The mystery

The reaction I've had from people when exploring their type has been very interesting; they're fascinated but, at the same time, resistant. People want to be understood... buuuuuut they also don't want to be understood. What we want is understanding. What we don't want is to be dismissed: "Ok, I know what you are now. Time to move on." People want to be special, and we are all special. At the same time, we also have a relatively few typical ways of thinking and behaving because there are only so many of perceiving and processing information. All of us - unless we're either unusually highly developed and have gained the ability to use all the functions, or we never developed any of them at all - will, therefore, fall into one or another personality type.

Typology isn't a definition; saying you're this or that type doesn't mean that you're only this or that type and that there's nothing more to you. It's also not a way to gain power over other people; if you're using a typology to bludgeon or accuse another person, or to get a secret window into what makes them tick in order to manipulate them, you're just doing it wrong and stay the fuck away from psychology. What it is is a coordinate that tells you where you are - or, more accurately, where your ego is - in the field of consciousness. The x, y, and z axes (not what you chop wood with but the plural of axis) are perception, judgment, and attitude (sensation/intuition, thinking/feeling, and introversion/extroversion). Our type is simply a dot on that map.

While there are several undeniable dangers and pitfalls to using typologies they are, at the same time, incredibly useful, even comforting. Understanding types helps us understand why we are the way we are, and others are the way they are. People of other types often confuse the hell out of us when they do the mystifying things they do. Knowing their type can help us demystify their behavior. This leads to an even more important benefit to learning typology: compassion. One of the greatest gifts of typology is how it gives us permission to be ourselves... and teaches us to give others permission to do the same. It defuses our relationships by showing us that other people aren't (usually) annoying or hurting us because they're jerks, but this is just who they are.

I'll give you an example. I'm an INTP. A dear friend of mine is a feeling type. I am BAAAAAAD at remembering important days (birthdays and such). My feeling friend, on the other hand, would never even think of not saying something nice on someone's birthday, giving them a call at the very least. It hurt him very much that I often forgot his birthday and he took it as a sign that I simply didn't value him, which couldn't be further from the truth. One year we were talking about this and the conversation was getting pretty heated, when I blurted out "I just don't think that way! I don't even remember my own birthday! How hard do you think it is for me to remember anyone else's??" And he suddenly stopped. He realized that we are so very, very different, and a behavior that would mean one thing from him means a very different thing from someone else (or doesn't mean anything at all). Now, I've also learned that I need to make a little more effort in this area of my life because I actually really do value my feeling friends and relatives but it was something that I had to deliberately and consciously work at, not something that comes naturally to me.

These are the reasons why typology is so powerful as a means of increasing our understanding and our ability to create harmony in our relationships. But simply knowing our type and the types of other people isn't enough. Types aren't static. It takes time to figure out what you are; it's usually not just a matter of taking a 5 minute test and then bam, that's it, you know everything. You may be that lucky but what's more likely is that you're going to get some false answers at first as you grope around in the dark, trying to really understand yourself or the people who are important to you. And beyond that, it doesn't just end when you finally understand what your type is; you need to develop the things you need to develop. Figuring out what your type is is great, but you need to look at it to see what steps you need to take to further develop yourself. Your weaker functions indicate areas of your life that are calling for your love and attention, and to keep growing we have to start working on those parts of ourselves.

And we must never forget that knowing our or others' types doesn't mean that you know ourselves or others at a deep level; that takes time. Many, many years of time. Jung fought hard against our tendency as a society to reduce people to safe, neat, easily digestible statistics, as "nothing but"s; "nothing but" a Latina professional from Chicago, or "nothing but" a person with a certain IQ, or "nothing but" an extrovert. Our ego may have stereotypical ways of behaving, but we each of us has a special, one of a kind uniqueness which comes from the Self. Jungian typology tells us how we take in and process information, and our resulting tendencies. These things are true and they exist, but they are not the entirety of who we are. People resist being typed because they (rightly) resist being put into a box, of having the complexity of their being reduced to a 4 letter (or whatever) stereotype. Yes we do have stereotypical ways of behaving, but this is not the whole of what we are.

Just as the persona (how we represent ourselves to the world) or even our ego (the construct we use to navigate it) are not the entirety of ourselves, neither is our type (the method our ego uses to navigate the world). We are much larger and more complex within our conscious sphere than any label or mask or method. And when we bring in the actual entirety of ourselves - when we bring in our unconscious as well as conscious selves - that largeness and complexity expands far into the realm of deep mystery. Typology is incredibly useful, but we must always take care when using it to use it as a way to further explore that mystery, not demean and diminish it.