This is a follow up to a recent program I ran for a
group of business people at the Curtin Business School Centre for
Entrepreneurship.
One of the benefits of knowing your Jungian psychological profile
is that it enables you separate your characteristics that are innate, thus
strengths, from the behaviours that have developed as part of your life journey
- choices you have made and experiences you have had.
For example, I was lead to believe early in life that there
was something terribly wrong with me because during my teenage years I seemed
overly emotional. This was not the way for a man to be and so I gave myself a
very hard time over or it and the more often an emotional surge occurred the
harder the internal response.
You can imagine the relief to discover that my emotional component,
my Feeling preference, was a natural, a given, a gift, not a major flaw in a pattern
of psychological dysfunction. And because it was my secondary preference, my
teenage years were its time to come forward, to flourish. The Feeling
preference is one of what Jung called “brain function” preferences and it was
the one after my major, my Intuition preference.
But there’s more. Stay with me, even if it gets complicated.
When my mother was pregnant with me, her mother was chased
off the family farm by her father in a drunken rage, with an axe. Now you can’t
tell me that didn’t have an impact on the baby, unborn boy. And by that time in
her life, my mother had already been battling depression for over a decade.
Then, I did say there was more, after my parents were scared
by the flame red scalp of the Little Jon, they took him to the family doctor
and he was diagnosed with pink-disease. What’s that? Mercury poisoning. How do
you get it? It was in baby food, teeth fillings and god knows what else.
Symptoms: high levels of anxiety and irritability, quick
temper, depression.
Dammit! Doomed.
Let me recap for you.
I have an innate emotional component. My mother bares me in
a time of high tension, grief and emotion in her family life. I am poisoned by
a heavy metal that does my brain no favours.
Oh, and later, I am also diagnosed with lead poisoning.
Doomed? Nah. Why not? Because I’m human and the species has
an amazing ability to shift, to grow, to change, to morph. Do I still suffer
emotional surges? Yes. But now I know that one cause is biological. It’s not
all psychological. And my innate emotional preference helps me find, and for
long periods, maintain, an emotional balance.
There’s another gift I haven’t mentioned: humour. Without
that I would have killed my father, or him me. And my mother? Same. My Wife?
Yes. More about her here
Knowing my Jungian preferences - Extraversion Intuition
Feeling and Perceiving (ENFP) - helps me sort out what is what, where I need
help, where I need to adapt, to learn and which buttons are being pushed and
why I respond the way I do.
For example, when the Esperance Port lead contamination news
blew in our faces, I was enraged. Why? It was a combination of my innate Feeling
preference – the immoral behaviour of the mining company responsible, clearly
showing no understanding of the impact of such a lazy implementation of guidelines,
on humans, birds, or the rest of the environment. And my personal experience of
lead poisoning – similar symptoms to mercury poisoning with the addition of brain
damage and stunted growth – and the torment, turmoil and suffering it caused.
And this is where my humour helps me. When I tell my tale of
woe I always ad: Well, my brain would have gotten damaged anyway, but the thing
that annoy me most is that I could have been a really big guy.
