INTJ Thoughts

March 10, 2015 - Sept. 21, 2015

I have always been an INTJ. Obviously I have not always been aware of this. That is as with any awareness of any concept. Being and INTJ is something that someone once decided what possible. This person decided to examine human behaviour and personalities, as many others before have done. Like all psychologists, he simply wanted to come up with a general system to explain why we as humans are the way we are. He focused on personality. The general way and reason each person acts. Our personalities are not concrete things, either. Our personalities are more of a general set of actions or ways of behaving that we use individually to interact with the world around us. My Myers-Briggs personality type of INTJ explains a lot about me in just four letters. These letters explain that, in typical situations, I tend towards being Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking and Judging. There are fifteen other types depicting every combination of introversion/extroversion, intuition/sensing, thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving. These types simply give a label to how a person will tend to act in everyday situations. No explanation of why people act how people act is ever going to be truly exact. We can simply come up with a more understandable means to explain how people act. How understandable this explanation can become, I am not sure.

I seem to have gone off on a tangent above, but I suppose and hope chasing rabbits has prepared both me and you for the journey ahead. As I began, I am an INTJ. Personally, I find introversion to be my most prominent trait. Or at least the one I am most confident in. Introversion protects me. Which seems somewhat ironic to me because I tend to avoid acting upon my emotions without at least determining the most rational way to do so. Which causes my thought of introversion being protective to be more understandable in my mind. Keeping to myself allows me to keep my emotions in check. Emotions are illogical. This, however does not make them bad. That is a thought I must constantly remind myself of. I take great pride in my intelligence, but I must admit that I have a low level of emotional intelligence. Very few emotions do I believe I have a good understanding of and feel strongly. Anger and fear are the two easiest for me, fear being second to anger. I understand when I am angry, and I feel anger quite intensely. Thankfully, I do not typically react outwardly to my anger (other than by the involuntary response of crying which makes me even angrier). Even when I do react outwardly, it is not in a way that causes damage to anyone or anything.

Fear is something innate in all of us. Having the anxiety disorders I have make fear an even larger part of my life. One moment I can be quite content, and the next I am afraid of nothing. I know perfectly well that I am in no danger, but I am afraid. I have specific things that can trigger these responses, which are mostly more or less physical. Hearing or feeling the heartbeat of any living creature will cause my heart to race. Being grabbed by the wrist will cause me to punch the person grabbing my wrist until they let go. Almost anything touching my inner elbow will make me want to skin my arm. All of these things produce a sensation in my head which I can best describe as a feeling as though my brain is being melted.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, I'm really just typing my thoughts as they come to me. I have been working on this for a while and I don't remember when exactly I started this. After typing the previous sentence I hit file on the document and the first thing on the file menu was the info. It told me I created this on March 11, 2015 at 00:17 and the las time I edited it was on March 30 (until today, of course, which is September 21, 2015.) I have thought about adding to this before today, but never got around to it. When I add to this seems to go along with my mood. I most want to add thoughts when I am in a depressive mood, and I don't even think about it when I am in a happy mood.

Let's get back to some INTJ related stuff. One thing about INTJs is that it is very unlikely for us to believe in a God. We think rationally, typically separate from the influence of emotions. Belief in a God is based on faith. In general, a God is considered to be invisible to humans, no matter the religion. I am going to stick with the beliefs of Christianity because that is what I follow. As an INTJ, it is difficult for me to believe in something that is not tangible to me in any natural way. We cannot see gravity, but I believe it exists because I am laying in my bed, not floating in outer space. The fact that I can "feel" physically the force of gravity on my body and "see" it on other objects is proof to me that gravity exists. With God, I cannot see him or touch him. He is not tangible to me in any physical way. My belief in God comes through faith. Faith is an emotional concept which deals with the belief in something or someone without a logical reason to (this is my personal definition, not a dictionary definition.) Faith is similar to trust, although I believe with trust you have a reason to believe in the person/thing. For me, the faith I have that God exists comes from the fact that there are parts of the universe and the human experience that cannot be explained scientifically. There is no logical reason for the cells of any living creature to be the way they are. Science can explain how DNA works and why certain things interact with each other the way they do, but there is no real explanation as to why things are the way they are. Humans could just as easily have no DNA and be squirming masses of a spinach-like substance. The reason the earth works out the way it does with everything working together the way it does cannot be found. Science can explain why an animal migrates in the winter, but it cannot explain exactly why the process is truly necessary in the first place. My faith comes from the fact that simple chance and science could not have made the earth the way it is.

The rest of my faith comes from personal experiences, not outside observation. I am Pentecostal. I am part of this denomination of Christianity because I believe that what the Bible says is true. This seems like a very illogical thing to believe, given that the Bible in its essence is only a book. The reason I believe it is true is because there are parts of it which apply directly to me, and I have experienced them first hand. This is where trust comes in. I have been given sufficient evidence that what the Bible says it true that I trust the parts I cannot experience directly are also true.