Audience of One

F is for Feeler

Following on from the Extrovert of two weeks ago comes another Myers-Briggs preference, the Feeler. According to my personality profile, Extroverted Feeling is the “dominant function”.

I’m slightly sceptical about how applicable this test is to a lot of people with less extreme tendencies, but I seem to be quite strongly described by this. I feel, and it’s not something I can keep internalised. I am “predisposed to closure in matters related to people”, and I am “concerned with the likes and dislikes of others”. Feelers also go for more subjective things in making decisions, and see things less in terms of black and white.

Enough of the Myers-Briggs, though. While psychology can tell you a lot about yourself, it can also tell you a lot wrong about yourself (especially if you just took an online test and didn’t even get a proper psychologist to test you).

For a long time, I’ve felt things quite extremely. Not in terms of pain – I’m sure my nerves are just as sensitive as everyone else’s – but in terms of emotion. If I’m disappointed, then I’m often inconsolable. If I’m happy, then I’m ecstatic. If I’m depressed, it affects not just my mood but my energy. If I fall in love, I fall in love hard. It’s always been this way, and has just been complicated by teenage hormones and mood swings in recent years.

So what? Lots of people feel things strongly. Well, with me it’s combined with impatience, apathy and maturity. I try not to be arrogant (and fail most of the time) but I’ve always seemed to be at a higher maturity to a lot of the people I’m friends with – not in terms of being more adult than child and more responsible necessarily, but spiritually and mentally. Maybe it is arrogance, but I’ve gone for years with no-one but adults able to talk on my level about spiritual things. Christians whom I know and love make mistake after mistake that I try and warn against but yet they think they know better. It’s possibly because I’m not older and wiser: just wiser. You can see how I often fall into arrogance, if this is what I believe. I believe it because of what I’ve experienced and what I’ve heard from others who I know are far wiser than I am.

Maybe people need to learn things for themselves. As one who feels things strongly, though, I empathise with them when things go wrong, yet my counsel goes nowhere – and that hurts. As one who feels so strongly (and is as strongly extroverted as I am), lack of those on the same level leaves a hole, one which I feel constantly. I’m impatient for it to be filled.

I’m also apathetic about work, or have been up until now. It’s not a good combination. Suddenly I’m faced with the prospect of having to work hard, and far from driving feelings from my mind, it becomes even more of a struggle because the feelings are still there, and they’re combined with the unpleasantness of actually getting down to work for the first time since I helped with the nine- to eleven-year-olds on Sunday mornings.

This weblog is intended (in part) to be a record of my struggles as a Christian. The foremost struggle is when I feel things so strongly, I find it hard to rely on God for all my needs. It’s all very well saying that he can provide them all, but I believe sometimes he chooses not to (in some ways) to make us hunger for him more. As a feeler, this is amplified, and I do hunger for him more; as ever, that doesn’t make the feelings any less painful and hard. Impatiently, I have to wait to see what the future holds.

Matthew @ 11:50, April 30, 2005 to ABC | Comments (0)