ISTP Weaknesses

Today I want to talk about ISTP weaknesses.

• Living entirely in the present, they have difficulty with long-term commitments
• Not naturally good at expressing feelings and emotions
• Not tuned in to what others are feeling, they may be insensitive at times
• Tendency to be overly private and hold back part of themselves
• Need a lot of personal space, which they don't like to have invaded
• They thrive on action and excitement, and may stir things up to create it

These would all be spot on, but my desire to fit in forced me to develop social tools to bypass some of these weaknesses.

Starting with living in the present/difficulty with long-term commitments, I would say this is generally true.  I don't like having time limits (although deadlines are wonderful motivators and beating a deadline provides me with great satisfaction).  I want to enjoy each moment to its fullest and not have to worry about wrapping up my current task so I can move on to another.  I'll commit to social gatherings if I'm given a day or two of notice and have plenty of time on my schedule.  Planning becomes a game and, once I have something on my schedule, I try not to think about it or else I inevitably come up with reasons why I don't want to go.  So, I create meetings with a calendar reminder, forget about them (unless major preparation needs to occur), and allow them to practically become spontaneous.  That I can deal with.

Regarding feelings, emotions, and insensitivity, this is pretty true as well.  Like I said last time, I learned how to conform in order to fit in.  To cope, I've thoroughly studied the behavior of others, watching how people act in various situations. Unless I'm stressed out, I can typically feign knowledge and understanding during conversations in order to keep the other person interested and talking until I do understand. I also heavily emote with body language and hand gestures and I maintain eye contact with my conversational victim partner.

I'm very private and I do hold back.  There are things I don't tell my best friend.  I segregate friends to make socializing easier.  I keep my church friends at church events, gaming frineds at gaming events, my co-workers at work.  Speaking of which, it's also true that I treat work as work.  While I'm there, I don't socialize much, I get right down to business, and I don't leave until the important business is complete for the day. I also have difficulty making new friends and I tend to discount people until I understand how they can fit into my life.

Personal space: if I don't know you or if I'm stressed, I want you farther than an arm's length away.  It's that simple.  And don't touch my stuff.  Don't reorganize, don't clean.  It's my mess and I use my perception and keen memory to remember where things are located within it.  If I like you and I can observe your behavior, that's different; shake my hand, give me a hug, get close and feel free to play.

Action, excitement, and stirring things up: this is why I'm no longer happily married (separated after just a couple years).  Oh, the difficulty understanding each other's basic psychological drives definitely hurt the relationship, but my patience and optimism, her desires for peace, harmony, and the wellfare of others, and our similar ideals on how people should interact kept us together longer than we should have been.  Even after everything we've been through, even though the love required to hold a marriage together is gone, we're still best friends.  I can talk to her like none other.

So why did action, excitement, and stirring things up lead to our break up?  Because I wanted spontaneous craziness in my life.  I wanted to watch reactions.  I wanted to observe interactions.  And I do believe that peace and understanding are essential to a positive relationship, but they're boring.  It's in my nature to shake things up and look for trouble.

Saturday morning Taz with no plans and no stressors would wake up and shake up the entire house, turning on lights, music, games or television, burning "cooking" breakfast, and reveling in the fresh chaos.  My ex would cautiously wander through the house, getting a grip room by room, until she found me and requested that I shut half of it off.

And there's the problem.  Shutting half of me off.  And shutting half of her off.  We couldn't be ourselves together.

Okay, enough of that for now.  There's probably a future post in here somewhere.

One caveat, one big exception to all the weaknesses above: they go away when I'm treating my current situation like a game. To stay sane, I've played, "How many meetings can I have in one day?" "What is my conversational partner really trying to get out of this interaction?" "How close can I let someone get and for how long before I freak out?" and my favorite, "What can I do and what can I put up with that no one else can?"

Until next time,

Taz