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04-28-2012, 11:28 AM | #1 |
Rose Garden
The Gospel is for Christians, too :).
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 6,911
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Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
Why some people "take things too far" when others "use common sense", "take what's good and leave the rest".
Everyone sees the world through the lens of their own personality. We can learn how others see the world and use that to better understand and communicate with them, but we can't ever truly see the world through their eyes - we can only approximate it, not experience it. And so all parenting gurus write through the lens of their own personality, and we read them through the lens of ours. Some we resonate with, others we see some and some , and others leave us , depending on how well our personalities mesh (leaving aside content - we can really *get* something that we *loathe*, and can be entirely at something we think is probably good, if only we could make heads or tails of it ). We are capable of seeing subtleties, making fine distinctions, with our top functions, but our less differentiated functions are not capable of seeing as much nuance, acting with as great a range or flexibility. Our dominant function is a deluxe Swiss army knife; our inferior function is a hammer - everything's a nail . And so an approach that works great for a dominant Ni (INxJ) might not make any sense whatsoever for a dominant Se (ESxP), and vice versa. Even if both are doing the same basic thing - AP or GBD, say - they will probably look at it differently and do different things, or do the same thing for different reasons. Which is great . The problem comes in when we read/listen to a guru who advocates a vision or method that is entirely opposite to our personality and general approach to life, and instead of tossing her to the side as not applicable, for some reason we think her approach is The One True Way, and so turn ourselves inside out in an effort to apply it. Since we don't really *get* it, we can't tailor it to our own situations, we don't see the subtle variations in what people more suited to this approach do, all we can do is blindly follow and hope it works out as promised . Of course this feels completely unnatural and wrong. And so people will often give up after a few days or weeks of this, chalk it up to temporary insanity, and go back to what feels more natural. But sometimes people have very strong pressure, whether internal or external, to conform to this very unnatural approach to life. The vision or approach or guru is Right, by definition, and so if it feels unnatural and wrong, it must be because of *me*, because of defects in *me*. And so they persist in following an approach that they don't get, ignoring all the warning signs, desperately determined to become someone they're not because they believe they have to . There's no way that ends well . Especially with inherently bad approaches, but even with otherwise good approaches used by someone who doesn't get them yet feels they *must* use them no matter what. And it doesn't just happen with Christian punitive gurus . I've seen the same train wreck in unschooling circles, in classical hs'ing circles, in AP circles. While it's the worst in abusive dynamics, when one side *is* deliberately pushing it's way as the One True Way, and brooks no disagreement, it can happen accidentally when a self-confident person of one type influences a low-confidence person of a rather different type. So it's something to be aware of even here on GCM - sometimes I see the beginnings of it in people who latch onto a given way of implementing GBD as the only way, and are determined to apply it even though they explicitly say they don't get it. And are encouraged by well-meaning GCMers to press on, trust the process, it'll all make sense eventually. There's a difference in the initial awkwardness stage of something new and going against oneself - I think we need to be watchful for that line being crossed, both in ourselves and others .
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~ forty-two ~
Possessor of The Answer to Everything and Solver of (Somebody Else's) Problems INTJ: introverted iNtuition with extraverted Thinking DYT 4/2: connecting intellectually and emotionally Enneagram 5w4: a need to perceive and to feel special Wife to my pastor dh (INTP) since 2003 Mother to: dd13, 'R' dd10.5, 'A' ds8, 'J' and two in heaven: miscarried 10/29/04 and 01/01/05 Blog: Lutherama What we want is just one thing, not the thing. Last edited by forty-two; 04-28-2012 at 11:37 AM. |
The Following 6 Users Say Thank You to forty-two For This Useful Post: | BarefootBetsy (04-29-2012), cbmk4 (04-28-2012), Chaos Coordinator (04-29-2012), gentlemommy (04-28-2012), saturnfire16 (04-28-2012), teamommy (04-28-2012) |
04-28-2012, 11:34 AM | #2 |
Rose Garden
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: North Eastern CA
Posts: 9,119
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Re: Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
I think that fits well with the idea of principle centered living. Figure out your principles and then with each new idea that comes along you'll have a baseline to compare it to. Make thoughtful decisions, after looking at all the factors, that support your foundational principles. Live by those principles instead of someone else's rules.
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~Emily INTJ, Type 4 Wife to D Mama to: E 12/05 L 7/08 Z 12/10 A 6/14 and J in heaven 2/10 Torah Keeping, Unschooling Family My blog on unschooling and family life: Peace On Dark Nights. |
04-28-2012, 11:49 AM | #3 | |
Rose Garden
The Gospel is for Christians, too :).
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 6,911
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Re: Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
Quote:
Fundamentally I think that it is true that healthy people find a balance between what other people think is good and what they think is good, and thus compare new things that come along (whether from themselves or from others) with their baseline balance. But doing so by finding ones' fundamental, foundational principles is a rather N, particularly NP, way of going about it, I think. I've seen waaaaaaaay too many mission statements written by SJs that *completely* missed the point. And those statements are then ignored accordingly - that's just not how they do things . XSxJ is actually very well suited for taking others' rules and comparing them to their internal experience to figure out what to do. And telling them that's bad, what they *really* need is some internal principles instead of external rules, is perpetuating the very problem it was meant to solve .
__________________
~ forty-two ~
Possessor of The Answer to Everything and Solver of (Somebody Else's) Problems INTJ: introverted iNtuition with extraverted Thinking DYT 4/2: connecting intellectually and emotionally Enneagram 5w4: a need to perceive and to feel special Wife to my pastor dh (INTP) since 2003 Mother to: dd13, 'R' dd10.5, 'A' ds8, 'J' and two in heaven: miscarried 10/29/04 and 01/01/05 Blog: Lutherama What we want is just one thing, not the thing. |
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04-28-2012, 12:30 PM | #4 | |
Rose Garden
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: North Eastern CA
Posts: 9,119
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Re: Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
Quote:
It's sounds to me like comparing others' rules to their internal experience and comparing others' rules to their internal principles/values, is just a slightly different way of doing the same thing.
__________________
~Emily INTJ, Type 4 Wife to D Mama to: E 12/05 L 7/08 Z 12/10 A 6/14 and J in heaven 2/10 Torah Keeping, Unschooling Family My blog on unschooling and family life: Peace On Dark Nights. |
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04-28-2012, 01:20 PM | #5 | |
Rose Garden
The Gospel is for Christians, too :).
Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 6,911
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Re: Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
Quote:
And I've seen firsthand how an ISTJ is somewhat bemused and feels less than by others' insistence on principles over rules - it feels different to her, and when she tries to explain it, she's told she's not seeing it right, that this new way is so much better. They probably meant well, but they saw rules as bad - following external rules against themselves hurt *them* so much, therefore they are bad for all - and so zealously crusaded against rules. The people who found value in the rules were clearly mistaken and had to be saved from themselves . Thus perpetrating the very thing that hurt themselves so much .
__________________
~ forty-two ~
Possessor of The Answer to Everything and Solver of (Somebody Else's) Problems INTJ: introverted iNtuition with extraverted Thinking DYT 4/2: connecting intellectually and emotionally Enneagram 5w4: a need to perceive and to feel special Wife to my pastor dh (INTP) since 2003 Mother to: dd13, 'R' dd10.5, 'A' ds8, 'J' and two in heaven: miscarried 10/29/04 and 01/01/05 Blog: Lutherama What we want is just one thing, not the thing. |
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04-29-2012, 02:19 PM | #6 |
Rose Trellis
Join Date: Mar 2007
Posts: 3,362
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Re: Personality and ceding authority to parenting 'gurus'
I don't know anything about Meyers-Briggs, but IME people who hew strictly to childrearing systems of all types have anxious personalities. If they can just find some way to make the unpredictable predictable and the unquantifiable quantifiable--if they can just find a checklist, somewhere, that guarantees results--then the anxiety will go away . . . right?
Anxious people tend not to trust their own intuition, that fuzzy and un-pin-downable thing, so when the alarms start to ring, they just keep on doing more of the same thing to try to drive away the anxious feeling, because, hey, checklist. In addition, there is the phenomenon seen in victims of con games: if you can get the mark to invest enough in your scheme, they will very likely keep investing more, because nobody wants to admit that they wasted all that time or money or what have you. Anxious people may end up following punitive and cruel child training gurus--some of the accounts at ezzo.info are so sad. They might end up as the exhausted parents of "indigo children" who are completely out of control. They might have years of their lives stolen by Scientology. It's all about trying to find the checklist that will make life easy and simple and free of fear.
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Wife to John, December 18, 1999 ~ Mother to Sophia, March 13, 2004 ~ Mother to Eva, June 10, 2006 ~ Mother to Matthew, December 21, 2009 ~ Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will lift me up. |
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