…how do we get a “spaciousness” in our own responses so that we can experience our feelings, our thoughts, our motivations without acting on them directly—but without denying them either. This is not a matter of suppressing, dissociating, trying to override one’s negative experience; it’s not a matter of controlling; it’s not a matter of pushing anything aside. It’s a matter of being able to watch what is going on in our own experience…
Issues
Do you know people who tend to confuse left and right? –Not that they don’t know where their left and right is, but they mix up the words. Generally, if you ask them for directions you will notice that their hands point the correct way but their words don’t. The words right and left come out incorrectly, with no logic.
Organizational behavior, even more than individual, is shaped by myth and unconscious dynamics, rather than by rationality. I have noticed parallels between Jung’s observations of personality type and the gods who were at the centre of the classical Greeks’ understanding of motivation and behavior. The Greek pantheon can provide ways of talking about a wide range of value systems, energies, feeling states, behavior habits…
In the business world I have the privilege and challenge of leading a group of people where our typology is diverse. Sometimes, when we need each other most, we let each other down as the stress ignites the respective shadow functions within each of us. In the scenarios described herein, the ESTJs may have expected me, their ENFJ leader, to respond in crisis with warmth and sensitivity; but the stress of crisis became a game changer…
Where in your own life have you seen efforts to pathologize, punish or otherwise stigmatize particular ways of being, including personality preferences?