When an "ISFJ" realizes they're truly an ISFP

Yamapi dancing at a party, which, yeah, of course I had to.

I retook the MBTI test associated with the 16 Personalities website, and here are the incredibly accurate and helpful results.

Okay, so there is nothing weirder than an ISFP spending more than a decade being mistyped as an ISFJ. These two personality types are on opposite ends of the spectrum. I actually thought I was just a crap ISFJ and spent so much time and effort for years trying to get better at being one. Turns out, I'M NOT ONE! I'm an ISFP, better known as the Adventurer, and oh my gosh, friends, it makes so much bloody sense!

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Is the ISFJ hard to understand?

Is the ISFJ hard to understand?

Yes, Ned the Piemaker from Pushing Daisies is, in fact, an ISFJ. He makes it into my top five favorite fictional ISFJs that include Captain America, John Watson, and Kevin Ryan from Castle. If anyone is hard to understand, it's Ned!

So, onto the question, is the ISFJ hard to understand? That entirely depends on how well you understand the ISFJ cognitive functions. Because Si is our top function we spend a whole of time living in the past. In fact, if we could wrap ourselves up in physical representations of our memories, then we would. In fact, I sort of do, judging by the classic movie posters on my walls and the unopened Elvis and James Dean collectible dolls on display on my bookcase. They're memories and whenever I see them, I'm reminded of what I love. If you can understand that part of an ISFJ, then you're halfway there. If you can't, it's probably because you're still trying to approach the ISFJ from your perspective instead of trying to see from our perspective.

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ISFJs are evil? . . . I think not!

Elijah Mikaelson - one of the hottest vampires on television and an ISFJ to boot!

People now write the darndest things into my search box. It's kinda funny!

Like this latest one, ISFJs are evil.

Umm, no, we're not. The ISFJ can be conflicted sometimes like Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey or even Ned Stark in Game of Thrones, but you couldn't call either of those characters "evil."

One of my absolute favorite ISFJs in television is Elijah in The Originals, but he's not a villain despite the occasional moment of heart-ripping that he does to protect family. Nope, instead that honor goes to Klaus, a truly wicked ENTJ. Fortunately, most ENTJ's never reach his levels of manipulation and scariness.

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ISFJ and INFP . . . or a study on Sharon Raydor and Rusty Beck

For those of you unfamiliar with Sharon and Rusty, they are the lead characters in Major Crimes, a sequel crime drama to the hit program, The Closer. Sharon Raydor is captain of the Major Crimes division of the LAPD. Rusty is a witness to a crime, and since he's under-age and his parents are not in the picture, Sharon is his guardian. The two shows intersect because the crime Rusty witnessed happened at the end of The Closer, a crime committed by the ultra-villain Phillip Stroh (who I literally hate with each and every breath). Rusty was . . . hustling at the time. Because his mother abandoned him when he was 15, and he didn't know what to do, he turned to selling himself to men so he could survive. I'm not condoning or excusing his behavior, but that's what he did because he felt he couldn't trust anyone to help him.

A lot of the personal focus in Major Crimes is helping Rusty heal from his experience on the streets and prepare to appear in court for Phillip Stroh's trial. He builds relationships, slowly and through much mistrust, with all the members of the division, all of them familiar characters from The Closer. Sharon was under no obligation to keep Rusty. They could have placed him in witness protection or sent him to foster care, or any number of things, but she decided to keep him instead. The question is why.

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