A couple of weeks ago someone on twitter asked about people’s MBTI personalities, and I responded that I am an INFJ, but it’s difficult for me and I don’t want to be an INFJ. She asked if I would care to be a guest blogger on her blog, writing about this topic. I had some spare time, so I wrote an essay and emailed it to her. I never heard back from her, and I emailed her to see if she got my email. She said she had got it, she was out of town and she was sick, but she was planning on catching up on her emails over the weekend.
Needless to say I never heard back from her. So in the interest of not wasting a piece of writing I am posting it here on my blog. If you are not interested in MBTI personality types this is probably not very exciting for you. I find the whole thing kind of fascinating, although I’m not sure how scientific it is. Maybe it’s kind of like astrology. I’m a Taurus by the way.
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I started to realize that I was different from most people when I was about 8 years old. My parents always told me I was perfect and had high expectations for myself. As I got older I realized that I didn’t fit in with the rest of the world and in my teens I learned how to act so that I didn’t appear unusual to others.
I have an ability to “feel” people’s feelings and to get them to talk about themselves. I do consider this a gift, however it can also cause problems. Feeling other’s feelings as well as my own can cause me to become overwhelmed. After all, most times one person’s worth of feelings is enough. And I am quite an emotional person with very strong feelings, so to take on everyone else’s can cause emotional overload. I am concerned with other people and how they feel and act. This combined with my perfectionist tendencies and my high expectations of myself can cause me to become overly involved in other people’s lives. When someone opens up to me I feel that it is my responsibility to take in as much as I can of them; to help them in any way they need. I rarely, if ever, try to cut short conversations with anyone, even if it means my time is spent unwisely. There are times when I have other things to do or places to go, but I get involved in conversation with someone. I keep asking them questions, getting them to talk about themselves, all the while trying to tell myself to “Stop It!”.
I tend to be insightful, with insight into myself, into others, and into patterns in society and the world. My mind is constantly analyzing the world around me and the people around me. I try to find meaning in everything – in relationships, in situations. This can be tiring at times! I have to work hard to get my mind and my thoughts to rest. Everything has possibilities and contexts.
I have strong values and principles and I try very hard to live my life accordingly, but I find I fall short. I also find that other people don’t understand my reasons for my behaviors, since most people don’t have such powerful principles working within them. I often make up excuses for doing or not doing things because I know that people won’t understand my motivations. Since I never feel that I am living up to my values I constantly have a feeling of self loathing, of imperfection. I always am striving to be a better person, to do more for humanity and for the world, and I never feel that it is enough.
On one hand I am idealistic, on the other hand I am cynical. I always have some degree of idealism about any situation or person, however I am often cynical that the true ideal will emerge. I am frequently disappointed in other people, even though I know from the beginning what the outcome will be. I have high expectations of myself and others.
I have a strong ability to focus and concentrate, and get frustrated when “real life” interrupts my thoughts or my work. I don’t work well with other people, I prefer to be alone with my thoughts and ideas and I prefer to do things myself rather than delegate. Due to this trait I am often overloaded with work that I take on instead of letting others do it. Combine this with my need to do everything perfectly and you can see that I have a lot of pressure on myself.
Although I have strong feelings and thoughts I keep things to myself and rarely let others in. I don’t think anyone would understand me and I don’t want to take risks of alienating people. I prefer to keep conversations going about the other person and not myself. I often say, “Give me an hour and a stranger, and I’ll know his whole life story, his goals, his fears, his dreams.”
I trust my intuition, and sometimes it is wrong. However, I will trust it above anything else, including facts and evidence.
I have an anxiety disorder, which is most likely due to my desire to be perfect, to always be productive, and to always be caring and attentive to others and to the world. It’s fairly impossible for me to talk about my problems with anyone which makes therapy difficult, and I’m a person who could benefit from good therapy. I have a lot of resistance with my therapist.
A perfect example of my life occurred this afternoon. I decided to sell my spinning wheel since I don’t have time to spin and I put an ad on Craig’s List. Today a young woman came over who was interested in buying the wheel and she brought her husband. He seemed like a very quiet introverted guy; he is actually a physicist. They spent some time at my house, and we chatted while she tried out the wheel. She ended up buying the wheel and sent me an email this evening. She said:
“Good evening Harriet,
I wanted to thank you again for the wheel and good conversation. My husband, Rick, had such a good time talking to you and was sad to go – coming from Rick, that means a lot (he’s not much of a talker unless he likes someone).
Have a good night,
Rose”
Tags: anxiety, beliefs and values, blog, different, feelings, high expectations, infj, myers briggs, perfection
I just spent close to an hour looking up and writing down the calorie counts for the items on the menu of the restaurant that I am going to tomorrow night with a friend. I’m not sure if I am engaging in obsessive behavior, or self harming behavior. I do want to lose weight, and I had lost about 33 pounds after I went off my anti-depressants two years ago (I gained 35 pounds from the meds). But I’m left with a very poor body image and I want to continue to lose weight, even though most would say I’m at a fine weight. I’ve got plenty of fat and flab remaining however. I’ve been at a plateau for a couple of months, but in the last 2 weeks or so I’ve lost a few pounds, so I feel like I’m on a roll. But I’ve been eating a really low number of calories each day – no one would tell me that this amount of food is healthy.
So I’m exercising every day and watching my calories – that’s a good way to lose weight and get fit, right? Where does it cross the line into mentally unhealthy behavior? And the exercise is exacerbating the tendonitis in my hip which is often extremely painful – another form of self harm, perhaps?
Tags: body image, eating, food, obsessive, weight
I did it, I really did it. I went in there and spilled my guts. I told J that I had wanted to rehearse what I was going to say, but I couldn’t rehearse because I didn’t know what to say. He said, “You have the idea, but you don’t have the words?” That’s a frequent occurrence. But I did manage to get it out – I told him what a bad week I had and how I threw away all the cutting tools, and how I wanted to drive into the pole to get the weight off of me. We talked about why I didn’t drive into the pole, and we talked about self harm behaviors. I guess he wanted to know the details so that he could have a better idea of what he is dealing with. I really don’t feel that I’m a danger to myself, and I guess I made that clear to him.
I also apologized and told J that i felt bad that I had basically been lying to him by not telling him everything that has been going on with me. He was very insistent that omission by a therapy patient is not lying and I have no need to apologize or feel bad about it, that it can take a long time for someone to open up. I was afraid he wouldn’t respect me anymore, but he said that is not true at all. Then I came out and asked if he still wanted me to come back, and he said, “Of course, why wouldn’t I?” I told him that I thought he liked working with anxiety and I wasn’t sure if he would still want to work with me knowing that I’m not just afraid to fly and that I obsess about cake (have I posted about that yet?). He assured me that he wanted to continue working with me, but I think I’ll check again next week. He might be just saying that today because it was such a difficult experience for me to tell him these things and he didn’t want me to feel bad.
He asked me about suicide and various questions and details. I guess it’s important for him to know if I’m planning anything, which I am definitely not. I told him about my fascination with suicide, reading and watching movies, etc, and my thoughts about suicide – for others and for myself. I also told him that I applied to be a hotline volunteer and asked him if he thought that was a bad idea. He didn’t seem to think it was a bad idea, but he asked if I thought I’d be able to separate myself from others going through crises. We both agreed that wasn’t a question I couldn’t answer quite yet, but maybe after training I’d have a better idea. He just thought if a four hour per week shift was going to ruin the rest of the week for me that it probably is not a good job for me. That makes sense.
Then J said something that I found bizarre. He told me that maybe I should go out and get some razor blades or an exacto knife to have around, since I got rid of all of my blades. I asked him why I would do that. Apparently I had said that I’m a little uncomfortable without them, and he said I’m 100% more likely to use them in an emergency than just for everyday purposes. Maybe I didn’t quote that correctly, it doesn’t make sense. But a couple of days after I threw everything away I remembered that I had an exacto knife in the car. I checked this afternoon and yep, it’s in there. And it does give me comfort knowing it’s there. But that’s a scary feeling too – why is a knife comforting to me? I’m planning on leaving it in the car though.
J also told me that we won’t necessarily talk about deep scary things every week because I mentioned that now there is pressure on me – what will I talk about next week. Maybe once in a while we’ll pick one of the 47 items from my list of “unimportant things” to talk about. But he said it in a way that made me know that those things aren’t really unimportant. He also mentioned something about my “real self” and I said I don’t show my “real self” anywhere, not just in therapy, and he said he knows that.
Then when I was leaving J sheepishly mentioned that he had a list of books for me – books about “Not Being Able to Say No to People”, since this is what we had talked about last week. He realized that I’m not much interested in the list after our discussion today, but he gave it to me anyway. It was 7 pages that he had printed off Amazon.com and he thought some of them sounded good, but he hadn’t read any of them. I told him thank you and I wasn’t sure I would be able to read all of the books on the 7 pages by next week, and he said it would be fine if I didn’t read even one of them. I thought that was such a nice thing for him to do, and so surprising to me.
So I have some mixed feelings. I’m proud of myself for actually trusting J enough to tell him these things that NO ONE knows, well I’m not sure if it’s total trust, but it’s definitely a risk. But I also feel scared, I’ve never had my personal stuff “OUT THERE”, and I’m not sure how to deal with that. In a way it’s nice having told, because now someone else is sharing the weight with me, even if it’s only for 45 minutes. But it’s also frightening because it makes me vulnerable. My defenses are down and I’m not used to that.
I have a fear of being too needy. Is there such a thing? I’m wondering where this fear came from, perhaps because I was somewhat independent as a child and my parents came to depend on me being independent which led to me not wanting them to think I needed them. One of those vicious cycle things.
I also have really low self-esteem. I’ve read some articles about low-esteem and they usually claim that those of us with low self-esteem are too needy. We need reassurance from others that we are worthwhile and lovable. Since someone with low self-esteem is so unsure of themselves they need that feedback from others.
So perhaps I am a needy person, however I fear being needy. I need to know that I am a worthwhile person because I don’t believe that I am and I guess I get that reassurance from other people. But I would never ask for anything from anyone, for fear that they would think I’m being too needy. I do try hard to please everyone else, which leads to feelings of annoyance, and sometimes anger, that I am doing all of these things for other people, and not doing what I really want for myself. My husband is not a real emotional guy. He is not particularly affectionate, and part of that is due to me “not needing” him to show affection to me. But since I feel like an unlovable person I feel that such treatment is what I deserve.
I have many friends, some of whom I have been friends with for 20 years or more. I’m not sure how these relationships have endured frankly. I don’t open up readily, I don’t show my true self, I get hurt easily but I hide it and bury my hurt feelings. I’m “too sensitive”. I’m a perfectionist and always worried about screwing up. Sometimes I misunderstand people or situations and think I’ve offended someone. I wear a mask almost all of the time, and rarely let anyone see my true colors. However there must be something about me that allows me to form close relationships with people. I don’t feel authentic, but I must come across that way. Who would want to be a friend with someone inauthentic?
I confuse myself.
Tags: childhood, feelings, friends, neediness, perfection, self esteem, sensitive
Family – just the word sounds so homey and loving. When, in actuality, a family could be full of hurt, misunderstanding, manipulation, and even violence. I don’t know of any family that is just loaded to the gills with happiness and love. In my family I have my mother, who is a good person at heart, but extremely focused on being productive and a workaholic, my sister, who is narcissistic, and my father, who was a loving person, but somewhat of a doormat, letting others dictate what he did and what he felt, who unfortunately passed away 11 years ago. Then there are the other various aunts, cousins, etc.
I’m 48 years old and I always feel the need to please my mother. What’s up with that? Women in our family tend to live to be about 98 or 99 years old, so I predict this will continue for the net 50 years. Oooookkkkkaaaayyyyy….Oy.
Yesterday, for some reason that I can never figure out, I disclosed to my mother something that I should have kept private. I told her that I was applying to be a counselor for my county’s crisis hotline. This involves filling out an application, getting references and going through a screening process. If I pass that, I then do 48 hours of training in a 4 week period. It’s intense. Her response? “Why would you want to do that?” I told her I thought it would be rewarding. She said, “I read that if you want to be happy you should always be around happy people.” I said, “Well, who will help the unhappy people?” And she said, “Well, if that’s what you want to do….”
OK, Mom, I get the idea. You think this sucks. I reminded her that my volunteer position as a court appointed advocate for a foster child is very rewarding and I enjoy working with my child even though it is not a happy situation. I don’t really feel like I’m doing much to help him, but my supervisor ensures me at every opportunity that I am doing a good job and his is a very difficult case.
So the next time I feel like telling my mother something, will someone remind me to keep my mouth shut? Thank you.
This is from a site called Wordle.
I got the link from the Vicarious Therapy blog (thanks, Aqua, hope you don’t mind.)
I entered by blog address into the website and it produced this word cloud. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that “change” and “therapist” are so large. I am surprised that “weight” is the largest word – have I written about weight that much?
And “gorilla” is pretty big too – and I know I only used that word in my last post. So I’m not sure how reliable this thing is. But it’s pretty cool and I like it.
Tags: random
I read a quote today that I liked:
“If you are wrestling with a gorilla you don’t give up when you get tired, you give up when the gorilla gets tired.”
I like that. There’s something in me that doesn’t seem to give up. I’m always searching for a way to change my life, to make it better, to make it livable. I haven’t found the thing yet, but the gorilla isn’t tired yet. I’m exhausted, but the gorilla never seems to tire.
I watched a tv show called “Being Erica”. There is a therapist in the show, using the term therapist loosely. But he asks Erica if she is committed to changing her life and she says yes. I think that is the wrong question though. I thought I was committed to changing my life, the problem is I’m apparently not committed to doing the work involved in the changing. I want to change so badly, but I am having a lot of trouble with the effort that entails – trusting my therapist and being vulnerable. Change won’t happen without that.
Tags: change
Last night I gathered up all of the razor blades, box cutters, and blades from the exacto knife, wrapped them up in newspaper and threw them in the trash.
Now I’m trying to determine how much stockpiled medication I have and what I should do with it.
Tags: cutting
Tags: cat