INTP Personality Type Interview (with Kristen Heble) | Podcast 0427

10 comments

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  • Dan McLaughlin
  • May 6, 2022 at 5:59 pm

  In keeping with the theme of this particular episode, as an INTP male, now 67 years old, I had great difficulty with feeling for most of my life. I didn’t cry when my mother or father died, though interestingly, I cried uncontrollably when my canine friend of 13 years died, which really confused me.

  I have been a member of a barbershop quartet and chorus for about 36 years. Though I am not a professional musician, I was most fascinated with the technical aspects of it, and spent a great deal of time understanding the physics of sound and why chords “ring” when everything is just right. I have developed a pretty good level of expertise on vocal production and the technical aspects, but one of the members of my quartet, who is also the director for the chorus, is very much a feeler. Everything to him is about feeling, and we would often come to misunderstandings, because he always talked about the feeling of the music, while I thought we were not yet technically proficient to produce the feeling when things were not in tune, matched, etc.

  When I finally started to understand more about the different functions in the Myers Briggs system, it suddenly dawned on me why it was like we were speaking different languages sometimes. We both wanted the same end product, but approached it from different perspectives. I am more understanding of his viewpoint now, though I still believe that feeling is only effective in music when none of the technical performance issues are serious enough to get in the way.

  My feeling has developed a great deal over the last decade, through necessity. In 2012, my wife was diagnosed with fronto-temporal dementia, a progressive, always-fatal disease like Alzheimer’s, and at first I was pretty matter-of-fact about it. A few years ago, I was decorating the Christmas tree by myself when Karen Carpenter’s song, “Merry Christmas Darling” came on. I suddenly started to cry and couldn’t stop. I called my kids to come and have a decorating party to get it done. She is still at home with me, though she is incapable of any part of normal life functions.

  With my quartet, I wanted to learn the song “Always” for her, as in “I’ll be loving you always.” I had to sing that song probably a hundred times before I could get through it without choking up. Now we can perform it and it is a favorite. Feeling in music now has a whole new meaning for me.

  I now often find myself getting emotional about things, and actually welcome it. It is certainly therapeutic when you can do it. (There were actually a few tears in my eyes as I was posting this :) )

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  • Eric
  • March 30, 2022 at 6:03 pm

  Great interview as always! This one really drove home to me, as a male INTP, how well I have it being such a type in a man’s body. The amount of adaptation she’s had to go through to really find her place among the sisterhood of society was noteworthy to me.

  I don’t know if this is the same thing as the “self-care bath time” idea, but walking alone outside – as a teenager I used to run my portable CD player w/ headphones and pace around the house in a loop, which was well beaten down by me & the other neighbors riding our bicycles in this same loop, and feelings/thoughts/insights (Ni?) would come out to me in that context. Nowadays it’s walking the dog, and I’ve made a daily habit (as of past 2 weeks) of securing 1 hour of my morning to walk the dog on the same exact loop, and my insights have started flowing from that space.

  There’s another weird thing I think relates, the specific routes where I walk tend to become associated in my mind by the kinds of insights I’ve come to when walking these trails in the past. I feel this is an Si-Ne axis attribute, where my self-reflection insights become permanently encoded with the physical environment around me as the “seed”, to borrow a cryptography concept. So when I walk that specific trail or street again, my thoughts harken back to earlier thoughts I had when I last walked that path. I feel this is an illustration for why engaging Ne’s implied agenda – finding new contexts – is so important, because retracing your same paths endlessly results in stagnant thoughts & ideas. (Now tomorrow I should choose a different 2.5mi loop to walk!)

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  • Antonia Dodge
  • March 30, 2022 at 3:07 pm

  The Unleashed program isn’t specifically for work related challenges in socializing. There’s also a bonus session with Joel (ENFP) and our friend Dan (INFP) discussing a model to determine which relationships to put energy and focus versus relationships that may need less attention.

  A

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  • INTP
  • March 29, 2022 at 4:56 am

  Thanks. I wasn’t aware of that and looked it up. I agree, navigating the small talk is a good topic. Although my impression from that training is it’s more work environment related rather than outside work relationships. It’s relationships outside the work environment where I am most challenged.

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  • Lesa
  • March 29, 2022 at 12:01 am

  I am a fellow INTP and feIt similarly to you as far as social interactions are concerned. I noticed that they have a course on here for INTP’s. The first line says how to navigate small talk and I really didn’t even need to read more to become interested.