Families: Be Who You Are, and Be That Well

Angela Smith

When Isabel introduced beau Clarence to her mother, Katherine wondered how her dreamy, idealistic daughter could build a harmonious life with this pragmatic, decisive young law student. How would they even begin to understand each other?

This is a common challenge in families. How does a gregarious father accommodate an introspective son who would rather read a book than play football? How does a pensive mother bring joy to the life of a daughter who would rather climb trees than talk? How does a husband who would like to dance the night away mesh with a wife who would rather spend the evening at the library? Isabel and Katherine found a solution.

Isabel Briggs married Clarence Myers. She spent her life seeking ways to help people understand their Gifts Differing, as she titled her book, and we can benefit from her research to bring harmony and understanding to our own families. She and mother Katherine Briggs developed an analytical tool, the Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, which assesses  four pairs of traits in which each person tends toward expression of one or the other. Armed with this analysis, we can appreciate the strengths and gifts of our loved ones, no matter how different they are from us.

The MBTI measures each person’s tendency toward the following traits:

Extroversion or Introversion: As a preschooler, Rachael hid under my skirt when strangers approached, and created a fort from a large cardboard box where she spent hours alone, surrounded by dolls and toys but no people. Her sister Jessica sat on the swing in the yard, dangling her feet and waiting for people to walk past in the alley, each of whom she would cheerily greet with the exclamation, “Hi, Man!” or “Hi, Lady!” Rachael is introverted, or inward turning, and Jessica is extroverted, or outward turning.

Intuitive or Sensing: At age eight, Jason dreamed of powering the house with lemons, a fanciful solution based on knowledge gained from the science encyclopedias he devoured. His brother Nathan did not care how the house was powered; he only wanted to climb the drain spout to reach the second floor balcony roof for the sensory thrill. Jason, an intuitive, reads meaning and theories into his perceptions, while Nathan connects directly with data gathered through the senses to form a more concrete analysis.

Thinking or Feeling: Mr. Spock from Star Trek is the ultimate thinker, making decisions through rational analysis. His feeling counterpart, Captain Kirk, makes decisions holisitically, blending together various factors and discerning a "gut feeling" to guide his choice.

Judging or Perceiving: When Rachael was three, she sat at the breakfast table with her grandmother and asked, “Gram, what’s your goal?” As a college student, she uses multiple planners: one on her computer and one in book form. Rachael, a judger, likes to make plans and have matters settled. Her sister Mary, a perceiver, might decide to take spontaneous walks around town at 1:00 AM with her older brothers, while Rachael is snoring in her bed in preparation for the next day. Perceivers like to keep options open and plans flexible, taking in more information right up until a decision must be made.

In the body of Christ, we do indeed have gifts differing. St. Paul describes it this way:

“God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ ” (1 Corinthians 12:18-21)

This is no less true of the domestic church, the family, than it is of the Church at large. In Just Your Type and Nurture by Nature, psychologists Barron and Tieger assist us in identifying and integrating each family member’s gifts by determining whether our spouse and each of our children is introverted or extroverted, intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. This empowers us to understand how that combination of traits affect the other's vision of, and preferred way of interacting with, the world. They thoroughly describe the mindset of each of the sixteen type combinations identified by the MBTI. Furthermore, they painstakingly compiled an analysis of the interaction of each possible pair of types so that the reader can predict joys and challenges involved in a relationship with each other type of person. A tidy, pragmatic mother can understand that her son who is lost in thought truly did not see the dirty socks on the floor as he walked past them, and craft an appropriate reminder. A father who finds abstract concepts invigorating can accept that his more sensory daughter might be resisting taking calculus because she truly cannot grasp that level of abstraction.  A judging husband can learn a bit more relaxed spontaneity from his perceiving wife. An intuitive wife can see the color of the fall leaves through her sensing husband’s eyes, instead of viewing the trees only as a poetic metaphor.

This knowledge empowers parents to encourage the “eyes” of the family to see and the “ears” to hear-- and to enrich the others by sharing that hearing and vision. Thus parents can create an environment where each family member is encouraged to “Be who you are, and be that well,” as St. Francis de Sales advised. The ear is empowered to hear, the eye is empowered to see, and the entire body benefits from these gifts differing.

A link to  Nurture By Nature by Barron and Tieger can be found on our Family Page under Recommended Reading:

http://www.stgabrielcarlisle.org/respect-life-family-1/