True Blood

I’ve written briefly before about temperament types, but Father’s Day had me thinking about them again. One of Carl Jung’s many contributions to the field of psychology was his theory of psychological types. After Jung published his work on psychological types, psychologist Katharine Cooks Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, developed a psychological type test, or indicator, called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI is a most handy tool. It can help you understand yourself better, as well as help you understand others. I always urge those who haven’t taken the MBTI or (or some facsimile thereof) to take it and learn more about themselves and others.

We had the whole family, and then some, over at the house for most of the day on Father’s Day. Four generations of people who have been connected for as long as half a century provides much room for observation and discussion later to two intuitive types like my husband and me. Intuitive types want to analyze, dissect, and understand everything. We find connections and patterns, or make them when we don’t find them, preferring fancy to fact, the gut feeling about a situation or person to the evidence staring us in the face. He’s an ENXJ, and I’m an INXJ, meaning that we are evenly balanced between our Thinking and Feeling functions. Although my husband and I are a matched pair, it’s statistically unlikely for like psychological types to marry one another, except when one or both parties are intuitive-thinking types, as we are. NTs tend to be principled in everything they do; they somehow instinctively know that marrying one’s opposite doesn’t effectively support the principle of marital harmony, so tend to marry someone similar to achieve that end. 

opposites attract

Intuitive-Thinking types are the exceptions, for research indicates that over 75% of people marry an opposite psychological type. Some theorize that opposites attract because if you marry your opposite, you can externalize your need for a balanced personality. Your spouse, in effect, exemplifies and carries everything you’re not. The organized person marries the slovenly type; the person who’s always late chooses a partner who’s punctual to a fault, and so on. Then, once the rosy hues of idealization wear off, the harsh light of day reveals that we married someone we were bound to rub the wrong way, and vice-versa. As it says in Proverbs, “as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” It should come as no surprise that the first five to seven years of marriage are the most difficult; it takes that long for people to either “get” one another, or give up. By year eight many couples divorce.

An interesting side effect of the law of opposites is that, when opposites attract and marry one another, they tend to have children with temperament types similar to one spouse or the other, but not both. Thus, an introverted child may have a quite extraverted mother; the intuitive, dreamy mother may have a child who’s more practically grounded than she. My husband and I were both raised by mothers who were our exact opposites temperamentally and who were  mysteries to us. Our siblings who were similar to our mothers naturally understood them, while we were like fish on bicycles when it came to insight about what would please our mothers. I think in retrospect that our mothers found us equally incomprehensible, and used our differences as excuses for the emotional distance they maintained. Rather than working at understanding us, they tried to change us. These efforts only resulted in our feeling unacceptable, unworthy of love. We grew up alienated in many ways from our own parents; from this, we had to heal.

true love

I don’t think that being different from one’s child is an excuse for emotional estrangement. With such a wealth of information about children’s psychological and emotional needs available, it seems inexcusable that parents would fail to help their own child feel comfortable in her own skin. Being told you’re somehow misshapen psychologically or temperamentally can be a terrible injustice and heartache to a child.

It’s also hurtful when we give the adults in our lives this message of unacceptability. The Christian ideal of loving your neighbor as yourself is, in the context of temperamental dissimilarities, particularly compelling. Jesus taught that it’s easy to love your friends–those with whom you choose to associate, those you tend to like–but divine to love your enemies. Our enemies are those who wrong us, misuse us, who are dissimilar to us in belief, custom, race, temperament. An enemy is odious, hateful, an adversary. The Greek word used in the Gospels, in fact, has as its root the words adversary, adverse. One who is adverse is one who is opposed, opposite, or acting in a contrary direction. This certainly must apply when we’re dealing with temperament types; we’re admonished to love those who act in ways contrary to our ways, too.

“Love does no wrong to a neighbor,” it says in Romans 13:10; one can find this same teaching about love’s behaviors in all true religions, even among humanists. In the sciences, physicians adhere to a  ”do no harm” ethic. We all know what love is when we think about it; we just don’t think about it often enough. Many times we wait for our feelings of fondness to surface before we’ll act in loving ways. We may fail to act lovingly absent any positive feelings. We confuse sentiment for principle, phileo for agape.

In his book, True Love,Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes that the four elements of true love are:

• Lovingkindness or benevolence, the desire and ability to bring joy to another person.
• Compassion; the desire and ability to ease the pain of another person.
• Joy; if there is no joy in your love, it is not true love.
• Freedom; love in such a way that the person you love feels free outside and inside.

 True love is a moral choice, a philosophically ethical stance. We choose to love. It’s not an easy or natural choice; if it were, we wouldn’t need religion to teach us how to do it.

What comes naturally to us is easy, and it’s easy to assume that others see and experience life as we do. It takes a great deal more maturity and wisdom to care about and understand others as they are, to love them as they are. To love ourselves as we are. All this applies to psychological types.

Father’s Day

At our Father’s Day cookout yesterday, with four generations of our clan milling about, all our temperamental differences and likenesses were on parade. As adoptive parents, we never assumed that we’d be like our children temperamentally or vice-versa. In fact, the emotional distance we experienced with our own mothers prepared us to become better parents because it drove us to do for our children what our mothers did not do for us, which was to love us unconditionally. We never wanted to encourage in our children the same emotional distance we experienced with our mothers, the alienation from our very selves that their subtle and not-s0-subtle rejections engendered.

The tree frogs bawled as we lingered over our beers on the porch long after everyone had left. We talked into the night about how we had learned how to love every child of ours as he or she was and is, how precious and valuable each one is in this peculiar family system. We noticed how disconnected this relative or that one is from the family, from the way things really are, from us, even though they’re in the middle of everything, chatting, letting the energy bounce around them. They show up physically, but bring no self with whom anyone can connect, no real life.  They say and do all the conventional things, use their manners, can talk for hours, but they rarely ask a question. If they ask a question, they don’t wait for the answer. If asked questions, they cannot seem to answer in emotionally or intellectually satisfying ways.

 We talked about how sad we feel about this, especially as intuitve types for whom meaning and connection are essential. Where is the meaning of this person’s life? we asked. How can that one be so shallow, with all this abundance ’round about? How is it that when we ask, “How were you changed by this experience you had?” we receive only a blank stare? Is this what all the love and support this person has received have come to? Is this what all those years of living has meant to these people?–Endless debate about politics, religion, shoulds, oughts, musts and shalls?

We talked about how we had finally come to a place of acceptance with our own parents, understanding their needs and giving according to their needs, not just demanding what we want, what we need. When we gave our parents what they ought to have first given us, we discovered we were repairing not only our own hearts, but tears in the fabric of the universe, too.

hell, no! we won’t go!

Because of who we are, though, we sometimes come away from family gatherings feeling depleted and dissatisfied. Because our temperament types exist in only 1-2% of the population, we’re the oddballs, not our more conventional relatives. We naturally prefer depth to breadth because we’re intuitive. Perhaps the idealized, fake selves we perceive in some of our family members are the result of differences in type; maybe they’re not as dead as they seem.

As we mulled this over, we realized that within our very large family are members of every single different psychological type, and then some. We’ve been able to be emotionally close to and intimate with every single person who made him- or herself available for loving relationships. We’ve learned that not every person has a real self or is willing to give it. Sometimes people develop only enough of a self to relieve their suffering, and then they stop. They don’t learn to truly love; they come to the place where they might have something to give, and then they withhold it. They refuse to die to themselves, to put it in Biblical terms. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, by itself; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Nobody bears fruit until he first goes down, down, down into the dark, cold, lonely earth and germinates. That’s what Jesus taught. Buddha didn’t sit under the bodhi tree for no reason. He was dying to himself.

We all know we have to go there; but most will not go. We see this in our family. We see what the refusal to go any farther looks like. It looks like an anti-war protest: “Hell, no! We won’t go!” It feels like a tear-jerker, like a tragedy, like a train wreck fixing to happen. We lay our hands on our mouths, appalled, our eyes opened wide with consternation. Do you see that?! we gasp. Look what she’s refusing! Oh, no! Oh, my!

Some people’s selves have been so wounded, so compromised, that they live on virtual life support. Like vampires, they use the life in others to energize themselves. They’re willing to live “as-if” kinds of lives, rather than pressing on to grab hold of an authentic life of their own. They refuse to become balanced, to grow, to yield, to “become all things to all men,” as Saint Paul admonished, “so that the many may be saved.” They refuse to love. It’s OK with them if other people suffer. It’s OK with them if they cause suffering. They go blank and limp when you say, “I am in pain because of you.” This is because they are still suffering on some level, because they are in pain because of themselves, too.

I’m going to be writing this week about true love and temperament type, about how each and every person, no matter what his personality type, can love with all he has. We can learn to step outside our comfort zones and give what’s needed, once we’re full up.  We can even give before we’re full up, if we’re brave enough. We can give what we have. That’s the sacrifice, the laying down of one’s own life for the sake of the beloved. I don’t think we’ve really loved until we’ve done that, until we are more than just recipients of constant blood transfusions.

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