Do any of you feel adopted?

[pjoa09]

I have a nagging thought that I could be adopted.

The more I think about it the more I see intense personality differences between me and my family, extended family, and every ancestor I have.

However, I can see a few similar features between me and my mom but as far as I can tell they aren't that many and I am fairly darker, always have been.

My mom appears to be an ENFP, brother ENFP, and father ENTJ.

I can feel very strong ideology differences, personality differences, and most importantly attention to events revolving around us. Everyone in my family enjoys supervision and domination except me.

In fact I don't even feel like I am an Indian of any sort. Never could relate to anyone in my family and same story was at school.

However, I do get entitled to a lot of things I shouldn't and feel guilty for.

Is this just INTP/ISTP or could I stand a chance to have been adopted all these years but it never slipped out of anyone's mouth?

 

[Ink]

I know I'm not adopted, and I feel very different to everyone in my family, including extended family. They are almost all S's though. Don't look at your relatives personalities to figure out if you have theire genes but their bodies!

edit: only read first lines, I think it's just your strong Ti and weak F that makes you not relate as much... but you could be adopted, I'm not sure, you should study genetics and not personality to figure that out though!

 

[own8ge]

Don't discriminate so much, lol. Basicly what you are saying is somewhat similar as to: "I'm a nigger but I don't like chicken. My family are all niggers but I don't agree with them on chicken. I must be white."

My whole family is S. I'm N.

Anyhow. I myself know the feeling. In the past I always wondered if it would be possible to have a lost twin. But you shouldn't judge so much. You are an INFJ?

 

[Jennywocky]

Kids can all be different from family and parents... In my family, I was INTP married to ISFJ, and our two bio children are INTP and ESFP. Meanwhile, we adopted a girl from another country and she is INFJ.

When I was growing up, my dad was ESTP and my mom ISFJ, and my sister is ISFJ. I was the odd one out. In fact, in my entire extended family on both sides (including cousins), which amounts to 22-25 people, there is only one other N besides me.

 

[WALKYRIA]

same here, my family is filled with sensor(wich is statisticaly normal lol). Although my father could be ENTP... how do I know? He's mad as hell.

 

[mu is mu]

As Ink said, genetics would provide your answer with certainty. But judging from your descriptions of your experiences you don't seem adopted to me, but rather like an INTP and not like an ISTP. It seems to me that INTPs react very differently to cultural influences than most other types do, oftentimes resulting in the sort of eccentricity and individualistic mindset that you've described. Maybe you've discovered that you can identify with some of the INTPs on this forum, whom you've never met and who come from various cultural backgrounds, to a greater degree than you can with your own family members and friends.

As for me, I happened to be fortunate enough to have an ENTP as an older brother while growing up. He seemed to raise questions and experience certain issues that I had rarely, if ever, heard anyone else discuss or encounter, and when I later experienced those types of issues in my own life his experiences provided precedents for me and thus assured me that I wasn't insane or mentally ill. Were it not for him I would probably have a disturbed, much darker life than I do today and I have no doubt that I would be raising the sorts of adoption questions that you mention here.

I also think that the public's ignorance of personality/temperament theory can greatly damage young INTPs (or any INs) who consequently have to cope with a social world that consistently discourages and criticizes, directly and indirectly, their inherent personality differences from SPs and SJs. Ignorance is not bliss.

 

[pjoa09]

Shouldn't there be some sort of relation between nurture, nature, and personality?

I am fairly unusually dark when everyone else in my family is light colored (my dad is just a tad dark but they said he was much lighter when young). I am the only one with a short thick lip and wavy hair. I am slightly less hairy but still hairy. That's all I got. I look really different from my brother though.

But personality was the main concern. I am alienated by my personality. I can see personality traits pass on from my parents to my brother but I can't see it in me.

 

[ℜεмїηїs¢εη¢ε]

I look so much like the rest of my family that it's hard to believe that I might be adopted. I do feel very different in the way I think about things compared to them though.

 

[Hayyel]

If you would put my sister beside me you would also say one of us was adopted, we are total opposites physically and psychically too. But none of us were adopted, it's just genes.

 

[Ink]

Shouldn't there be some sort of relation between nurture, nature, and personality?

There is, but it is way too complex to figure out if you're adopted based on that. Why not just ask your parents?

 

[pjoa09]

There is, but it is way too complex to figure out if you're adopted based on that. Why not just ask your parents?

Maybe it's a lie that they will never break from. Okay, that sounded stupid.

I guess I am not adopted, just bored out of my mind making up conspiracy theories for myself.

But damn I am different mentally. Creepy shit.


This thread can rest in peace now.

 

[Jennywocky]

This thread can rest in peace now.

I'll adopt it if you don't want it anymore.... poor li'l thread....

 

[ElvenVeil]

Think about it from your fathers perspective.. you are so different from him.. maybe you aren't his son....

*the plot thickens*

 

[Architect]

I am very different from my family, the joke used to be I was switched at birth. I have genetic test proof to the contrary.

 

[r4ch3l]

Short answer? Yes. Reality? No way. It's a mindframe and a psychological fantasy, not a reality.

I have had major blowouts with my family because I feel that they have no interest in who I am as an individual whatsoever yet I had insane pressure to perform -- a combination of these prerequisites, raw intellectual need/curiosity, and my obsession with figuring out best outcomes.

While I was estranged from them for years I now believe that while they are good people at their core their style of parenting was very narcissistic and a product of both their generation and their own upbringing; I was simply an extension of their own personalities and aspirations. I am the eldest of three girls born back to back and I feel that my father (an oldschool out-of-the-Navy dyslexic engineer who I suspect is ISTP or INTJ or an INTP in survival mode? Dunno.) and hysterical, gorgeous, schizophrenic mom (ISFJ) are completely foreign to me and I never bonded with them but also that in a way my lack of bonding is not due to an error on their part so much as an inherent part of who I am that becomes misunderstood in the current psychological paradigm. When I have had conversations with my mom about why I was so touch-averse when I was a child I initially thought (because of others and therapists) that my mom was defensive and hiding something; now I see that my natural sensory-processing issues (which my youngest sister also has and was diagnose with HFA) and hardcore tendency toward interpreting the world through logic explain this. Before I thought that because she was the parent it was her fault that we did not bond in a "natural" way, but now I see that she must have been traumatized and also frustrated by the fact that I was not responding in a normal way as an infant and then enthralled that I had "special" abilities as a toddler.

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.” – G.K. Chesterton

 

[DelusiveNinja]

I feel like an alien. Nobody understands me and I don't understand them. Plus when I try to ask why they do the things they do out of curiosity they give me this attitude as if I'm judging them. This is why I say screw my family and the fake, unjustified, and illogical emotions that come with them.

 

[Chad]

I can relate however I was adopted. It's actually quite cool to know that your parents chose you.

 

[nearfantastica]

Having an ISTJ mother, and being raised primarily by her, has often made me wonder the same. There has been many jokes about how I was adopted over the years. I've decided not to take them seriously (for all I know, they are) because it doesn't affect me greatly in any way.

I have put serious consideration into how I became an INTP being raised by a prominent ISTJ, however. My mother and I are drastically different in every way, apart from our introversion and mutual dislike of being emotional. Everything else is a mystery.

Maybe we're both adopted?

 

[Magus]

It was a nagging suspicion throughout my childhood. I've always felt apart from my family to some extent. I now know this my feelings had much more to do with being an angsty INTP teen. At this point I'm quite distant from my parents (despite still being dependent on them).

What Rachel said, its a mindset/psychological Ne thinking what if... rather than anything to do with reality. It comes with an INTPish sense of dislocation from people generally.