Introverted Sensation: ISTJ and ISFJ Types by Lenore Thomson Part 2
Like ESPs, ISJs are at the mercy of their immediate perceptions, but they don't usually realize this. Nor do the people around them. Extraverted Sensates respond to their sense impressions all at once, and their receptivity is obvious. When they "burn out," people don't need to ask why. ISJs are so cautious about their investment of time and energy that people are surprised when they reach a breaking point.
It should be noted, therefore that ISJs really are Sensation types left-brain Sensation types. The left brain can't handle multiple perceptions - except by dispatching Extraverted Judgment to put them in sequential order. So ISJs are constantly absorbing new impressions, but they're sorting them one at a time, putting them into the various "meaning" boxes they've set up in their internal storage system.
When such types are faced with a decision, they literally examine every fact at hand, granting each its own integrity, examining it from every angle, trying to figure out which box it belongs in, or whether some other box will have to be set up and labelled. ISJs do this with all the facts involved before they're willing to draw any conclusions.
The best comparison I can think of is those tribal elders who won't sanction outward change in the community until they've located a precedent in the founding stories that embody their tradition. Until they can figure out where to store the information and what it's likely to affect, they have no basis for accepting or rejecting a proposal
Most ISJs go over books, documents, and contracts word by word, and perhaps several times, before they're satisfied they know what's being said. Pushed to a premature decision, they will continue to think of exceptions and qualifications that hadn't occurred to them earlier.
Once they've decided change is warranted, however, ISJs are impossible to dissuade. If their decision is an unpopular one, they'll stand by it, come hell or high water. The relevant facts have become part of who they are, and they will insist that their outward situation be adjusted to reflect them. Even if they have little time, they will not delegate this implementation process to others. They want hands-on control over it.
Introverted Sensation on Its Own Terms The outward behaviours of these types have contributed to their general reputation as careful, strong, faithful, persevering, and honourable - but perhaps a little dull. Even ISJs will describe themselves this way! But in truth, the inner world of an ISJ is often delightfully unconventional, even whimsical, and the type's private interests can be decidedly offbeat.
This is where ISJs definitively part company with the ESJs. Extraverted Judgers are inevitably well-adjusted to prevailing standards and assumptions, but they don't usually see themselves that way. Because they maintain a flexible relationship to those standards, they describe themselves as independent, even different from others. ISJs, by contrast, may have a thoroughly individual way of looking at life, but they rarely believe that their way of seeing things is unusual. They may feel alone, unable to make a decision, misunderstood, or unappreciated, but it almost never occurs to them that their views are idiosyncratic, much less unique to themselves. The flavour of their inner world is not immediately apparent in an Extraverted context, but it's almost always visible in their hobbies, their personal letters, and their leisure-time pursuits. Such activities make clear the way these types naturally give form to their internal priorities, apart from managing life for others.
ISJs are quintessential collectors, and they acquire objects the way they acquire facts - one at a time, in a consistent domain of interest. Although these objects may be classic collectibles, like stamps or Hummels or first editions, they're more often specific and esoteric, as though the ISJ were giving outward expression to the Perceiving self within: the pleasures, passions, and humour that would otherwise go undetected.
ISJs attend toy soldier conventions, become experts on musical nutcrackers, fill their basements with arcade games from the 1950s, accumulate medieval maps, collect weapons, Snow White figurines, and artefacts from particular time periods. They show up at memorabilia auctions, book fairs, flea markets, and science fiction gatherings.
Their acquisition also takes the form of collecting experiences - or more accurately, variations on a particular experience. This, too, can occur in the classic sense of playing golf every day or boating every weekend. But it more often involves activities of a distinctive, even fanciful nature that, by virtue of ritual repetition, become nearly archetypal.
For example, a good friend, an ISFJ army operations engineer, spends his vacations riding roller coasters all over the world. A colleague, an ISTJ indexer, finds a way to attend every concert within a 500-mile area given by folk artist Richard Thompson. An acquaintance, an ISFJ social worker, reads every new Stephen King novel ten times in a row.
Such activities appear to make a stable bridge between consistent personal impressions and the constantly changing outer world. But unless one knows an ISJ well enough to be aware of the type's private pursuits, the deep, sometimes romantic attachment the type has to certain kinds of objects, information, and experience may be completely invisible. In fact, people who don't know an ISJ apart from a work context may regard the type as serious, predictable, and somewhat detached.
Actually, ISJs are almost helplessly engaged. Given the subjective nature of their perceptual reality, they're always aware of a certain discontinuity between their expectations and others' behaviour. Most ISJs find this aspect of life amusing, if frustrating, and they may keep up a running Seinfeld-like commentary in their heads about the absurdities they encounter every day.
Not long ago, the ISFJ engineer was complaining about how hard it is to find a decent classical section in popular music stores - he keeps finding Frankie Valli's Greatest Hits filed under Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
ISJs tend to believe that others don't "get" their sense of humour, but this isn't necessarily true. When ISJs feel comfortable, they make all sorts of observations about perceived discontinuities, some of which are dead serious. But they aren't the kinds of observations that everyone would make. So it's not always clear what kind of reaction the type is looking for.
For example, ISJs may react with discomfort when someone's behaviour is inconsistent with a stated or apparent obligation. Their feelings, however, may focus on something that other people regard as a mere technicality. They can be acutely embarrassed by social or economic misrepresentation - such as wearing the wrong clothes or displaying possessions beyond one's means. Pop media is merciless in its depiction of such reactions. One thinks about Niles Frasier, of the TV program Frasier, who becomes apoplectic at the idea of anyone's wearing white shoes after Labour Day.
ISJs in real life usually try to behave in a way that reflects precisely the role, station, obligations, and rights they perceive as their own. They may even present themselves neutrally, preferring to err on the side of underestimating their position.
Because they are so concerned to anchor outward reality to their self-experience, ISJs can have a hard time understanding that others don't see reality in the same terms. It may strike them that any decent person would see reality in those terms. So the only possible response for many of these types is to establish a particular area of expertise, so they can have hands-on control over what happens in that arena or determine how the standards are met.
This is how ISJs unwittingly trap themselves in their dominant function. They turn into lone rangers, enlisted by friends, colleagues, employer, spouse, and children to rescue them from and discharge the tasks that others find tedious or difficult. ISJs nearly always comply, even when they feel overwhelmed or used, and others may come to take them for granted.
Some ISJs shrug and figure that their inner resources and sense of responsibility have doomed them to a life of unequal partnerships, but they need to take a closer look at the decisions they've made in this regard. Being of use can be tantamount for ISJs to intimate connection with others, so they can unknowingly keep others dependent for the sake of being needed.
ISJs who restrict themselves to circumstances in which they feel needed ultimately cheat themselves of necessary Extraverted experience. Their Extraverted environments are too well adapted to their inner life. They have no incentive to make decisions apart from their own priorities. These decisions have a selfless quality, because they're made on behalf of others, but they aren't objective, and they can create problems the ISJs aren't equipped to handle.
Such types may find, for example, that the people who depend on them react to their ministrations with an irritating mixture of resentment and appreciation - or with entitlement and increased demands. Colleagues may accuse them of being controlling or unreasonable. ISJs don't recognize themselves in these criticisms. Sticking to their guns strikes them as a matter of honour and integrity, not a matter of reason or relationship.
Ultimately, they get pressured by their psyche to develop a more Extraverted perspective. They're pulled in the direction of their inferior function, Extraverted Intuition, and the resulting impulses undermine their usual approach to life. Like all types, however, ISJs don't see this unconscious drama as part of themselves.
Extraverted Intuition directly opposes the ISJ's dominant aims and goals, so it's not well developed in these types. Introverted Sensation tells them that immediate sense impressions are part of a consistent pattern of inner meaning. Extraverted Intuition suggests, rather, that immediate impressions are part of an emerging external pattern, which will ultimately change their meaning.
Under the influence of unconscious Extraverted Intuition, ISJs become genuinely cautious. They have the impression that others are asking them to accept changes that require a compromise of their integrity, and they suspect that these people lack discipline or a sense of values. Inferior Intuition persuades them that the larger picture is at stake, and that accepting the change will collapse the whole structure.
What ISJs need at this point is the deliberate cultivation of their secondary function, Extraverted Thinking or Extraverted Feeling. This won't protect them from a sense of conflict, but it will keep them from mistaking competing psychological aims for outward battles in which their honour is at stake.
As stated earlier, ISJs usually need an outside viewpoint to understand how to do this. And it's worth noting that many of the letters printed in advice columns ask the columnist to arbitrate precisely the kind of outward battle ISJs are wont to conduct - between doing "the right thing" and compromising their integrity for the sake of relationship. A fairly typical letter of this sort is from a mother who objects to a church wedding for a daughter already living with her fiancé. The question is whether the mother should stand up for her morals and stay home or attend and thereby sanction what she regards as a dishonourable life choice.
Advice columnists invariably refuse to answer this kind of question, which is posed in solidly Introverted terms. Instead, they ask the writer to recognize the Extraverted side of the issue. They ask whether the exercise of subjective priority in this context is worth the probable loss of daughter and potential grandchildren in all the contexts to come.
Such advice does not beg the issue of personal integrity. It forces the mother to recognize that there is an objective moral issue involved – the relationship with her daughter and grandchild, which she values and needs. If Introverted Sensation insists that Judgment be used to manage the integrity of others' decisions, Extraverted Judgment suggests that the roles of mother and grandmother are also priorities, and they'll be lost unless the daughter is allowed to learn from her own decisions. This is where the real conflict lies - not between doing the right thing and sanctioning a bad thing, but between two honourable ways of understanding the same situation.
It takes a lot of work for ISJs to recognize that their very real virtues can be modified by external considerations without betraying them. It requires bringing their inner priorities into dialogue with their outer ones, rather than the other way around. By wrestling with this conflict, the mother in question may decide that family values means more than playing by the rules; they mean cherishing loved ones even when they appear to be wrong.
ISJs who learn how to train their Judgment on their outer needs as well as their inner ones gradually increase the range of both their options and their capacity for empathetic relationships. These types are highly respected and admired by others. They radiate a quiet, caring, but forceful sense of authority. They know exactly who they are and are assured in their direction, but they can hear what others say and make accommodations when they need to.
Some of our best public servants appear to be ISJs of this sort – most notably President George Bush and General Colin Powell. Their leadership derives, in part, from their ability to stay true to what they believe, to listen to others, and to direct people's energies productively in a crisis.
The Tertiary Function Conversely, ISJs who resist their Extraverted side find it very difficult to take others' views into account. They're quite sure they're right, and they can be incensed by suggestions to the contrary. The more they resist an external standard of Judgment, the more Extraverted Intuition gets out of their control, and they reach for the comfort of their tertiary function.
The ISJ's tertiary function is Introverted Thinking or Introverted Feeling, which I talked about in the last chapter. This kind of Judgment operates in a right-brain manner. Developed well, it encourages us to maintain unconditional human values, even when doing so is not immediately gratifying.
This kind of morality is crucial for Extraverted Perceivers, who need contact with an internal sense of right and wrong. It can be disastrous for ISJs who lack an adequate Extraverted perspective. ISJs are already likely to regard their subjective priorities as internalized values. Introverted Judgment ultimately persuades the type that he or she is the only decent, moral, or reasonable person in the picture, whose mission is to maintain the still point at the centre of a disintegrating universe.
Such types can seem almost Extraverted, because their behaviours are coloured more and more by their inferior function. They take all sorts of social positions that give them the power to do what they think is right, or they're bustling back and forth between various people's houses, quite certain that things will fall apart if they don't take care of them personally. Their tireless efforts are usually rewarded by others, and they can appear saint like – until someone questions their motives or strikes them as unappreciative.
This particular aspect of the ISJ is often stereotyped in our culture's Sensation-oriented myth cycle - on TV shows, in novels, and in movies. Big Nurse, the head of the psychiatric ward in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is a good example of an ISFJ who deforms external reality along the lines of her inner impressions, all the while believing herself to be a sane, calming, helpful manager of people.
One might also consider all those unyielding, by-the-books ISTJ police captains in TV cop shows who make life difficult for the typical flamboyant ESP detective. Such caricatures imply that ISJs are threatened by individuality and concerned to stamp it out wherever it rears its spirited head. But entertainment is an Extraverted Perceiving medium, and Perceivers always fear that rules and regulations are designed to curtail their personalnfreedoms.
As I've tried to point out, ISJs themselves have a view of reality that is highly individual. The ones who lack Extraversion simply don't know how individual they really are. One can see it in the way such types apply forms and rules. They aren't trying to make others conform to objective standards. They're trying to force life to adhere to their subjective impressions. Some infractions will strike them as meaningless, others a threat to civilized existence as we know it.
In fact, extreme types can become distinctly amoral, all the while believing themselves to be champions of society's moral values. Lately, medical shows have been portraying HMO directors in these terms - as the cost-conscious ISTJ who thinks he's saving the world, but whose bottom-line mentality is devoid of moral principle.
Like all Introverted functions, Introverted Sensation has an archaic human core - the unchanging psychic patterns, evolved over millions of years, that help to form and stabilize our individual frame of mind. ISJs who get seriously out of touch with their Extraverted side gradually become oriented by this collective psychic world, and their behaviours and emotions seem oddly stereotyped, as though they were playing a part in their own myth - as the Hero, the Strong Leader, the Saviour, the Martyr, the Sage, the Victim, the Nurturer, the Protector, and so forth.
Ultimately, however, the archaic aspect of Introverted Sensation tells us something important about this function's distinct contribution to human awareness. If Extraverted Sensation suggests that we have our portion in constant phenomenal change, Introverted Sensation suggests that we are grounded by archetypal patterns beneath the threshold of consciousness.
In this respect, Extraverted and Introverted forms of Sensation bring together the two aspects of sensory existence that physicists call explicate and implicate order. We recognize the transcendent nature of this combination in many of our religious traditions, such as the taking of vows and the celebration of the sacraments. When we submit immediate sensory phenomena to static ritual boundaries, it grants them meaning. And that meaning helps to mark out our individual path.
