I have had much opportunity in my life to examine my shadow, but botched it I guess, as those opportunities have been born of cyclical extremes. If I had learned and integrated, I wouldn't have found myself committing the worst of sins - not learning from experience.
But what am I on about? Every five years or so it seems, I have a nervous breakdown. I'm undergoing one now. The forum time I'm spending is testament to that.
I place myself in conditions that cause stress, and watch my personality unravel. Mostly anything that has anything to do with human relationships will trigger that stress. It is a curious exercise, and while I am harsh on my self-professed inability to learn from the past, it is more of a testing exercise, achieving finer and finer tuning and deeper understanding of what makes me tick. I am, of course, fundamentally quite self-ignorant, and only experiments of these proportions and persistence seem to yield any useful information.
So, this shadow I observe in extremis.
The P/J axis flips first. I'm in need of a modicum of externally-imposed stress because then I actually get things done. The more stress the more driven, ambitious and goal oriented I become. I meet deadlines. I finish projects. I aim high. I think a healthy level of stress is to be found here. But as it rises I become increasingly inflexible, rigid, controlling.
Apply more stress (stress is cumulative) and eventually The T/F axis switches. Instead of a thought out, reasoned response, I become emotionally reactive. The worst childish emotions. Irrational fears. Overwhelming rages, hatred, sorrow. The most bizarre and unrelated things will trigger tears, but I suppress them. I feel angry all the time. These monsters will be raging through my inner landscape and I will try to remain 'normal' on the outside. I will fight doggedly to not let them out. They overwhelm me.
The feeling of being out of control emotionally is one of the hardest, perhaps the very hardest, psychological phenomena I face.
So: rigid, irrational, paranoid, overwhelmed, I finally lose sight of the big picture. The N/S axis flips. I can't see the future. I can't imagine my way out of the horror show. I can't see anything in it's proper context, nor recognise the 'exit' sign. I feel like a complete victim of my environment, powerless to change anything and hypersensitive to absolutely everything. Every stimulus provokes a self-preservation drama. My senses feed me Danger Danger Danger! messages constantly. The world, and everyone in it, becomes a threat.
Now, curiously I do not become 'E'. I do not need people in this state. Quite the opposite! I become even more withdrawn, self-isolating and reclusive. I avoid people. An inescapable overdose of people was what caused the stress in the first place. I have been known to sit in the car in the carpark crying for hours because I simply can't face going into the supermarket to buy food.
Voila, I become the most extreme and unhealthy manifestation of ISTJ martyrdom.
Now, my question is: if the opposite letters actually represent our shadow type, why do I not manifest as a negative ESTJ? Why does my normally reserved nature not become outgoing?
I don't think the shadow is as simple as "opposites".
Oh heck, either that or I'm an ENTP in denial.
