A Personal Mistyping Story

In my last post I discussed the idea of introverted functions forming personal connections with information. At the end of that article I warned of some potential confusion over the difference between a savior and something which is personal to you. The reason I brought that up is because that confusion happened to someone I know quite well. Me.

My Personal Type

Before I was typed by Objective Personality, I thought that I was FF NeTi CPSB or at least something similar. I thought that the intuitive and thinking parts of myself were what best described my personality. This was the part of myself that felt the most personal and authentically me. And I wasn’t exactly wrong. That is still true in a way with the type I was given. I was typed as FF FeSe PCSB, a type with savior feeling and sensing, but an intuitive and thinking introverted world (Ni & Ti). These parts of me are what is personal to me and thus how I form my identity. In the OP system however, this is NOT how saviors and demon functions are determined. Your saviors and demons aren’t what is most personal to you, but rather they our natural processes where information processing is most comfortable and trusted by us. For my type, that means the extroverted world.

My OP type has 2 extroverted saviors and 2 introverted demons. For those new to OP parlance, I am what is referred to as a jumper ENFJ in the Objective Personality System. I’m naturally looking at the external world, what things exist (Se) and what people value (Fe), but my demons are what is personal to me. My patterns and connections (Ni) as well as the way I understand how things work (Ti) are personal. I’m taking the time to form personal relationships with those types of information which form my inner world, building up my own patterns and understandings. I’ve created categories and frameworks that make sense to me for interpreting the world and finding meaning. If the way you understand and categorize the world lines up with mine, then we get to be buddies because we relate on that personal level. If not though, I’m naturally looking for values and things outside of myself that we can communicate with.

My Thinking is Personal

My ways of understanding how things work are personal to me because I have introverted thinking (Ti). I want to bring in the information and relate it back to how I understand things to work and make sure that it fits within that structure. For me I am often puzzling things out in games and trying to figure out the ways to play that make sense to me. By making my own decisions within the structure of the game, I’m forming my personal form of playing, crafting my playstyle, my Ti. You do this with anything, a method of writing, brushing your teeth, sorting your laundry… Finding what works for you. Building and refining those methods over and over until they are personal. Te does this differently. They are impersonal with their methods, tossing one out for another rather than building upon their personal frameworks.

However, since my Ti is a demon, that process can feel unnatural to me and I’m not as confident in it. I have to set aside the feelings of the situation to determine what I think for myself. The feelings can be distracting to this process and make it hard for me to think clearly when it feels to me like others need my help. It feels easier to just use my saviors to try to smooth things over in the immediate moment. I’ve found the key is to take my time and allow my mind to clear, similar to something like a process of meditation, but slowing down like that has its downsides…

When working with my demon Ti, I might need to break the information down more and that can take a lot of time to do so. I can become self conscious about the time it is taking to process and feel uneasy about my ability to succeed. Introverted processing can be time consuming compared to the extroverted saviors I am use to relying on and without practice, anything can prove difficult. To combat this, I might revert to my saviors, asking others for help or trying to find answers outside myself. I might simply align with what others think is valuable in the present moment without understanding it completely for myself, feeling pressured by my saviors to go along with the tribe and get things moving again. This is the kind of trap that we can fall in when we are not able to synthesize our saviors and demon functions. I need to take time to understand things for myself, so that in the moment I am prepared to bring forward my opinion. This is a balance between my Play and Sleep animals.

My Intuition is Personal

I find meaning in the world around me by building personal patterns with introverted intuition (Ni). I want to relate and categorize all the sensory data I’m experiencing into concepts and build upon my existing understanding of those concepts, deepening my relationship with them. This means I often focus my savior gathering in the direction of these Ni concepts, continuing to learn more and more about a singular concept until the well seems to run dry and I cannot seem to extract anymore. For me this looks like building up my experiences in specific hobbies, targeting my learning in those specific areas that have interested me and continuing to build and refine my understanding in those areas.

I felt that my intuition was a savior because of how personal these patterns of understanding feel to me. I felt like the motivating force behind my hobbies was something abstract and that I was forming connections relating it back to these abstract ideas. But what I failed to realize was that in forming these connections I was gathering data from reality (Se) before feeding into my very specific and personal concepts (Ni) rather than exploring many concepts and making connections between them (Ne).

Ni is a demon for me because despite a drive to build these conceptual understandings, I do so by spending much of my time interfacing with the outside world. I’m gathering data from others as a way to better shape and form my Ni in ways that I can feel confident in because they have the backing of sensory data. Making guesses with my Ni alone makes me uncomfortable, I prefer to have seen something work in reality for myself before I can truly trust the pattern. Even when I do make guesses, I want to confirm them as quickly as possible. I often do this by cross checking with other sources.

“So that is how one person describes Ne, but what about this person? How are their definitions similar and how are they same? How can I get to the truth of what the pattern truly is by overlapping these sensory experiences?”
me chasing down the sensory information

My growth path is thus to accept that sometimes we aren’t going to necessarily have all the information to be sure that an outcome is what will happen. We can do our best to balance the sensory data with the patterns, but sometimes it is beneficial to make a guess. Reach for that point out in front of you where you see potential positive outcomes and adjust as you go. Sometimes it becomes this stress where I want that plan to be perfect. I want to have all the information so that I can sit down and synthesize it all, but it just isn’t realistic. We need to be able to balance and move back and forth between these types of information.

What’s Next?

My Objective Personality type has given me a framework with which I can put a name to my demons, the aspects of my personality that I struggle to integrate with the rest of me. These demons are the sorts of information and behaviors that I tend to naturally avoid. With this information I am able to focus on developing in the right areas and understanding that, while I may fail at times or come up short in those areas. I can improve and find greater balance in my personality. Day by day, step by step.

I hope you have enjoyed my little mistyping story. I hope it helps you in understanding that we can make mistakes, as we all do, and begin to learn from them rather than running back to the parts of ourselves where things might seem easier. It is sometimes hard for me to own up to making a mistake, but in sharing this personal truth with you, I hope you can see how you yourself can begin to own the demon sides of you and find greater balance on your path towards growth.

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