The Church - Under The Milky Way (Remastered) | Youtube
Nord World Sessions: Mike Pensini | Youtube
Compilerbau - Fragments Of Bach I - YouTube Love the artist name and the song title both. Nice little throwback tune.
Another reader question:
“Are any of your kids INTJs? How do you relate to them? What are you teaching them about feelings? I think my middle son is an INTJ. Neither of my parents were, nor peers, so my childhood was characterized by feeling misunderstood and excluded. I think the sameness between me and him is going to somewhat ironically lead to two totally divergent life experiences.”
Sorry to hear about the more frustrating aspects of your childhood there…it did resonate with me.
Personally I don’t have any INTJ children; mine are ISTP, ISFJ, and ENFP. And I love them all very, very much, and they teach me tons about psychology every day. Phew. :-)
However, I am the INTJ child of an INTJ father, and my father had no idea what an INTJ was. Overall he was pretty unhealthy in terms of his psychological disposition, and really suffered unnecessarily. Still, hundreds of people showed up at his memorial after he died, and he was well-known and well-loved in the community. He did a lot of things right.
I grew up as a Turbulent (T) INTJ. My father was more of an Assertive (A) INTJ. I personally push myself very hard toward flexibility, change, and self-improvement. He pushed himself very hard toward some combination of the ISTJ and ESTP directions, and was heavily invested in sensory work without knowing about the toll that takes on an INTJ. Where I push toward flexibility, he pushed himself toward rigidity and right-behavior (usually the production of sensory output—write that book, buckle down and do it!)
Unfortunately, my father also taught me by his example that feelings are meant to be repressed. When I was about twelve or thirteen, I remember my mom (ESFP) crying emotionally while recalling the loss of my brother, some 20 years after he had passed (this brother was a much older sibling than me). I was sitting in the car, a pile of programming and IT and history books next to me, waiting for my parents to drive me from our upscale neighborhood to some community event. My dad, who had experienced this sort of situation on and off at this point for 20 years, simply responded, “stop it. STOP IT. STOP IT.” He grew louder and more angry as the exchange went on, and it was incredibly awkward to hear this broadcast across my otherwise peaceful neighborhood as my parents stood in front of our garage.
This experience doesn’t really describe my “normal” dad, except at points where his life experience intersected with that extraverted character of emotion which was so annoying to him. It was not at all comfortable and he had little education in its subtleties. It was logically silly, and nothing could be done, and those events were far behind us, so “STOP IT” was about all he could come up with.
I am grateful, personally, that I had a more nuanced education in emotion in the years following. I spent a lot of time in therapy (for what I now understand to be productivity exhaustion) and if you’ve been to therapy before, the subject of feelings and emotions is usually very well covered.
If I had an INTJ son, I’d teach him the same way I try to teach my current kids about feelings. I’d teach him by example that feelings are GREAT! They are not and will never be the only perspective on things, but wow. They are awesome. They are a powerful problem-solving tool. And they are OK.
I can’t even go into how effective the feeling functions are, how transformative they are. Most importantly—they’re just a fact of life. You can try to work around them, or work against them, but the moment you do, society and your personal problems will effectively turn against you and you can’t blame society or your psychology for that. So it’s best to get a good grounding in feelings. Learn to attend to them and use them like you would the controls of a fighter jet. INTJ Dario Nardi’s book, 8 Keys to Self-leadership, contains two chapters on the feeling functions Fi and Fe that are excellent material for a nuanced education in feelings.
> I think the sameness between me and him is going to somewhat ironically lead to two totally divergent life experiences
Yes, you are probably right. I have observed that the same-type parent with a same-type child experiences something similar. No matter how much they try to raise them to be a clone (tongue in cheek)…the kid just kind of goes “been there done that, and it’s basically eye-roll ‘dad territory’” (even if unconsciously) and you’re out of luck. :-)
Filed in: Parenting /5/
While I wait for Thunderbird to synchronize 250K emails (oh dear—but I got so sick of the new GMail interface), I’ll be addressing some questions from a reader in the next few blog posts. The first question goes like this:
“Love languages. My primary love language is physical touch. Have you observed that being common among INTJs? Have you observed that INTJs stumble on it, thinking of themselves as solitary, not taking steps to get some touch in their lives?”
Yes, physical touch is a common one for INTJs due to inferior Se (extraverted sensing, the psychological function that balances out our heavy use of introverted intuition on the opposite side of things).
We’re in our heads, receiving intuition, really out of touch and not “present” and all of a sudden there’s this feeling of “I just want to hook up with everyone I see”—that’s one way an INTJ explained it to me once. And there are many ways to experience this, but overall the preference for physical touch in a romance is common for INTJs as far as I can tell.
However #1, I’ve also seen this change. Inferior Se and its needs tend to be most intense when we aren’t getting where we need to go in life, when we are really spinning our wheels. I’ve seen INTJs switch into a more capable problem-solving situation (ahem: Get coaching, it helps) and suddenly quality time is more important to them. Long walks to talk about things, one-on-one dates to go explore the community; that sort of stuff.
However #2, this can also change based on the context. Sure, maybe the INTJ wanted cuddle time before they got out of bed in the morning, but right now, right when they’re about to finish the last function on the spreadsheet, or hit Publish on the latest edition of their web comic? Ewwww, don’t touch me, it feels like I’m being assaulted!
So there’s more than enough room for nuance in this, and I think that nuance is super-important to explore. If your partner says they don’t like your preferred love language, watch for times when they actually do. Ask: Why? What’s different? Don’t force it, just observe. This can lead to relationship breakthroughs.
Good question. Next!
Filed in: Relationships /78/ | Feeling /64/ | Se /25/ | Sensation /40/
The latest Marc’s INTJ Podcast is up!
Direct MP3 Download | Archive.org Apocalyptic Contingency Storage Resource Container Reference Link
Listen along as I discuss:
…and more! Enjoy!
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir (Quote found on Michael S. Schneider’s website, above—this is THE great Ne / extraverted intuition idea: All things are connected!)
Filed in: Podcast /5/ | Books /10/ | Socionics /7/ | Publications /44/ | Ne /17/
Thanks to listener feedback, there are now two formats for my INTJ podcasts: Regular Format and Topical Training. Topical Training podcasts discuss one topic for 15 minutes, including exercises for improved use. Regular Format podcasts will be a bit looser and discuss various topics, with a bit more fun thrown in.
And here’s the first Topical Training episode, on standards-setting for personal growth.
Direct MP3 Download | Archive.org Apocalyptic Contingency Storage Resource Container Reference Link
Listen along as I discuss:
In terms of cognitive function, standards-setting is concerned with measurement-based judgments, and as such is part of what we call extraverted thinking, or Te. Te is the INTJ’s secondary function, one that can help us break through big problems.
More soon—enjoy the weekend.
Filed in: Podcast /5/ | Productivity /120/ | Te /36/ | Thinking /70/
The latest Marc’s INTJ Podcast is up! Now with jazzy intro/outro!
Direct MP3 Download | Archive.org Apocalyptic Contingency Storage Resource Container Reference Link
Listen along as I discuss:
Enjoy!
Filed in: Interaction Styles /4/ | Careers /40/ | Randomness /26/
Let’s say you’re playing a role-playing game where your player-character is a really good researcher.
As a result, every time you roll the dice while solving a problem, bonus points are added to your roll if your solution involves research.
If you have time, write or talk out your own answers. I’ll add my own answers later, too.
Filed in: Thinking /70/ | Te /36/ | Ti /30/ | Productivity /120/
Very few people arrive at a “right career” in advance, let alone at any point in their actual career.
The happiest INTJs I know are not thinking about whether they’ve arrived at the right career.
The happiest INTJs are the ones who are able to confront problems and solve problems. They are engaged in a problem-solving role. That effort and reasonable return-on-effort is what is making them happy.
In terms of career progress, I have observed that INTJs are happiest when they progress toward an effective and comfortable role, rather than progressing toward some kind of pre-labeled career. You want to be a “scientist”? Great! You can do that anywhere so start defining the role with more clarity. Not the job title, not the business sector—define the role.
The nice thing about “role-thinking” is that it applies post-retirement just as well as it applies to any other context. It’s not limited to the way you’re making money. You can describe your role right now (e.g. “chair-sitter-writer-thinker”, but it should be a lot more leverage-able than a simple one like that) and overlay that role onto any responsibility, for a view on how that responsibility matches your capabilities and preferred problem-solving mode, and how it will require you to stretch.
There’s a lot to be said about roles, but try thinking in those terms—a fitting role, or fitting roles, plural—next time you evaluate your career.
Filed in: Careers /40/
I occasionally hear from INTJs who are upset at themselves for “being so aloof” or for avoiding social experiences. And while it’s good to give consideration to that possibility, that’s also extremely risky territory.
If you’re really certain you’re aloof and not just giving reasonably-confident attention to your core INTJ gifts, I can see why it would be wise to work on that, to bring in some more balance. You may be able to be more effective with other people and with the outside world in general, as a result.
However, a problem I see a lot of INTJs dealing with around midlife is that we can give so much attention to our failings in social situations or in those more “grounded” contexts, that we get completely sucked into solving this problem. So sucked in that we forget who we are.
So it is risky to do this without defining a method for securing and attending to our inner world, our core INTJ gifts, as we do so. This is the same absolutely vital inner world that is constantly bringing distant signals to our attention, the inner world that speaks distant and long-sought-out truths to us, often through unclear metaphor which can take a lot of time and energy to sort out.
As a result of setting this gift aside, that richness and depth of problem-solving capability can dry up, and we lose our mooring—not with reality (or “objectively sensed experience”), but our mooring with the unseen truths and what some refer to as the cosmic side of it all. Those unattended inner truths, in a very basic and immature form, can then begin to manifest themselves through very concrete unwanted behaviors and outcomes in our lives. In our sickness, in our suffering, we then become a living metaphor of the way we have unintentionally mistreated some of our most valuable cognitive functions.
At the same time, others who cannot experience this, or who repress the subject of our INTJ gifts due to their own functional dynamics, cheer us on, telling us it’s good that we’re lightening up, or it’s good that we are more social.
We need to be able to take those outside comments for what they are—perspectives from people who are attending to a different set of gifts.
One difficult truth here is that no matter how unmoored it may seem when cast in relation to “objective” (e.g. socially-defined) reality, the INTJ’s hidden world is absolutely full of promise and treasure if the INTJ is willing to explore and develop it.
It’s deceptively easy to leave our dominant function at a basic level while we shore up other functions, without later returning to develop that dominant function to a significant degree. In my experience it is extremely rare to meet INTJs who have developed their intuition to a high level, and I think part of the problem is that the outside world, society, is not generally comfortable with the idea of encouraging that sort of growth. However, this kind of growth will only make everyone stronger and allow a more resilient and mature human society to evolve.
IMHO it is a good idea to find a way to balance out the attention to the various functions and objectives with some reasonable weighting and additional emphasis given to our most gifted cognitive processes —and to look on this as a system to be evaluated from the outside-in, periodically. We don’t need to let ourselves be blown about by winds of social criticism, but we can still take those points of view into consideration and adjust our personal system while trusting in our overall process.
So: What music are you liking these days?
How about favorite Youtubers, or Youtube channels?
I’m all ears—let me know! My email’s in the sidebar, and you can tweet to me: @systematikk
Last time I got some pretty excellent metal recommendations, in addition to some really good indie pop. You know who you are!
Filed in:
The latest Marc’s INTJ Podcast is up! Now with intro/outro!
Direct MP3 Download | Archive.org Apocalyptic Contingency Storage Resource Container Reference Link
Listen along as I talk about:
By the way: The podcast music will probably change in future episodes. My wife listened to it, and we discussed it, and we both agreed on why I arrived at it (it matches my perception and “organic” information-outlook, in many ways), but we both agree that it doesn’t really match my overall informational style and approach.
I hate picking music for things, because I get sucked in, every time, for hours.