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Frank Abagnale, Feelings, and Life Experience

Friday December 9, 2016

Above: Frank Abagnale tells his fascinating story at FedTalks 2013

One of the things I love about personality type is that having an interest in a thing can tell you about who you are. An interest is never just an interest, but a result of an inner push or pull of some sort, be it conscious or unconscious.

I’ve always been interested in people like Frank Abagnale. When I came across the Passers website recently, this awakened my previous interests in the topic and I went back to re-watch Mr. Abagnale as he tells his own story.

I find the video above far more powerful than the film based on Mr. Abagnale’s life, Catch Me If You Can. In his own words, Frank Abagnale encountered a deep tragedy early in life, and lost what was most important to him at a critical point in his youth. While the film attempts to portray this and does a good job of it in parts, Abagnale’s own words seem to deeply touch me. Any glamour in his experiences was completely overshadowed by the deeper, and literal, loss of life which occurred.

As an INTJ, I am discomforted by the ease with which I can let life pass by, either my own or the lives of my loved ones. Keeping emotional issues at arms length has always been a specialty.

But perhaps this is also why I feel so affected by, drawn to, and sometimes overpowered by, human drama. While it’s nice to be fall back on the fact that I have strengths outside of the realm of feelings, and that feelings “aren’t an effective problem-solving tool” for me, the truth is that a lack of development of feelings will, over time, punish me again and again until I balance myself out and reconcile the deeper separation from my own feelings, and, especially, the feelings of others.

For this reason I find Abagnale a tremendous role model. He is one more voice of change in my inner wilderness.