It’s common for people to look to Socionics (and to other typology systems) to find encapsulating ideas or structures from which to understand themselves and their world. One can use those structures in order to understand yourself, your stories about who you are, what this means about your preferences and needs, about your ideas on how to meet those needs with like-minded people…
It’s common to want a set of ideas to cleave to, so that you know how you should behave in everyday life in order to be internally and externally consistent and liked by the people you like. And it is straightforward to look to Socionics for a circumscribed explanation of self and others. There is this sense that as long as you come to structurally understand yourself and others, you will come to know yourself; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be similarly aligned with you and without conflict; and generally, become happy.
But there comes a point, sooner or later, where every seeker must move past structure, labels, and concepts, to accept that neither they nor anyone else fits neatly into a pre-made package. It isn’t enough to just say that as the commonplace saying it has become; it deserves to be really understood. The things people know about themselves—their likes and dislikes, their past behavior, the things they are drawn to and the types of ways they think about it (in short, their stories about themselves)—those things themselves do not adequately describe who that person is, nor can they fully predict their behavior.
Typology is all about understanding ourselves and other people by attaching an encapsulating or structural label. This label is by definition well understood; from there, it is up to the person making that determination to explain the way in which a person’s behavior lines up with the given type, or explain away behavior that does not line up.
Joe is always full of ideas, often shows an almost-childish excitement, finds it easy to start new things but boring and difficult to finish things he’s already started. According to those behaviors, Joe types himself as an ILE (ENTp).
But now one of the great silent issues rears its head as Joe asks himself: is it normal for an ILE to brood, have doubts, become loud and excited? Am I still an ILE if I am not interested in new things? If the type description says x, y, and z, and I am not these things, does that mean I am not an ILE?
Now, I am not saying that it is a problem for people to question. Not at all. And in fact mistyping is a common occurrence. I am speaking now about people who struggle with these questions, who continue to seek answers, clarity, and explanations, and for whom this goes on and on.
If you accept that the stories you tell yourself about who you are ARE who you are, then you can continue to type yourself as best as you can and keep yourself within the parameters of that type as a way to establish and understand your self-identity. But if you move away from that kind of typology, that kind of approach to self-knowledge, you can release the hold that answering ‘Who am I?’ has on you. You can simply be the person you already are.
So here is what I said before: There is a common yearning in people coming into Socionics for a circumscribed notion of self and others. There is this sense that as long as we come to structurally understand ourselves and others, we will come to know ourselves; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be aligned to us and without conflict; and generally, become happy.
This feeling, that structurally understanding ourselves and others using these systems can lead to all these great outcomes, is, unfortunately, false. That is not to say that people don’t reach that outcome: they certainly do. But how can a system teach us about who we are? The system can only teach you through the proxy of a type. Being exposed to typology can teach you interesting ideas to which you may respond by growing into or because of them, but no structured type arises from inside your own head and heart. You only find solace through seeing commonalities between your perceptions of yourself and the types that are described in the systems.
That solace, as my generic Joe showed, can be easily disturbed. This is because once you attach yourself to a label, you begin to ask yourself whether what you do and think aligns with this label. You may assume the label is more valid and more important than your own thoughts and behaviors, and try to change outlying behavior or thought patterns to fit more comfortably inside the parameters of the type. Although plenty of people find themselves also changing their idea of the type to fit their personal parameters, either way there is a constant strain towards alignment with the abstract.
All of this is about attachment: attachment to good things; connections; being accepted; understanding your stories about yourself; staying firmly within the boundaries of your known self; staying within relationships with people you’ve typed as compatible; structuring your home or your life to suit what your type would prefer; attaching yourself to the system as a way to get your needs met, and as a way of finding and keeping a particular role or position in your life.
It is when attachment is threatened by circumstance that any of it becomes a struggle. When you don’t align your ideas of reality to reality—that is what suffering is. You cannot stick to one or more systems or method of understanding yourself and your world when reality changes despite whatever story you may tell yourself to explain it.
So to those who are seeking to find or explain themselves through these systems: don’t put yourself in bondage. Gaining insight through the proxy of a type into the way your inner structures of self work is a wonderful thing and it is clear that Socionics is an extremely useful system for just that sort of thing. But don’t ask yourself whether a type would act this way or that, or if a type wants this or that, or feels comfortable among this or that. Ask yourself that question first. Seek to understand your own behaviors, your own stories about yourself, your own choices without any explanatory lens. This is the process of becoming aligned internally, and once you shift your focus to that, you might find that your questions finally have satisfying answers.
Paradoxically, once you begin to accept your behaviors and your expressions of self, it might make it that much easier to then find a type within one or both of these systems that will adequately describe these behaviors. At that point, it becomes much more easy to find a resonating type within these or any psychological systems, and you can begin to learn about that type without being impeded by your own doubts, fears, and needs.
It’s common to want a set of ideas to cleave to, so that you know how you should behave in everyday life in order to be internally and externally consistent and liked by the people you like. And it is straightforward to look to Socionics for a circumscribed explanation of self and others. There is this sense that as long as you come to structurally understand yourself and others, you will come to know yourself; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be similarly aligned with you and without conflict; and generally, become happy.
But there comes a point, sooner or later, where every seeker must move past structure, labels, and concepts, to accept that neither they nor anyone else fits neatly into a pre-made package. It isn’t enough to just say that as the commonplace saying it has become; it deserves to be really understood. The things people know about themselves—their likes and dislikes, their past behavior, the things they are drawn to and the types of ways they think about it (in short, their stories about themselves)—those things themselves do not adequately describe who that person is, nor can they fully predict their behavior.
Typology is all about understanding ourselves and other people by attaching an encapsulating or structural label. This label is by definition well understood; from there, it is up to the person making that determination to explain the way in which a person’s behavior lines up with the given type, or explain away behavior that does not line up.
Joe is always full of ideas, often shows an almost-childish excitement, finds it easy to start new things but boring and difficult to finish things he’s already started. According to those behaviors, Joe types himself as an ILE (ENTp).
But now one of the great silent issues rears its head as Joe asks himself: is it normal for an ILE to brood, have doubts, become loud and excited? Am I still an ILE if I am not interested in new things? If the type description says x, y, and z, and I am not these things, does that mean I am not an ILE?
Now, I am not saying that it is a problem for people to question. Not at all. And in fact mistyping is a common occurrence. I am speaking now about people who struggle with these questions, who continue to seek answers, clarity, and explanations, and for whom this goes on and on.
This is about people who are trying to find themselves within their type.Many people who are struggling with these questions of labeled identity often seek ways to become more sure of their typing: they speak to their friends and loved ones, they read about other types and compare their traits against them, they try to gain a stronger understanding of the system, they post videos of themselves for other people to type them, they get involved in various Socionics groups, etc. At the heart of all these different ways a person might try to answer the question ‘Who am I?’ is a set of problematic assumptions.
- Assumption #1: The question ‘Who am I?’ can be answered satisfactorily by a standardized, external system of types. This is the basis of seeking: the assumption and silent belief that you can find yourself in an external entity. But it is impossible to find yourself in anything but within yourself: your qualities, possibilities, inclinations, values; your personal history and potential future; your genetic and biological and psychological parameters; your self-stories about what kind of person you are, what you strive towards and what you use to meet your goals and needs: all these together might be able to define and describe you, although even these cannot predict you 100%; but no external system made by another human being can do more than give you ideas and resonating insights on who you are. Socionics, as any typology system, is great at describing what is already there and drawing insight for that type to consider, but it cannot itself explain who you are.
- Assumption #2: the type a person uses must explain and predict the core and detail experiences of their personality. This builds off the first assumption in that it suggests anyone can be satisfactorily and fundamentally explained by an externalized system. But no external system can be expected to be so thorough when you as a person is not truly bound by any imperative to act or not act in a certain way; to think or not think certain thoughts; to feel or not feel certain feelings. No such imperative, no such definitive line really exists except where the mind or your history tries to self-impose it; you generally express your most common personal habits and values as behavior, but you are not truly bound by anything you have ever done, thought, or felt previously. And if you are not bound, then an external system like Socionics can only describe what you are presenting to the world and to yourself in the moment. It assumes that you will continue to present this and attempts to type you so that your type reflects the changes you choose to make in the future, but while it is a great and useful descriptor of what you already show, it cannot define your potential or put boundaries on your behavior.
- Assumption #3: as soon as a person catalogues themselves fully, they can determine who they are. What does it mean to catalogue yourself? It means to think about what you know about yourself and to try to make that knowledge complete. You ate cereal this morning, you ate cereal yesterday morning, you ate cereal the day before, and you liked cereal all those times, so you can conclude that you are the kind of person who likes cereal. This is a data point you can use in cataloguing yourself, and you can repeat this until you have incorporated all of your recurring themes, experiences, and interests. But all that you will have done is formalize and recognize the stories that you tell yourself about who you are. We tell ourselves these stories in order to have a continuation between one moment and the next. We tell ourselves these stories in order to remember the reasons in the past that we have done or said or felt something, and to stay true to that in the future. We tell ourselves these stories so that we can have an address in the universe: I am Joe, son of Jane and Adam, brother of Sarah; I am an engineer; I am a baseball fan; I like the color blue; I live in New York City; I am 35 years old; I am a happy, unhappy, wealthy, poor, driven, unmotivated, perceptive, uncaring, normal, special human being.
If you accept that the stories you tell yourself about who you are ARE who you are, then you can continue to type yourself as best as you can and keep yourself within the parameters of that type as a way to establish and understand your self-identity. But if you move away from that kind of typology, that kind of approach to self-knowledge, you can release the hold that answering ‘Who am I?’ has on you. You can simply be the person you already are.
So here is what I said before: There is a common yearning in people coming into Socionics for a circumscribed notion of self and others. There is this sense that as long as we come to structurally understand ourselves and others, we will come to know ourselves; find a place to fit in; understand other people; recognize the best relationships, which will be aligned to us and without conflict; and generally, become happy.
This feeling, that structurally understanding ourselves and others using these systems can lead to all these great outcomes, is, unfortunately, false. That is not to say that people don’t reach that outcome: they certainly do. But how can a system teach us about who we are? The system can only teach you through the proxy of a type. Being exposed to typology can teach you interesting ideas to which you may respond by growing into or because of them, but no structured type arises from inside your own head and heart. You only find solace through seeing commonalities between your perceptions of yourself and the types that are described in the systems.
That solace, as my generic Joe showed, can be easily disturbed. This is because once you attach yourself to a label, you begin to ask yourself whether what you do and think aligns with this label. You may assume the label is more valid and more important than your own thoughts and behaviors, and try to change outlying behavior or thought patterns to fit more comfortably inside the parameters of the type. Although plenty of people find themselves also changing their idea of the type to fit their personal parameters, either way there is a constant strain towards alignment with the abstract.
You may assume the label is more valid and more important than your own thoughts and behaviors, and try to change outlying behavior or thought patterns to fit more comfortably inside the parameters of the type.That ongoing struggle makes it both less important and less noticeable when you don’t accept things in yourself or others. This is especially problematic in relationships, where it’s often the case that one or both partners try to change the other to suit their own concepts of who that person should be like. Typology only makes that more structured and valid—it is one step further from honest acceptance of reality for what it is. The urge towards wanting to feel happy, to feel connected and aligned and loved for your strengths and supported in your weaknesses can be especially difficult for people who earnestly subscribe to Socionics, which talks about Quadra and duality relationships as being just the places where you may feel all those great things. Once you are in such a relationship, you might come to police yourself in order to not step outside of the acceptable parameters of the type’s behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses: playing a role instead of opening up to who you are in every moment.
All of this is about attachment: attachment to good things; connections; being accepted; understanding your stories about yourself; staying firmly within the boundaries of your known self; staying within relationships with people you’ve typed as compatible; structuring your home or your life to suit what your type would prefer; attaching yourself to the system as a way to get your needs met, and as a way of finding and keeping a particular role or position in your life.
It is when attachment is threatened by circumstance that any of it becomes a struggle. When you don’t align your ideas of reality to reality—that is what suffering is. You cannot stick to one or more systems or method of understanding yourself and your world when reality changes despite whatever story you may tell yourself to explain it.
So to those who are seeking to find or explain themselves through these systems: don’t put yourself in bondage. Gaining insight through the proxy of a type into the way your inner structures of self work is a wonderful thing and it is clear that Socionics is an extremely useful system for just that sort of thing. But don’t ask yourself whether a type would act this way or that, or if a type wants this or that, or feels comfortable among this or that. Ask yourself that question first. Seek to understand your own behaviors, your own stories about yourself, your own choices without any explanatory lens. This is the process of becoming aligned internally, and once you shift your focus to that, you might find that your questions finally have satisfying answers.
Paradoxically, once you begin to accept your behaviors and your expressions of self, it might make it that much easier to then find a type within one or both of these systems that will adequately describe these behaviors. At that point, it becomes much more easy to find a resonating type within these or any psychological systems, and you can begin to learn about that type without being impeded by your own doubts, fears, and needs.
Good post, given the subject matter I expected to substantially find fault but actually I agree with nearly all of what you say here. I would say a lot of it very differently, though.
ReplyDeleteI have minor quibble here:
"Typology is all about understanding ourselves and other people by attaching an encapsulating or structural label. This label is by definition well understood; from there, it is up to the person"
This assumption that the socionics labels are "by definition well understood" is clearly untrue in practice. Different socionists sometimes have very different models. That is to say, more directly, different people can and often do refer to a label (such as "ILE") and have extremely different notions of what that label means.
Thanks so much for your feedack! You're right: it is clear that there are many forms and definitions for the various types of the Socion. That said I think my point still holds, that typers attach a type label to a given typee, and use that type label as a proxy for understanding the typee.
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