Grief Destroyed My Personality Type

I took my first personality test nearly 20 years ago when I was 19. It was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a famous personality test based loosely on the teachings of Psychologist Carl Jueng. The test told me I was an ENFP, which means, in short, that I function at my peak when I am in “performance” mode, working with people, feeling a good vibe, losing track of time, and following my intuition into deep and rich relationships. My young college student self sat slack-jawed at the findings. “How could this test know me so well?” I wondered. Sure enough, when I leaned into the findings of the test and put my “ENFP” diagnosis to work, I found success as a student leader, a fraternity brother, and church intern. In many ways, I’m grateful for what this test revealed in me. It’s little wonder that the Greeks carved the phrase “know thyself” into the wall of the oracle’s temple to Apollo in Delphi.

I’m not the only one who has been smitten by personality tests like these. Whether it’s the Enneagram or the DISK or the Big Five, it’s big business helping people discover themselves. We see the same impulse in the renewed popularity of astrology, young adult novels that feature some sort of great “sorting” mechanism, and clickbait internet quizzes. Who doesn’t want an external authority to help unlock the hidden secrets of our identity?

Personality indicators are fun, and perhaps, one might learn something about themselves through a bit of reflection on their results. Despite my college age devotion to what the external authority told me, I can also tell you by personal experience that they aren’t enough. Put too much stock in the results of your tests, as I once did, and you’ll find the limits of what these indicators reveal.

From 2012 to 2015, my wife and I worked on a professional side project alongside our normal day jobs. The hope was that this project would take root and grow, and then I could transition out of my day job and rely on this project for my sole income. We spent one year planning for the project, and three years working on the project: 4 years altogether. We gave nights and weekends to this project, but more importantly, we gave our hearts and hopes to it as well. The decision to end the project was not as sad as I had expected; we were burnt out and tired and needed to disengage. I wasn’t prepared, however, for the wave of grief that would soon crash into me, and by proxy, my marriage.

The next nine months after the project were some of the hardest and scariest in my life. Bryan was supposed to be an extrovert, but this post-project Bryan didn’t want to leave the house. In fact, post-project Bryan’s intuition was faulty, and his work at his day-job began to slip. He was numb to his feelings, depressed and joyless. Numb, that is, except when he and his wife fought. They both could feel anger, but post-project Bryan rarely felt anything else. What happened to this adroit, jolly, optimistic, loving, and caring Bryan that had walked the earth for the previous twenty nine years? The ENFP who could read a room, engage with anyone, and welcome strangers with open arms? Who was this crabby, sunken eyed husk that had taken his place?

It’s easy with hindsight to see the grief in all of it, but in the throws of numbness, depression, anger, and the rest of those famous stages, self-diagnosis isn’t all that easy. There was no acronym or test to take that would give me insight into how I should behave. My poor wife would have to put up with this Bryan for about nine months before the old Bryan returned to himself. What made it worse was the kitchen renovation post-project Bryan started that she didn’t ask for. She’s quite the saint for not only offering me grace at my most unhinged, but also for eating dinner off the grill and out of crock pots for two months straight.

Personality indicators are great for what they are, but when the fullness of our identity rests on being a Taurus, a Hufflepuff, or a 9w1, we rest them on shaky ground. The first challenge, the next failure, the new defeat, any of these difficult life experiences will overwhelm us without a firmer grasp on our identity than these indicators provide. I still think an external authority is helpful in helping us know ourselves, and again, these tests can be helpful to some degree. They’re just not big enough, not individually designed, and not offered in love.

Alongside the limits of what a personality test can reveal, it’s also true that the human heart often craves knowledge as a means of control. The intoxicating promise of these tests is self-knowledge, a source code of one’s own personal programming that will finally allow us to deprogram the bugs in our system. If it were only that easy. Sometimes, life requires us to embrace that which goes against our ingrained personalities. Introverts occasionally need to practice extrovert behaviors, high strung achievers need to take a back seat, and feeling types need to make decisions based on research data. Hufflepuffs are required to be Griffindors. The problem isn’t that our programming is faulty. Instead, the problem is that life is hard. It requires more of us than we can give, and no personality is fully capable of weathering its challenges.

The final limitation of a personality indicator is that people can change. Often a result of new pains and new loves, personality tests offer a snapshot in time but come with an expiration date. A new job requires us to be better at task management, and after a few years, we find ourselves to be an ENFJ instead of an ENFP, a more confident leader instead of an inspiring entertainer. Perhaps, as the result of new skills and changes in taste, we discover we gravitate to the enneagram number of our “wing” more than our original primary result. Lord knows since having small kids, I prefer to stay in a lot more than I used to before they came along. I’m just not the extrovert I used to be.

Grief wrecked my enneagram. It shattered my Myers-Briggs. I was so sure and confident of my identity and talents and gifts that, when those gifts and talents weren’t enough to hold off the hardships of life, I had no anchor to ground my character. I lashed out at people who loved me, I avoided work obligations, and I found my solace in drive-through cheeseburgers. It was an event that changed me, and revealed a sobering part of my personality that other tests failed to identify prior.

If we’re going to go to an external authority for our identity, it had better be one that can pronounce unchangeable truths, qualities that aren’t tied to the ups and downs of life. The declaration that someone is a “child of God,” for example, doesn’t change with circumstances. It’s better to be a forgiven sinner than an extrovert or introvert any day, especially when the forgiveness is eternal in scope. Some external authorities are so trustworthy that people let go of that desire to control and embrace a higher power. I hope I remember to take the word of that authority next time things fall apart. But then again, ENFPs are notorious for being flakey.