Self Discovery

I'm a person who likes to take personality tests. I'm a Four with a Five wing on the Enneagram. I come out as INFJ on Myers-Briggs. On the DISC test, I chart as a high S and moderately high C.

I keep a journal and see a spiritual director monthly. So a recent discovery rather took me aback. I was tooling around the Internet, checking out goodness knows what, and I came upon a description that seemed to have me pretty much pegged: passive aggressive.

What? I immediately thought. Me? Denial set right in. So I honestly looked at some of the indications: fear of dependency, fear of intimacy, making excuses, sulking, victimization. Sigh. Not that these traits dominate my life, but... I do find myself going there when I'm low.

Funny, I thought I've been pretty emotionally and spiritually healthy lately. Could I really be passive-aggressive? Looking at it as objectively as I can, I would say I have those tendencies. And part of me would totally freak out about this. But I think I can recognize this in myself and acknowledge it without overreacting to it or even judging it. It is as it is. I can even sort of laugh at it and accept it. If I'm aware of it—and especially if I name it, I think—I take away its power over me.

This is another tendency that I (and I would guess many) have: we sit in judgment of ourselves, or at least parts of ourselves. We need to just accept ourselves. I often remind myself that I would not be nearly as critical or condemning of these same faults in others. I'm starting to cut myself some slack, too. I know that it's easy to think too highly of oneself, and I know that I have my moments. But generally I tend to lean the other way. I'm sure if I lived in the Middle Ages I'd be wearing a hair shirt all the time.

I was recently diving in again to Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. It's one of the seminal works (by Riso and Hudson) on the enneagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality. As I read through the nine levels of development in the Four personality type (three levels each of healthy, average, and unhealthy), it was a very accurate road map of my mental and emotional state. I honestly recognized myself in those pages. (It was kind of alarming, like who's been watching me?) I'm happy to report that I spend more time these days in the healthy levels, but I certainly live in the average levels a good deal. And I must admit to dipping into the unhealthy traits from time to time.

Anyway, I think the point of all this is that it's critical that we do know ourselves, warts and all. And some of us need to remind ourselves (and let others remind us) that what we call the warts are all just part of the beautiful mess of being human.