Don’t Judge A Person By Their Type: Here’s Why

In this article, I will put forth a proposal of sorts, a theory if you will. I was reading on the forums and came across someone who was hating on one particular type. The way I see it, for you to dislike certain functions, it’s for one of two reasons. One, you have interacted with someone whose personality sucks. We have all been there. Every type has those people who we would rather disown. However, if you keep coming up against it and having problems with every person who has that function in high use, then we come to the second reason. Two, the more likely scenario is that your own personality sucks so you can’t see the value in the function. So, if you hate all SJs and every one that you’ve encountered you hate, then it’s more likely that the problem is with you and not them. You’re just short sighted and intolerant.

I just get tired of people tying negatives to select types, and I just don’t think that is how it works. The bottom line is that everybody has all the functions, so when someone goes bad, it’s like all bets are off. This is one reason why it’s so hard to type unhealthy personalities. Unhealthy Ts get sensitive, unhealthy Fs get mean, unhinged S gets wacky, and unhinged N can get very locked down. Introverts lash out, and extraverts go into seclusion. Typically the bad behavior takes you out of the norm. This is why people propose the shadow personalities.

To further this, I get tired of people talking about how only certain types will be well liked by everyone, and that only certain types can be charismatic. That’s a load of crap. There is a version of every type that can be well liked by generally everyone. Will they all look exactly the same when they achieve that? No. Will they all act the same? No. But will there be certain attributes that can span all personality types that will be present? Yes. Being a pleasant, well adjusted, polite, honest, and open individual that seems generally happy and smiles is achievable by all 16 of the personality types…. all of them. You choose not to be that, not because of your personality type, but because of other aspects of yourself that have nothing to do with your type. It’s a road that goes both ways. All 16 can be hated by everyone if they suck. And all 16 will be liked by everybody if they don’t (everyone being a general term that isn’t actually all inclusive, but stands for the majority, of course.)

This is why I will never understand the people that want to use typing to justify the way they are. If you suck as a human being, it has nothing to do with your type. You need to look elsewhere for your validation or answers. To be honest, I think typing has less to do with your personality and is more about peering into the way that you think. It helps you understand what you think, why you think it, where it comes from, and what’s spurring your mind set, which is why labels like the cognitive functions make more sense to me. They focus more on the aspect of the functions being the building blocks of the way you think, which I guess, I can admit does play a role in the personality you produce, but it’s only a piece of it. You can, for instance, be an ISTJ with a good personality or an ISTJ with a bad personality. So clearly, the ISTJ component is not what is dictating the personality as a whole. You know what I mean?

Again, this is why you can get a broad spread and varying field of ISTJs that aren’t really the same, but the one thing that they have in common is not their personality as a whole. Rather, that they all think similarly which will lead them to say and do certain things the same. There are many different lifestyles that ISTJs may choose, but the common ground will be that they think similarly. Being the same type does not mean that they all dress the same, or have all the same interests, or even make the same decisions. What will hold true is that they all think along the same lines and have similar reasons for making whatever decisions that they choose.