The authors of that book were, themselves, big proponents of what they called "storytelling therapy" And they said a good substitute for personality testing is just "telling your life story" It's the real impulse behind all of this appetite for testing - to be really seen/heard
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Taking a stupid test by checking boxes is a simpler, easier way to try to say who you are to somebody than actually telling a story in your own words It requires less commitment, you don't need to reveal specific details grounded in actual events, you can hide behind a mask
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And yeah that's why they feed a real felt need - it's a relief sometimes to be put in a box, it's validating to not feel alone, "That's just how we ESFJs are" But it ultimately falls short of what people really want, which is why no one is satisfied at the end of one of these
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There's always MORE TESTS, ALTERNATIVE MODELS, MORE GRANULAR ANALYSIS People develop profiles that are just chock full of code words and acronyms - I'm an ESTJ and an Enneagram 5 and a Slytherpuff and a Scorpio
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But my Thinking function is highly elevated compared to my Sensing function and I'm a 5 leaning toward my 4 wing and I may not be a true Slytherpuff but a Burnt Gryffindor/Core Hufflepuff and I'm a Scorpio Sun but a Virgo Moon and Aquarius Rising
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It gets very tiring You're trying to tell me something but it's something that might be much easier and better told in, you know, normal words About actual stuff that happens in your actual life
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The authors had ties to the "mythopoeic men's movement" from the 70s and allowed that archetypes and icons from existing old stories play a very major role in our ability to understand ourselves But you shouldn't think they have a fixed, universal meaning
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Like yeah if you take a Greek mythology quiz or a Star Wars quiz or an MCU characters quiz and the result really speaks to you and resonates with you, that's valid And by definition the more strongly you feel about it the more valid it is But it's a starting point, not endpoint
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It should spark a conversation about why you feel that way, what specifically about the character speaks to you (because all characters and myths are Rorschach blots), how it relates to stuff that's actually happening to you in your real life
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Not presupposing that the infinite wisdom of the simple computer program behind the quiz correctly put you in a box that tells people everything they need to know about you
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This is all stuff that's really obvious when you come out and say it out loud, but it's something people kind of willfully ignore when they treat "scientific" quizzes like MBTI like they're any different from a "Which House, MD character are you?" quiz
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And people really seriously do treat such pseudoscience like it's a shortcut to actually doing the work of a therapist or a counselor, to actually fucking talking to the person and asking *in detail* how they feel and what's going on with them
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