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Are YOU an Intrapersonal Personality Type?
I am an Intrapersonal Personality Type. This personality type is uncommon and thus pitiable, because it is not well understood. The Intrapersonal Communicator quite naturally asks probing questions not because we are nosy or busybodies, but because we keep an inner scorecard and are comparing our inner landscape. In truth, our curiosity may have little to do with others, but they assume we are probing to get under their skin or to make trouble when we are simply trying to make sense of our inner world.
My entire life I have been told that I am a “deep thinker” and that I ask “profound” questions (my religious mother told me that I ask too many questions), which has always puzzled me. Doesn’t everybody grind an unanswered question down until they have pulverized it, answering it from all possible angles? This need to understand life from the inside out has caused frustration for me in relationships because I have wrongly assumed that like me, other people want to discover the truth. What I have concluded through heartbreak is that most people do not, in fact, think very seriously about life’s mysteries, nor do they dwell on why people act in the strange ways they do. And they spend almost no time analyzing their own dysfunction unless they are forced to. The intrapersonal approach is perfectly illustrated by Rodin’s bronze sculpture, “The Thinker” because at the heart of my personality is a serious need to understand myself, which is why I ask so many questions and try so damned hard to understand others, even people who don’t care to understand themselves.
Intrapersonals tend to be introverted intellectuals who are drawn to psychology and the arts. If you know a counselor or an artsy type, there is a good chance they are intrapersonal and are off in some corner quietly analyzing life as if it were a chess game. This drive to tear life apart as a car mechanic takes apart a motor is relentless and insatiable and finds its outlet in the professions of analysis (think: psychoanalysis), and in the expression of art, and philosophy.
And this is the beauty inherent in the intrapersonal communicator: like nobody else, we can convey the essence of another person in words, or through art because we have, like Rodin's Thinker, sat and pondered our subjects at exhaustive length. To every misunderstood intrapersonal communicator, I can only say that I understand your need to understand-and that the world desperately needs you to KEEP THINKING.
My entire life I have been told that I am a “deep thinker” and that I ask “profound” questions (my religious mother told me that I ask too many questions), which has always puzzled me. Doesn’t everybody grind an unanswered question down until they have pulverized it, answering it from all possible angles? This need to understand life from the inside out has caused frustration for me in relationships because I have wrongly assumed that like me, other people want to discover the truth. What I have concluded through heartbreak is that most people do not, in fact, think very seriously about life’s mysteries, nor do they dwell on why people act in the strange ways they do. And they spend almost no time analyzing their own dysfunction unless they are forced to. The intrapersonal approach is perfectly illustrated by Rodin’s bronze sculpture, “The Thinker” because at the heart of my personality is a serious need to understand myself, which is why I ask so many questions and try so damned hard to understand others, even people who don’t care to understand themselves.
Intrapersonals tend to be introverted intellectuals who are drawn to psychology and the arts. If you know a counselor or an artsy type, there is a good chance they are intrapersonal and are off in some corner quietly analyzing life as if it were a chess game. This drive to tear life apart as a car mechanic takes apart a motor is relentless and insatiable and finds its outlet in the professions of analysis (think: psychoanalysis), and in the expression of art, and philosophy.
And this is the beauty inherent in the intrapersonal communicator: like nobody else, we can convey the essence of another person in words, or through art because we have, like Rodin's Thinker, sat and pondered our subjects at exhaustive length. To every misunderstood intrapersonal communicator, I can only say that I understand your need to understand-and that the world desperately needs you to KEEP THINKING.
My books: www.amazon.com/author/ninabingham
