It's recently been brought to my attention that I am bad at feeling. For those of you that are familiar with the Myers Briggs personality test I am a strong "T" or thinker as opposed to a "F" or feeler. More specifically my profile say that I am:
slightly expressed extravert
distinctively expressed intuitive personality
distinctively expressed thinking personality
slightly expressed judging personality
Of course knowing this about myself makes sense and does not come as a surprise. What is more new for me to think about is that in being strong on the thinking scale I am actually disadvantaged or immature when it comes to feeling. No for most thinking people including myself this is more viewed as a strength as opposed to a inferiority in any way. Well I'm starting to realize that I am behind. Someone I know recently was quoted as saying that they have the emotional maturity of a 12 year old. That person is over 30. It got me thinking, what is my emotional maturity? While I am fairly in control of my emotions I hardly know how to cry and I find it VERY difficult to even share my emotions most of the time. Most 16 year old girls have this mastered. Since i'm going to have 3 of them in another 10 years I figured that maybe this is something that I should work on. So the whole deal with the Myers Briggs thing is that this is the way you are. You can't really change it. So while my goal is not to completely transform the way my personality is set up I have decided to at least tackle some of my weak areas. This is the first place that I am going to start:
I have shared with my family and immediate community that I am going to attempt to be (more) honest about expressing my emotions. The reverse way of putting this is that I am going to attempt to not suppress my emotions. Here are a few clarifications:
I do not want to say whatever is on my mind. I think that there are very clear grounds as to how powerful words are and how destructive words can be when you say whatever the hell it is that you are feeling OR thinking. What I would like to accomplish through this little exercise is when I am feeling something and that part of me says "that's stupid to feel that" or "people are going to laugh at you for being _______" that i accept the emotional aspect of my life and others as equally as important as the thought driven parts. I plan on this being difficult since I think I have been raised in a cultural context that teaches that feelings are feminine and any male that operates off of them or expresses them is inferior.
I've already tried this a couple of times and it's pretty strange. Feel free to ask me how it's going. If you want to take your personality test you can do it here:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp
