Wednesday 18 April 2018

The dark side

I must admit that I'm on the fence right now, regarding this idea that there are 16 basic personality types. I'm talking about the whole Myers Briggs thing. It's based on the theories of Carl Jung, who is something of a hero of mine, but I don't know just how seriously to take it all.

Apparently, I have the INFJ personality type. If we take the root of the theory, this means that I have certain preferences in the way I process things and use cognitive processes described by Jung. This, accordingly, affects how I express myself, and therefore what people perceive as my personality.

When I look at other INFJs, I see areas of commonality. Actually, I see so much that I have in common with them that it's difficult to outright condemn the whole Myers Briggs thing. What I see as a difference between the greater INFJ community and myself, however, is how much they are connected to their spiritual side. Furthermore, there's a darkness to so many of them that seems absent from my own life. I wish I could put that darkness into better words, but I can't.

What scares me is the realisation that what I see in other INFJs, and deny being present in myself, are things that I've learned to suppress. As a private counsellor said, I've learned to hide my power. I pretended for a while that I didn't understand what she meant, and I almost fooled myself into believing it.

The darkness doesn't scare me so much. What I have come to recognise is that the darkness is an INFJ simply expressing their authentic self, and this includes what Jung called The Shadow. It should scare no one, really - least of all me. Well, actually, it should be of concern to anyone who's screwed me over, but that's another story. Accepting our darkness makes us strong. I don't know how true that is for other personality types, but it's true for an INFJ.

The spiritual aspect may be more of a challenge for me. I was once told by a new age type that I had a purple aura, which meant that I was inherently spiritual. I don't believe in that kind of stuff, but I found it strange that more than one person said the same thing to me. I don't know how it would feel to fully connect with my spiritual side, or what the outcome of that might be.

Here's to finding ourselves!

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