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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk with Christian Rivera about his journey through mental health issues as an INTP Personality Type.
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Christian Rivera – Dopamine Podcast
- C-Note
- Multimedia designer and creative consultant
- Christian is an INTP
- Dad = ESFJ
- Mom = ISFP
- Grew up in Philadelphia
- Dad pushed him out of his introverted world
- At 11, he realized that he was experiencing extreme highs and lows
- He realized he had a high functioning bipolar disorder known as Cyclothymia
- He birthed his podcast to express his ideas and talk about his experiences with mental health
- Went through a divorce in 2017
- He felt he was the problem.
- He wasn’t gelling with society and didn’t think he could fit in anywhere.
- Used his INTP superpowers to understand typology and disseminate what an INTP was.
- All of 2018 he spent exploring his entire life raised in a sensor feeler society as an INTP
- What is intuition?
- What am I learning as a person?
- What am I capable of as a Thinker?
- What am I capable of as an Intuitive?
- What does society think I am?
- What did my parents think I was?
- What did my romantic partners think I was?
- He does Uber to get to know his city and people
- PTSD after a relationship ends may be common for INTs
- Learning nuances of emotions has helped with his Extraverted Feeling
- Religion-based trauma and mental abuse
- Every time he would talk to someone about how he felt about something he was shut down, so he stopped trusting his Introverted Thinking
- Gas Lighting
- The thing Introverted Thinkers give to the world may always be perceived as an assault unless the Ti user finds a way to convey their compassion and good intent first.
- “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
- “This is my intent. This is what I am trying to say.”
- Be thorough with what your intentions are.
- Don’t treat your emotions as a foreign thing. Emotions are important data.
- Introverted Feeling can hold a lot of space for emotions.
- Introverted Thinking can hold a lot of space for thoughts.
- You have to get to the thought process before you can reprogram it.
- Thinkers, in general, may feel emotions are messy.
- INTPs feel like they have ADD/ADHD/Aspergers because they don’t emote the same way as other people
- People want to know the crossover between mental health diagnoses and personality type.
- Christian relates some of his Extraverted Intuition to his hyper mania
- Depression is the inability to access positive feelings
- Mania has all the positive feelings but avoids challenging ones.
- It is natural when developing Extraverted Intuition to want to go out and party
- It can lead you down a bad path which can hurt your mental health more than it helps.
- Be aware of your triggers
- Listen to yourself when you’re in the middle of an experience.
- An introvert can drown out sensory info by endless talking
- Extraverted Intuition can get overly consumed with doing it all and forget personal safety and health
- Liquid courage to ease connection
- It takes awhile to understand the dichotomous nature of Myers-Briggs.
- Figuring out the balance is important.
- Personal development is work
- Keep your finger on the pulse of your personal growth and recognize when you need to ask for help
- Stop to process. Don’t stay in perpetual motion.
- Refortify your boundaries to make sure relationships are working better.
- You have to put on the shell sometimes to break out of it.
- Extraverted Intuition can give you a ton of info, but then you need to introvert to understand what it means.
- INTX Unleashed
- Personality Hacker book
- Dopamine.life podcast
- https://cnote.thinkific.com/
- Vulnerability is a strength
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16 comments
Interesting Podcast. In the case of Christian’s mental health issue I was thinking of taking the enneagram into account. In my experience many intp relate to the enneagram 5 (the thinker). If the enneagram 5 disintegrate he will move to enneagram 7, which is in denial of the problematic nature of life. That would explain the over the top Ne-issue. Moving in the direction of 8 would be the way to integrate and actually take control of life.
Thank you very much for this podcast by the way. I don’t have bipolar disorder, but I also suffered some mental health problems growing up. Though luckily, I had some very early interventions, in contrast to people who spend decades without receiving help, so I’m doing much better now as a young adult.
Growing up, I’ve had a fascination with different types of mental illnesses, and I’ve devoured a lot of articles, documentaries and books around the topic. In contrast to stereotypes and from my own experience, I won’t actually be such a bad person to go to if you need a friend around some advice on emotional healing, and someone to listen.
Thought I admit I don’t think my Ti function can stand being a psychologist as a job, but I’m happy to offer some of my ideas and research on the side in my free time. I’m less of a long term therapist, and more of someone who can recommend you a personalized treatment for you when listening to your experiences and somehow can point you to the direction of a more knowledgable professional that is less likely to disappoint you like many others. That, and I also have a knack for not falling for stereotypes of an illness as my Ti demands it, and informing people of this to lessen the stigma. I hope with the little I can do, I can still help. After all, it is one thing to hear treatments from a book, and another to be able to practically do it.
I’ve been keeping inside a lot of frustration around reading a lot of discussions around mental health that I wanted to share. Though I’m not sure this is the best place to do it, but my Ti has been too annoyed around the inaccuracies of things for so long. If you’re curious about mental illness, the channel Psych2Go is a good beginner’s channel for it, Crash Course Psychology is an oddly comprehensive course on Youtube, and Dr. Tracey Marks is one of the few licensed psychologists on Youtube that seem to know a lot about it. I also enjoy helpguide and healthline as websites, though that’s just my personal opinion.
Complaints I Have with Some Mental Health Activists :
1. There always seems to be this either or attitude in mental health. That either it’s the one experiencing the mental illness’s fault or it was people in their own lives that caused it. The first attitude is likely to be experienced in the stigma around personality disorders, particularly BPD (See articles on Psychology Today), because often their way of experiencing the pain they have is lashing out to other people. The second often happens with more well known mental illnesses, such as depression or anorexia, and the encouragement for them to blame everyone else instead of taking responsibility for it. (See Youtube channel Savantics for example.) The reality often lies somewhere in both reasons, but how much one reason factors in more the other has to do with the individual, and generalizing all the people with an illness in general is a bad idea.
2. People always seem to be receiving double messages about revealing their troubles around mental illnesses. One side says they have to be “authentic” to reveal everything, and they are fake if they want some respect around their privacy around their troubles. Though at other times, when they reveal their troubles with mental illnesses, they are scolded for not trying hard enough to “cure” themselves, and told to stop talking about it. Here’s the thing. If someone wants privacy, let them. If someone wants to talk about it, let them. You don’t have to like them, but you have to respect their right to choose this. If you don’t like what someone communicates about their experience, you can just choose to move on with your life to something else.
3. There are a lot of Youtube channels talking about mental illnesses represented in pop culture and I’ve seen many many many reviews of mental health memoirs on Goodreads, and here’s the thing. It is okay to expect more minority representation in fiction (As long as they’re complex non-stereotypical characters whose story doesn’t revolve only on their minority status) because authors can just write whatever they want. Though remember this, those who write real non-fiction experiences around mental illnesses, don’t support representation by discrediting non-minorities, but by encouraging minorities to speak up. This sounds obvious out of context, but people can’t seem to understand this in real life. You can’t just discredit the whole thing, just because they’re not black, because the author can’t just turn him or herself black. They didn’t choose their race, and they still can’t. You can’t just discredit someone because they’re middle class or a man. What? You want them to be poor and live homeless and have sex reassignment surgery even if they’re cisgender? Don’t romanticize things like poverty, mental illness and discrimination. You are just encouraging people to be stuck in situations like that. Reviewing non-fiction is completely different from fiction.
4. People seem to repeatedly fall for misconceptions and stereotypes around a mental illness or neurodiversity condition (conditions like ADHD, dyslexia or autism that is made from intellectual differences on how their brain works, than emotional ones. Not to say that they can’t have emotional illnesses along with it.) that can just be easily fixed with a few moments with an internet search. Here’s an exercise, think of a minority status, such as the LGBT or having bipolar disorder, then search on the internet for, “Stereotypes/Misconceptions/Myths about (place minority status here.” It’s that simple. The terms, “(minority) websites, (minority) blogs, (minority) books and (minority) channels also work here.” When reading reviews around something, I judge more on the reasons around why a product is liked or disliked than the general reading. Even if you have no relation around a minority group, it’s a good idea to be aware of social issues around it to not perpetrate the stigma.
5. Lastly, remember that those with the mental illness have more credibility to their experiences than even therapists, doctors, activists, non-profits and even society at large. They’re the one you’re helping, so learn to listen to what they want. First hand evidence is more reliable than second hand evidence. I’m not saying don’t listen to the experts, but listen to both, and if you have to choose one over the other, than choose the one with the illness. This of course has exceptions on very severe mental illnesses where they can’t think clearly for themselves, but in general, trust the person with the experience first. Trust me. Know how to listen, and don’t just hand out unasked advice.
Thank you for reading.
I’m glad we can help. Just remember that those situations don’t dictate all situations. You have value and you are loved ???
As an intp female I always pushed myself to be social and do whatever my friends would do which we’re probably xSFJ types and at around age 12 I developed social fobia and had panic attack’s in school I had to drop out and started to isolate myself and would only go out if I knew I can easily go away at anytime without sounding awkward I had very hard time picking up a phone call and I’m general interacting with ppl I dono what-has caused this and I’m still suffering from it I’m wondering if it was because I was too much outside and around people all the time . Now I’m feeling much happier with myself I live alone with two kids and I’m mostly alone as kids are in school alll day or I’m with close family but the fear of strangers and certain ppl is still big and I avoid people as much possible , these podcasts are such eye openers and I love personality hacker it’s a blessing
Thank you for sharing, Rowena! I’m glad it resonated with you. That’s why I share my story. I don’t want INTPs to feel like they’re alone and have to fit the Stereotypes that are blasted back at them. We have a lot of amazing things to offer the world when we’re able to identify the ways we need to grow. The subjectivity of Ti is particularly powerful. Again, thank you for sharing!