MBTI in my family

When we started a family, we knew a lot about attachment and the way our own attachment would affect the process of having children. What we didn’t know was how hard it would be to work through all of our own attachment issues at the same time as trying to raise reasonably well attached kids who all had to deal with some form of trauma.

What I wish I had known then, is that I already had one tool that could help us – I had learned about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and its way of looking at how people think. The thing was, I had no idea it was actually applicable to relationships and to parenting, but now looking back I wish it was a part of training adoptive parents or new parents in general, because it has given us so many.

The MBTI is not a perfect instrument, far from it, but it has some validity and above all the functions that Jung and Isabelle Myers posited seem to have validity and now there is even brain scans to back them up. And learning about the functions has been just the key that we needed to grow as a family! Now that we understand that two of us are feelers and the rest are thinkers, so many things fall into place. We also realized we have one introvert in the family. As an ISFJ he is the most extroverted of introvert, but the introversion definitely shows up as being inclined to conserve energy unlike the rest of us who are extroverts.

I’ve spent the last decade wishing I could understand how this particular kid thinks, and now I think I’ve got it. Turns out, he is sort of a introverted version of my mother and most of my relatives on that side, and that already gave me lots of clues to how to treat him. We give him much more responsibility now, let him decide this and that concerning relationships and traditions, and try to take in consideration that he is an introvert. Which is not easy! I really have no idea how much to let an introvert stay introverted for themselves, and how not to, especially as this kid has extroverted feeling so high in his stack that he needs to be around people most of the time, which the rest of us extroverts actually don’t that much. Both us ENTJ:s in the family (myself and our oldest son) are happy reading books for hours or doing things in quietude, but not our little ISFJ. He needs people around him in quite another way, which takes an effort from me to understand.

MBTI has also been helpful in understanding how the PTSD in our family works. I realized all of a sudden half a year ago that I had been telling myself the wrong probabilities. When I corrected that, most of my PTSD symptoms disappeared. I still have fears, but most of them have gone away. Being an ENTJ I couldn’t help seeing danger everywhere, the potential of catastrophe, but being an ENTJ I rely heavily on probabilities, so when I could change how I thought about potential catastrophes, I could change my response to those unlikely events. I’ve tried to apply this thinking to our younger ENTJ also, but so far it hasn’t really taken a hold. He is much more cautious than I was as a child, because of his Introverted intuition (Ni) pared with extrovert thinking (Te) that makes him see possibilities everywhere.

Our ENFP also has her own way of dealing with trauma, and now that we know her personality type we can also deal with her emotions much better. She needs almost constant stimulation and is easily distracted when she is spiraling into negative emotion, and usually I can do that without engaging any of my own emotions (a perk/disadvantage of being ENTJ). It is harder for Niklas, our resident ESTP, who has the same EP-being in the moment not wanting routine-issues as his daughter. Usually when one of them blows up, one of us ENTJ:s step in and try to calm down the situation.

There is a lot of overlap between the personalities of our family, but the biggest gap is between us E:s and our ISFJ. All the rest of us are okay with plans changing in the last minute (our EP:s even crave that, and us ENTJ:s have Extrovert Sensing (Se) as a tertiary function and can function really well in sudden changes), but he really wants routine and everything to go just as planned. I sometimes feel bad for our tradition loving, relationship loving little extraverted feeler, who has been dropped into this Thinker family! 🙂

But then I think back to my own childhood, growing up surrounded by Extraverted Feelers (Fe)  who had no understanding for my way of thinking. It was a struggle sometimes, especially since I could feel their wishes for me to conform (something I’m very ill suited to do – my personality is more of a trail blazer), but now looking back I can see that I learned a lot from that. I’ve learned systems for handling feelers of all kinds, and try to sort of pass for a normal woman for at least a few minutes (my idiosyncratic way of thinking tends to pop out sooner or later, I’ve got the brain of a dude…!), and right now I am so grateful for that because without it, I have no idea how I could ever understand my youngest child.

There are perks to growing up with people with your sort of personality. You can have an ease of understanding  that you can’t with others. But you can also enhance each other’s weak spots, because we all have weak spots and they tend to follow certain patterns. Extroverts tend to skip their introverted functions and vice versa, and if you grow up with a parent of your own personality who does that, the chances are high that you too do that. And that is not helpful for anyone.

It is rough growing up surrounded by personalities that are far removed from your own, but it can also be a boon. I hope that our little ISFJ will grow up to be a person who isn’t that afraid of change or of changing traditions, and of objective impersonal arguments that often aren’t the sort of arguments that an extroverted feeler is attuned to. And I hope our TJ son will grow up understanding feelers as well as I did, or even better, because he is growing up with two different kinds of them. At the very least, I am grateful for having this opportunity for growth, which has been greatly enhanced by typing our family and understanding what we have in common and accepting our differences.

 

P.S. It can take a lot to type yourself and your family! I have the advantage of being a psychologist and have read up extensively on the subject, which is why I can say with certainty what types we all are. Otherwise psychologists tend to use the MBTI in addition to interviews and/or live observations. The instrument itself is usually not enough to give a definite analysis of a person’s thought patterns.

 

 

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