the four main uses of typology (pride/theory/relationships/growth):
pride
someone posted the keirsey test in a gaming forum. at the time i didn't know of the wider spectrum of typology. i wasn't highly interested in it, but then over the course of about a year and a half, got 4 different results (every single xNxP) depending on where i was in life at that moment, and that sparked my interest.
theory
that lead me to question the keirsey methodology, but lacking the comparison point of MBTI and enneagram in order to see keirsey as the behavioral variation within a larger spectrum of theories, i concluded that if i was able to change "type", their have to be bridges - a transversable spectrum between each of his dictated dimensions (which in keirsey mean the letters, not the functions).
i reconfigured the system to mean another set of variables, which i don't quite remember the full explanation for, but i believe i called the I/E spectrum "the frequency of thoughts relatively to one's own experience of said thought", or frequency, while the N/S spectrum was.. i think maybe amplitude? it was a long time ago.
either way, the thoughts were still in their raw form, and so the original thought threads where pretty damn long. i can be pretty good at carrying someone with me along such things, but with this i had no such luck.
at the time i was also hitting it off with some girl in that gaming community, which then impressed the fuck out of me, by not only understanding what i was talking about, but having an instant "aha!" moment as she quite brilliantly figured out the F/T spectrum. as the stereotype holds, i lost interest in the theory quickly enough, and completely forgot about it as anything other then a relationship milestone, as that girl then became my wife.
relationships
fast forward, one day i am coming home and she found this thing called the MBTI test. she has already taken the test and found out she's an INFJ, and wanted me to take it, were i found out i was ENTP. we read the profile, laughed at how well the profiles describe each other, and then read the romantic recommendations, but our inspection of it never got any deeper then "aw, the interentz said we're an ideal match for each other, let's close it and fuck each other's brains out".
fast forward again, and that girl became my ex wife (separated though not yet divorced), not letting me and our boy see each other and telling him i abandoned him .... i was trying to make sense of an impossible situation, not understanding how someone who i loved so much could ever do that to us or be so cruel, remembering her own pain over her many stepfathers abandoning her in her childhood and having the image of my boy going through the same thing, growing up to ask the same questions, wondering why i abandoned him and what it means about him, asking what it means for himself, planting in him the seed of belief that he is somehow flawed and wasn't worthy of my love, the seed of mistrust in others and in his own relationships... at the time i was still denying in my head her physical and emotional abusive behaviors throughout our relationship and blaming myself for causing her to do those, but slowly that understanding started creeping in, and as she continued in the belief that she has done nothing wrong, i realized what it means - there is absolutely nothing in her that can stop her from doing it, not to me, and not to him - and that i am not there to absorb it or protect him from it... its a never ending state of fear. i was still under the blame myself for everything paradigm, blaming myself for not being able to be there for him despite her choices of forcing it down our throats, trying to grasp what i did wrong, how the fuck did this happen... the whole situation was incomprehensible.
looking back nostalgically at our early days, i went back to that old relationship milestone, i then expanded it to typology in general, and then the MBTI, and started looking into the communities to see what's there. initially i didn't think the MBTI would help, but i figured it was worth a shot... surprisingly, it was quite fruitful, in both warping my head around it and developing a deeper understanding that allowed me to anticipate her interpretations, conclusions and behavior better.
growth
more and more, i was preoccupied with the MBTI as a construct & lens, i used it to understand other relationships, family, past co workers, a room mate.. and yes, myself (ENTP).
the MBTI started feeling like a multi-dimensional puzzle of sorts, to examine from different perspectives and see the different ways of how the pieces come together.
from understanding that the differentiation between classical thinking/feeling and jungian thinking/feeling was a local "politically correct" construct that ignored the causality, i stumbled upon what i now consider to be a huge piece (though not the whole) in what looks like the finale solution to the puzzle:
the judging functions are tools to deal with stress, specialized in resolving cognitive dissonance in general and emotional dissonance in particular (T & F respectively), and their orders is a repression mechanism, stem from the continues conflict between those two, and the need to repress the potential resolutions for one with one in favor of the other. depending on our life, this means leaving us with an accumulation unresolved dissonance of the type with which we are least accustomed too dealing with.
in other words:
thinkers repress feelings that don't make sense.
feelers repress thoughts that don't feel right.
this piece shines its light on the need to be able to resolve both. for resolving emotional dissonance, this means finding the tools to make sense of feelings that don't make rational sense, and to overcome the expectation that they should make rational sense. for resolving cognitive dissonance, this means the ability to put their beliefs about ourselves aside.
the next piece should be understanding the repression mechanism within perception.
another aspect is learning to compensate & generate the functions you don't have.