Reluctantly
Resident disMember
- Local time
- Today 12:51 PM
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2010
- Messages
- 3,135
If you want, you can either rank the descriptions or just say which ones apply to you and which ones really don't.
Description One
Description One
Description Two"
This person is captivated not by the sense object, but by the subjective sense impressions that this object awakens in him. The reverberation and repercussions of the object on his inner world are what his attention focuses on. It is as if a pebble has been thrown into a pond and the ripples spread out throughout the whole inner world of subjectivity, revealing not so much the qualities of the pebble but those of the water it has been thrown in.
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The sense impressions of this person have a different quality. They are not matter-of-fact like those of other people, but have overtones of myth, fantasy and deeper subjective values. This person takes what his senses tell him, brings those details into his inner world, weighs them, experiences them in the depth of his inner self, and only after this process has been completed does the world see an outward reaction.
When I see a friend who is like this and say, "Hi", he looks like he is not reacting at all. He stands there looking blank, but a moment later he greets me. What was happening? Why the lag? He was literally taking in the details of the situation. My presence had to be absorbed and only when his inner world became saturated with those impressions could he give an outward, delayed and extraverted response to my greeting. Once that initial lag is over our conversation runs smoothly.
Because external stimuli have such an impact on him this kind of person needs to keep his house, office or wherever he spends his time orderly. Neatness is important to his inner psychic comfort. He is uncomfortable in crowds, first because he is introverted, and second because he literally can become overwhelmed by external stimuli if there is too much of it. He needs to know where things are. He also takes very good care of the possessions he has. He values them, not just for what they are as an extraverted person might, but for the added emotional import they have for him. The cherished Christmas tree decorations that have been in the family for years are carefully wrapped in tissue paper and gently placed in a sturdy box until next year. The piece of jewelry given by a loved one is stored in the same velvet-lined box it came in, the love letters have a clean and pressed ribbon around them, and the scribbles of their now-grown three-year-old are saved in a trunk.
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Such a person uses his intellect to help organize and evaluate sense impressions. This type of person can put a great deal of time on one physical project. Unlike some extraverted types of people who will get bored or impatient, he keeps at it for months, and he excels where attention to detail and order is important, whether it is the repair of delicate machines, the mastering of complicated inventories or making an especially intricate quilt, sewn and embroidered with infinite care.
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If such a person chooses to build a house, the results will be perfect. Each wall, each board, will be carefully measured, skillfully painted, meticulously leveled and plumbed, but it will take him an age. Why? Because each step in the process is not simply done, but is weighed and balanced against the inner image he has inside himself. He might seem slow until you consider the wealth of images and inner sensations he is carrying around and has to sort through. This kind of thinking can make dinner a quiet ceremony, where each course is served with special care and a cup of coffee shared with a friend is not simply a cup of coffee, it is an event, a unique time graced by a beautiful tray and the plate of carefully arranged cookies.
Once when I went to visit a friend, he was fixing his car. If he had been an extravert he would have had a bunch of tools within easy reach, but he had them all lined up, neatly, in a row. If he had been another kind of introvert he would have had tools thrown here and there, and he would have been missing some, but they were all there. He had carefully collected them for the exact job he was about to do. He took out the part, carefully cleaned it, made sure all the gaskets were dirt-free, and then he just as carefully put the pieces back together again. But remember, first each piece had to travel within and then come out. When I came by I interrupted his peace, quiet and concentration which was essential for the job. He neither wanted, nor could handle, any extra stimuli. The job was his whole world at the moment. When he saw I wasn't going to go away he gave a quiet sigh and reluctantly turned his back on what he was doing, and then I was his one focus. Later he would pick up where he left off and begin again his interior-exterior dialogue with his engine. An might do the same repair work, and with something of the same thoroughness, but it would be much more matter-of-fact, it wouldn't matter to him how many people were hanging around, and he wouldn't have to take interior trips as he did it.
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The weakness of this kind of person becomes a focus on the familiar, which is why he or she hates change. To move to another house, to get another job, to go to another part of the country, is traumatic. He has absorbed all the details of his present situation and is comfortable with them. To make a physical move is to throw what he has come to feel comfortable with out of the window, and he feels he has to start all over again, meaning he has to take all the thousands of new details, one by one, bring them into his inner world, find a place for them there, and then pick up the next stimulus and repeat the process.
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Seen in this light we can understand what an upset such a move is for him. A Safeway store in one town is not the same as a Safeway store in another. It is a whole new experience.
Such a person then is slow to make friends. You have to approach them gradually and let them get used to you. It is peaceful for me to be around this type because topics are going to be taken up, one at a time, without a rush. When I am with some extroverts I have a hard time keeping up with all their ideas, but I find I have to tone myself down when I am with a this kind of person. Too many comments or stories tire them out.
Description Three"
This kind of person gazes inward, not to the ripples of sensation caused by the object like some introverts, but beyond these palpable facts to try to see their root and meaning. They are visionaries par excellence, seers and dreamers. They are caught up in the explorations of the inner world and the possibilities of inner transformation. They can follow these inner paths by way of images and ideas, and they are always attempting to go deeper and find the ultimate origin and goal of the inner self.
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Such a person is not concerned with what is, but what could be, not with the outer possibilities, but the inner ones. They can have a special love of books, for books let their minds go anywhere while they are comfortably curled up in their own room. One intuition triggers another as they leap through the centuries and soon they are exhausted without ever having moved.
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This person looks towards evaluating and organizing these inner journeys, but even so he has difficulty in expressing his interior world because this demands a certain degree of extraversion. His words tend to be fragmentary and evocative, as if he cannot tear his eyes from his inner world long enough to formulate what is happening in everyday language.
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This can create weaknesses for this person. He might be carried away with his theories, but his socks don't match. He might be taking daily trips through space mentally, but he forgets what he went to the store for. This person finds it difficult to pay attention to the actual here-and-now physical world that some extroverts are so comfortable in. He inadvertently tends to bump into things, spill things, drop things, have his mind on something other than his food when he eats, and scarcely notices the clothes he wears or the colors of the walls of the rooms in which he lives.
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I attended a lecture where the professor bustled into the classroom late, as usual, sat down in the circle of chairs and placed his huge briefcase in front of him. His suit was rumpled and as he got up to search for his pipe, he managed to trip over the briefcase he had just put down. Tobacco began to dribble down his shirt as he waved the pipe in the air while he expounded on the subject of the day. Soon the pipe was forgotten, resting precariously on his knee, from there to slide into the already bulging briefcase. Too bad it hadn't been lit, for it was clear that a fire was the only way the briefcase would ever get cleared out. We students continued to watch, fascinated, as he punctuated his lecture by squirming around in his chair, slowly managing to dislodge his wallet from his pants pocket.
Social situations are not comfortable for him, and the bigger the group the worse it is. He thrives and comes alive when there is just one other person to talk to, but crowds make him uneasy, and he is especially miserable when it comes to small talk. He does not make a good first impression because all the action is going on inside, and he needs a special atmosphere for it to come out.
He loves quiet and solitude, not in the way society thinks of morbid introverts, but simply because it takes peace and quiet in order to go on these interior journeys. It's not enough just to have an idea, he has to push it to see if it will flower into a deeper version of the original concept, or if some new rich vein of intuition will open up to him.
Time is of the utmost importance to this person. He would rather eat peanut butter crackers in a low-rent apartment than go out to expensive restaurants and have a fancy house as long as the former means time for his own interests and the latter demands a full-time job doing what someone else wants him to do. Such people flourish where bold speculation comes into its own in research and theoretical science. But since they are the most ill-adapted of all the introverts to the real physical world they run the danger of losing touch with ordinary life. When such a person neglects extravertion, he is not simply excused from it. He can become subject to obsessions, compulsions and scruples about food or sex which are attempts by the extraverted part of the personality to gain his attention and receive their due.
Description Four"
While some extroverts start with facts and ideas he finds in the world around him and ends up with plans to be accomplished, this type of person makes facts serve his thoughts. He uses them to help build his inner world of ideas. He takes delight in pursuing the orderly development of his own ideas until he has created a logical kingdom within.
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His outer conduct often reflects this inner sense of order. He can be organized, make a plan for the day, and actually follow through on it.
Once when we spent the day with a friend of this type it was a fascinating and enjoyable experience of precision planning. It started with a well-balanced breakfast for the whole family that he cooked and served with a minimum of fuss. Then off we went for a guided tour of all the local attractions carefully selected in advance to appeal to all the different members of the family.
This person will seek ways to help him develop this interior world of thought. If the abstract dominates he may devote his energy to philosophy or law or theoretical science. If the concrete is more his thing, he can be attracted to accounting or business.
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If he concentrates excessively on his own world of thought he will begin to neglect the rest of life that can't be expressed in thoughts. He will be tempted to say, "If I can't think it, it isn't real." Then the thoughts begin to imprison him and can even lose their objective character, for they become substitutes for developing the rest of his personality.
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The greatest weakness of this person is in the area of extraversion. He has difficulty in expressing his feelings, and when his feelings do come out, other people are not always comfortable with them. He gives the appearance of lacking compassion, and is inclined to say things that others take as sarcastic or insulting. But he doesn't see them that way. He feels he is just trying to be logical. He gains a reputation for being self-contained, competent and even cold. But he has feelings, and plenty of them. It's just that they are deep down, hard for him to express, and delicate and easily hurt when they come out.
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Some extroverts attach their feelings to the people and things around them, but this person tries to be in rapport with their inner world, whether it be of psychic images or ethical and spiritual values, and she tries to intensify this inner accord and embrace this world more deeply and fully. For such a person the people and things around her are occasions for her feelings, which flow inward and go deeper and try to become more intense and concentrated.
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Because of the direction of her feelings she is often accused of not having any. She has a feeling, then that feeling immediately travels to her inner world, she weighs it on her interior feeling scale, and only once the round-trip journey has been made can she express herself. So much inner activity is going on that she tends to keep her face and body still. People often overlook this type, or are quick to classify her as slow. If we could have an exterior picture of what is really going on, however, we would be astounded. She lacks spontaneity not only because she is an introvert, but because her feelings are a constant involvement for her.
It was a peaceful afternoon and a neighbor came over to chat with Betty and her mother. She casually mentioned that a neighborhood dog (the one Betty had spent hours with in happy contentment) had died. Betty froze. Her heart felt as though it had been pierced, but she showed no outward sign of her inner turmoil. At long length the neighbor ambled off, Betty rushed into the house, and in the solitude of her own room, she broke out into racking sobs. Her beloved friend was gone.
Such a person tries to protect herself against too strong an influence coming from the outer object and detach her feelings from it so that they can travel within. Her clinging to inner bonds with reality, silent as it is, can provide a good example from an ethical and moral point of view. People around her sometimes sense this inner reality, and fidelity to those thoughts. But at other times they sense how they are somehow being treated with a certain reserve, held in check and subtly devalued.
She looks for ways that can help her perceive her inner bonds and being extroverted can help her come to grips with the outside world. This kind of person can be literally bursting with feelings but have no ready way to communicate them both because of their direction and because their content is not readily explicable in everyday terms.
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Extraversion ends up being a huge weakness. If she has a conversation, for example, she might spend hours, or even days, still thinking up answers she could have given but didn't. Though she might really care for someone, that person might remain in the dark because she cannot express herself well.
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She is easily tripped up by introverts who overpower her with words. When this happens she gets overwhelmed and can no longer respond. If you show displeasure or impatience with her, she is totally lost and her internalized focus blocks her ability to respond, and she can easily be made to feel inadequate in our more verbal, active society. When upset, she will give you dark looks but it might be days before you know what is bothering her. Her extroversion can be like birds - they come and go, and often fly off before they can be caught.
too late...
