Zodiac, Etc.: Astrology for Personal Growth #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. For my letter Z post in the #AtoZChallenge, I’m writing about astrology. This may be seen as cheating once again, as astrology is about as far removed from science as can be, but then again my topic is personal growth and some people do believe in astrology and use it for self-development. I realize I already wrote a bit about the topic for my letter T post in 2020, which also covered tarot. Like you may’ve noticed during this year’s #AtoZChallenge if not the one in 2020, I believe firmly in picking what works for you and leaving the rest whether it’s science-based or not. Like, I personally do find the Enneagram helpful and I occasionally do visit astrology forums online too. I just wanted to make clear that I’m not claiming there’s any evidence behind it.

So what is astrology? Astrology is the belief that the position of the stars and the celestial bodies they form in space have an influence on people and the natural world. The Zodiac sign, or sun sign, is the celestial body closest to the sun at the time of an event (usually a person’s birth). Mine is Cancer. There are other signs that are important in astrology too, such as the person’s moon sign.

What does someone’s Zodiac sign say about their personality? Honestly, nothing. I mean, I did a quick Google search for personality traits of people with the Zodiac sign Cancer and, though the first two hits (I was too lazy to look any further) included somewhat similar traits, they are incredibly broad and I no doubt would be able to find different descriptions if I weren’t so lazy. For example, Cancers are supposed to be caring, creative and intuitive. They also supposedly value long-lasting relationships. Well, doesn’t everyone? Oh, and we care about traditional values. Not me! But maybe that’s because I was born prematurely and should really have been a Libra. Just kidding.

Youth to Midlife: At What Point is Personality Development Complete? #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m cheating a little with my letter Y post in the #AtoZChallenge, because I’m not really talking about any Y topic. That is, my topic for today is personality development from youth to midlife.

Many people believe that someone’s personality development is more or less complete by the age of eighteen. This isn’t true. The last phase in emotional development, which covers people’s individuation from everyone else, isn’t complete until a young adult has reached age 25 or so.

Similarly, cognitive abilities such as executive functioning, which is important for impulse control, haven’t fully developed until a person is in their late twenties.

As such, can we say that someone is well and truly an adult by the age of 30? Not necessarily. After all, life experiences also contribute to adulting. This means that in today’s society, where people leave home later, many don’t start a family until they’re in their mid-thirties, etc., with respect to life choices, someone hasn’t truly faced the most difficult ones until they’re around age 40. Which is midlife whether you want it or not. Yes, Millennials like me might want to pretend to still be youthful, and this makes sense from a personality development standpoint, but we’ve most likely had (nearly) half our life behind us.

What does this mean if you want to work on personal growth? What does it mean when you’re struggling with a personality disorder? Personality disorders are said to start in early adulthood and be stable over time, but are they?

I try to see it as there being hope. People with certain personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, do experience improvement of their symptoms as they get older. In fact, when I was in my mid-twenties, my psychiatrist told me my dissociative and emotion regulation problems (which were at the time not diagnosed as BPD, by the way) would likely get better as I got older. So far, they haven’t, but then again I (hopefully) still have half my life ahead of me.

Xennials, Boomers, Gen Z, Etc.: Does Your Generation Determine Your Personality #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Wow, we’ve arrived at the dreaded letter X! Now let me tell you X, by recommendation of one of the founders of the #AtoZChallenge (I don’t remember who) several years ago, was the first letter I decided on a topic for. This topic isn’t necessarily related to personal growth or even psychology, more to sociology. However, it’s fun nonetheless.

My topic for today’s post is generations. The idea that people of one generation have similar traits that differ from those of another generation, is tempting. Like, we all grew up at different times in history, so doesn’t it make sense that the technology available to us, the major world events of our teen years, etc. affect our personality?

The short answer to this though is “No”. Yes, young people (Gen Z currently, those born between 1995 and 2010) have a different attitude to life than older people like Gen X (birth years 1965-1980) or Boomers (1945-1965). They, for example, tend to have a more laid-back work ethic (also known as them being lazy) and a more relaxed view towards the future.

I see this myself in all the temp workers who are self-employed, most of them in their early to mid twenties. They clearly are in there for the quick money (self-employed temp workers get nearly twice as much as regular employees) and have a rather short-sighted attitude, such as not having disability/sick leave insurance.

If you read this, you may wonder why I said generations don’t have different characteristics. The reason I said so is it’s not their generation, but their age. When other generations were in their early twenties, they had a similarly laid-back attitude towards work or school. As an example, I’ll give my father (Boomer): he was in college for ten years free-wheeling through different majors and never finished anything. As he got older though, he did develop a more serious work ethic.

So what generation am I? I was born in 1986 so am none of the generations mentioned in the title. Xennials, after all, are on the cusp between Gen X and Millennials, roughly birth years 1977-1983. Instead, I’m a core Millennial. And it’s definitely the best generation to be in. After all, in our teens, we got a world-shattering terrorist attack to adapt to, in our twenties, we survived the Great Recession, and in our thirties, we survived COVID. If that doesn’t make us resilient, I don’t know what does. Just joking.

Wings and Arrows: How the Enneagram Types (and Other Personality Types) are Interconnected #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today for my letter W post in the #AtoZChallenge, I want to talk about the interconnectedness of various traits that might, if looked at another way, actually distinguish between personality types. I’m starting with the Enneagram wings and arrows, as I know those best, but may also branch out into other typologies.

Like I shared in my general post on the Enneagram, even though you are thought to be one out of nine different Enneagram types, the types are connected via wings and arrows. I will explain this using my own Enneagram type, which is Four, as an example.

First, each Enneagram type has two wings. In the case of Four, these are Three and Five. The wings complement the main type to form a more complete personality. Most people use both wings, though many use one more than the other. For example, I use my Five wing more.

As a Four, I tend to be dramatic and emotional, while my Five wing allows me, type Five being the Investigator, to look at things more intellectually. The Four with a strong Five wing is sometimes called the Bohemian. Had I had a stronger Three wing, I’d be characterized as the Arisstocrat, because type Threes are usually goal-driven.

Then there are the arrows. These connections determine which way each type moves under stress or in exceptional health. Fours move to type One in health and to type Two in stress.

Of course, a stressed type Four is not the same as a regular type Two. A regular Two, being the Helper, will possibly be a bit codependent but not to an extreme degree, whereas a stressed Four will be overly dependent and needy. As such, one Enneagram type is not better than another, but each type will use the positive qualities of one arrow when particularly healthy and the negative traits of another when particularly stressed.

I relate to characteristics of many Enneagram types. This is understandable not just because of the wings and arrows, but also because each type with two others will be in a particular triad and, depending on your perspective, these triads will be different. For example, type Four is with Three and Two in the heart-centered triad )which means that these types make decisions primarily based on their heart). In another respect though, types Four, Five and Nine are in the same triad, which, if I remember correctly, is based on reactivity.

In a similar way, MBTI types are grouped by primary cognitive function, but they can also be grouped by the dichotomous letter combination. What I mean is, in the latter case, INFJ and INFP are similar, while in the former, they couldn’t be different.

Of course, like I’ve said before, everybody is unique and we all could relate to traits of different types.

Unique: Using Your Individual Qualities for Personal Growth #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m currently quite triggered and feeling unsafe, so this is going to be a bit of a ramble. For my letter U post in the #AtoZChallenge, I’d like to talk about how each person is different and how to use your own unique qualities for personal growth.

Some people like to categorize or label themselves or others, for example using the MBTI, Enneagram or another personality test. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but if you take your labels too seriously, you run the risk of not seeing the person you yourself are.

For example, I’m an Enneagram 4. For the longest time, I thought that because I identify most with this type, I also had to identify with similarly-described types in other categories. If you’ve seen my post on the MBTI, you’ve seen that for a long while, I identified as INFJ. I still am not sure whether I’m an INFJ or INTJ and basing my identity solely on a meme, isn’t quite wise. That being said, the reason I forever thought I must be an INFJ, is in part that I identify most with Enneagram type 4. However, the Enneagram is based on core motivations, whereas the MBTI is based on cognitive preferences, so why would an Enneagram 4 need to be a Feeling type?

Personality tests, like I’ve said, can definitely help understand yourself. However, they are not the be all and end all of self-understanding. Neither is any other method of identifying yourself as one particular type or another. Not even deep introspection. Yes, it will lead you to a deeper understanding of yourself, but if then you decide to narrow your identity down to a type or even a rating on the Big Five, you’re not doing yourself justice. You are unique, after all. And yes, so is everybody else.

Myers-Briggs: The 16 Personality Types #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. How are we halfway through the month already? Time certainly flies! For my letter M post in the #AtoZChallenge, I’d like to talk about the Myers-Briggs personality types or MBTI.

MBTI, for clarity’s sake, stands for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and it is a specific test to determine your personality type according to Myers and Briggs. It is not the same as tests you’ll find online like at 16Personalities.com. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I’d like to talk about the origins of the Myers-Briggs personality types.

The MBTI was first developed during World War II by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. The creators drew inspiration from Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types.

The MBTI in its original form is a dichotomous system in which you are either one or the other on four different dimensions: introversion/extraversion, sensing/intuition, feeling/thinking and judging/perceiving. This then creates a four-letter acronym for your score, such as INFJ (introverted, intuiting, feeling, judging).

The first time I took an MBTI-based online test back in 2004 or 2005, all questions were either/or and there was no sliding scale.

Like with most topics I’ve covered so far in this challenge, the MBTI has little scientific basis, especially because it is a dichotomous system. Back in college, I learned that, when doing the MBTI several times with a month or so inbetween, people could easily switch types. This makes sense, since, although I usually (but not always!) score as introverted and intuiting, I have scored as INTJ, INFJ and INFP.

There is a theory about each personality type using four out of eight cognitive functions. The cognitive functions are extraverted feeling, extraverted thinking, introverted feeling, introverted thinking, extraverted intuition, extraverted sensing, introverted intuition and introverted sensing. The theory claims that, though everyone uses all eight functions, four of them are the main ones and these create a stack that determines your type. For example, the stack for INFJ is introverted intuition, extraverted feeling, introverted thinking and extraverted sensing. The INFP type, though in the dichotomous Myers-Briggs system it differs only on one aspect from the INFJ, is said to be comprised of the four other functions. Proponents of cognitive functions believe these make the MBTI more reliable. However, it confuses me, because I for one don’t fall neatly into one of the different stacks. And of course it doesn’t account for confirmation bias, ie. the fact that people get the result they want.

So what is my type, you might ask? I mentioned 16Personalities before and that’s the test most people will direct you to if you want a quick answer. For a cognitive functions test, try the Mistype.Investigator. And just for a little chuckle, I saw a meme once that claimed everyone wants to be an INFJ except for INFJs. That probably indicates I’m an INTJ.

Keirsey and Others on Temperaments #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I had it in mind to discuss David Keirsey’s temperament sorter for my letter K post for a while, but when I discussed him with my spouse, my spouse pointed out all sorts of things about Keirsey that make him a rather dubious person. Then again, there’s hardly any topic in this challenge that I haven’t been critical of. So Keirsey it shall be for my title, but I’ll talk about temperaments more broadly.

The first person to describe temperaments was Hippocrates in ancient Greece. He believed that health is based on a balance between the four major bodily fluids and that each person has a dominant personality type based on which fluid is more present. These types are sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. I looked them up and am definitely a melancholic type.

This idea, though it was used in medicine and psychology for many centuries, was eventually rejected in the mid-1800s. That being said, in anthroposophy and Waldorf/Steiner-based schools, variations are still used.

This brings me to Keirsey. David Keirsey (1921-2013) revised the ancient temperaments and connected them to the Myers-Briggs personality types, which I’ll get to in a few days. He first published his Keirsey Temperament Sorter in his book Please Understand Me (1978). The four Keirsey temperaments are the Artisan, the Guardian, the Idealist and the Rational. I honestly think these names are more positive than the classical ones. At least, I’d rather be called an Idealist than melancholic. That being said, according to Keirsey, the Idealists are not primarily melancholic but hyperesthetic (overly sensitive). Oh, I guess Keirsey didn’t solely think positively of the types.

There’s more controversy associated with Keirsey. At one point, he claimed that ADD/ADHD is a hoax and that children with this diagnosis should not be medicated but instead treated through “logical consequences”. I can understand the idea of not medicating children for a disorder that at this point is still solely diagnosed based on behavior, but I do not agree that the disorder is a hoax.

Jung’s Theory of Personality #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter J post in the #AtoZChallenge. On Monday, I discussed Freud, so it follows almost naturally that I’d be talking about Jung as well.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), like Freud, postulated that the human psyche consists of both an unconscious and a conscious part. He, however, believed that the unconscious consists of two parts: the personal unconscious (which is similar to Freud’s unconscious) and the collective unconscious, which includes archetypes universal to all humans.

The personal unconscious includes all of an individual’s acquired information that influences a person’s behavior but that has been forgotten or repressed. For clarity’s sake, it is not always negative. I think of this as the fact that positive triggers (also known as glimmers) are a thing too.

Jung says that the personal unconscious includes “complexes”, that is, associated collections of information that influence a person’s behavior.

The collective unconscious is mainly expressed in art, religion and other symbolic representations. It also shows up in dreams. The collective unconscious is universal. This is apparent from the fact that, as Jung observed in his interactions with psychotic patients in a mental hospital, there are certain underlying themes common to their dreams. According to Jung, the archetypes present in the collective unconscious, are the same for everyone across cultures and time periods. These archetypes, for example, include the Mother, the Hero, the Child, the Trickster, etc. I can’t help but notice how some of these are traditionally gendered.

Jung also believed people have a dominant attitude towards life: introversion or extraversion. They also have a dominant function, be it feeling, thinking, intuition or sensing. As such, Jung believed there are eight different personality types. As I’ve shared a few times, current thinking says that most people are not one type, but exist somewhere along a continuum.

Introversion: How to Know If You’re an Introvert #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today in my contribution to the #AtoZChallenge, I want to talk about introversion. This, like being a highly sensitive person, is another trait that’s often described in a positive, special-sounding way by those who identify with it and as a negative trait by those who don’t. Of course, as with most traits, introversion vs. extraversion is a continuum with most people not being at either extreme.

So what is introversion? The concept was originally brought into the public’s awareness by Carl Jung. According to Jung, introverts’ main source of energy comes from within rather than from the external world. For example, introverts get energized when alone and get overloaded when having to interact in a group.

It is not, as such, the same as shyness or social anxiety. Introverts, after all, do not necessarily fear interacting with others; it simply drains their energy.

Introversion is also not the same as loneliness. In fact, introverts need considerable time alone in order to recharge. I think many introverts actually feel more alone when surrounded by a large group of people than when they’re spending time in solitude.

Like I said, most people are neither explicitly introverted nor explicitly extraverted. For example, I for one get overstimulated in a group, but also don’t do well when alone for a long time. Like I said when discussing the Enneagram, my instinctual variant is one-to-one. That being said, preferring one-to-one interactions over group chatter is also a sign of introversion.

In other respects, I’m not really an introvert. This, once again, however relates to the positive traits of being an introvert. For example, introverts prefer to have one or two truly close friends rather than a large circle of acquaintances. While this is true for me, it’s not like I form deep connections easily.

Most societies in the developed world tend to value their more extraverted members. In this sense, it is understandable that introverts want to know how to deal with the world around them, a world that doesn’t primarily cater to them. For this reason, as with HSPs, there are many self-help books focused on introverts. There is also some overlap between being an introvert and being a highly sensitive person.

Freud’s Theory of Personality #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. For my letter F post in the #AtoZChallenge on personal growth, I want to talk about Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality.

According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the human personality consists of three main components: the id, the ego and the superego.

The id refers to sexual and aggressive drives that, Freud claims, are fully unconscious. More broadly, it refers to the drive for pleasure and the drive to avoid discomfort. This is the only part of the personality that Freud thinks is present from birth. As such, an infant cannot delay their need for gratification. For instance, when they are hungry, they are not able to keep themselves from showing this.

The ego is the part of the personality, both unconscious and conscious, that helps regulate the id and express our impulses in a way that’s acceptable in the real world.

The superego, which doesn’t start developing until a child is about five-years-old according to Freud, is the part of the mind that allows a person to distinguish right from wrong. This part includes the conscience, which is the part of the mind responsible for signaling that something is “bad”, as well as the ego ideal, which holds the person’s ideas of what is desired of them or what is “good”.

Healthy personality development can only happen if there’s a balance between the id, the ego and the superego, that is, if the ego is capable of moderating the other two parts of the personality. As such, if a person has an overactive id, they are thought to become impulsive or otherwise antisocial. On the other hand, if a person has an overactive superego, they will become overly judgmental. Freud actually claimed that pretty much all mental illnesses are down to imbalanced personality development.

Freud describes several stages of personality development, which are all related to the way the child interacts with their body. For instance, the first stage is called the oral stage, in which a baby discovers their environment through their mouth.

It has been nearly twenty years since I read about Freud. Back then, I only saw how Freud’s theory was wrong on so many levels and particularly judgmental, especially towards women. For instance, Freud reasoned that women have a less well-developed moral sense than men. This is obviously not true.

However, now that I read up on Freud’s theory, I can see certain parallels between Freud’s thoughts and the modern ideas of emotional development. For example, behavior signaling pleasure or discomfort is still strongly associated with Anton Došen’s first stage of emotional development. This is not, for clarity’s sake, meant to defend Freud, whose theory is not only grossly outdated but also horribly anti-woman, like I said. I guess this is a case of the saying that a broken clock is right twice a day.