of the same bits and pieces.  Some of us have tremendous skills in some areas, some of us don’t.  Some of have one kind of motivation in life, some of us have many and we change motivations as we develop - perhaps a love of music is supplanted by a love of amateur dramatics after coming across an enthusiastic local group.  We are all different but we share a broad cloak of humanity and common experience.  We are therefore able to empathise with people we have never met and whose lives are very different from our own.

I’ve often heard it said that everyone is good at something.  I’m not sure I completely agree.  I think many people are average at most things and they are still unique, worthy and valuable.  It’s not being good at something that matters; it’s being somebody.  And it is entirely by encouraging your young person to understand and share this view that parents can influence their child’s lifelong self-esteem.”

The authors make the point that self esteem often runs in families.  I wonder if racism - that is, an over-developed sense of ethnic pride - is not something that children pick up from their parents who, for whatever reason, choose to emphasise their own ethnic identity to counter their feelings of inferiority.  As with racism, so with sexism and extreme religious supremacy.  First generation immigrants often feel an understandable anxiety in relation to the indigenous majority and, not unnaturally, respond by vaunting the very thing that makes them different.  Sons smothered by their mothers may grow up to brandish their masculinity in a hierarchical way. 

In their children, however, this defence mechanism may take on a more dangerous hue as it is expressed as unthinking, immoveable prejudice learnt at an esteemed parent’s knee.  The book, then, offers advice to parents as well.  To value themselves.  To offer themselves the unconditional love that means being somebody - a person worthy of love even when all the achievements and badges are stripped away.

Gill Hines and Alison Baverstock, Whatever! A down-to-earth guide to parenting teenagers, Piatkus, 2005

Nice Mad, not Scary Mad

 

I spend a fair amount of time wondering whether I am mad.  Usually when people disagree with me vehemently, or when I wonder whether I am imagining the aggressive undercurrents that I sense in another person.  Wondering whether one is mad seems inescapably normal to me.  After all, none of us know what it’s like to live in someone else’s head and so we all have a funny idea of what not being mad feels like. 

I usually conclude that I am not mad, but only after a lot of very anxious soul searching.  Only very occasionally do I get sweet, objective, external confirmation that I am not mad.  A friend who knows me very well gave me this card today which makes me smile whenever I read it.  She saw it and thought of me, and bought it for me.  I’ll pin it above my computer, I think, next to a lump of the Berlin Wall.  I can cope with being Nice Mad.

 

(card from a brilliant series by Edward Monkton)