Thanks. I really do understand the appropriate interpretation of various personality test tools and this part is right on:
_________________________________________________________ This is not like horoscopes where there are good pairings and bad pairings. Each type can pair with each other type and it can be good or bad depending on how developed each person is. I think one of the sites we've looked at described what different pairings are like. I also have a book on that, but it's at my house and I'm at my bf's house right now. I'll post some stuff from it the next time I'm out there.
To address the comment Chuck made on the other thread, these types, whether it be the enneagram or the Myers-Briggs are NOT all that you ARE. So trying to grow beyond these lables is not a violation of "to thine own self be true." No one person can be shoved into a box with a label slapped on it. These typologies represent limited ways that you learned to cope with what life threw at you in your earliest life. These are patterns of learned behaviors. That's why Jung suggests that if all of your life you've relied on your powers of rational/logical analysis, then in your later life, try to develop your feeling abilities, your intuition. It makes you a well-rounded person.
All of these systems are tools. They aren't set in concrete. They help us to understand our own quirks and those of the people we live and work with. __________________________________________________________
My point was merely that in my own involvement with H I have found that our core missions in life seem to conflict. Strangely, H prides himself on his extroversion and considers my milder form of extroversion to be nearly reclusive whereas I consider his to seem almost forced. The helper in me has always been interested in helping anyone in my life serve their core mission but particularly the core man in my life and this resonates well with H right up until he feels he is failing at something and when that happens the less well functioning aspects of the "Individualist" seem to decribe H pretty well. He isn't so "artistic" as his creative and entrepreneurial. Anyway, this kind of mental masturbation is entertaining but doesn't really guide my iteractions with H except to this extent. I have consciously through my life tried to subvert some of the less useful parts of being a "helper" sort - the co-dependence, the tedency to overidentify, the tendency to lose myself in someone else's life, the tendency to manipulatively try to get someone to "do what's best" for them. In doing so, I have consciously sought my own mission, I have consciously sought to enhance my boundaries and I have enhanced other sides of my personality. The whole thing collapses when it comes to H.
