I’ve never liked the term personality test applied to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Each letter of the MBTI signifies a behavior preference. The letters tell me what I prefer to do, not who I am.

For example, I’m a risk taker. Before I had children, I did many high-risk activities for recreation like rock-climbing and martial arts. Which letter combination of INFPs indicates that I liked doing activities that have risk of physical injury? I’m very social with my friends. My wife and I hold dinner parties every other week. We often invite people we’ve just met in order to get to know them better. Which letters of INFP indicates that I like to be social?

I’ve read many descriptions for INFP. They’re all very flattering, but they’re also very general. Many of those descriptions seem to have some archetypal heading like Healer or Dreamer as if one word could encompass the sum of any one person. I value my ideals but I’m not an Idealist. I’m very pragmatic when it comes to daily living. When I read INFP descriptions, I see the exceptions. I see the parts that apply to some INFPs but not all. I also see parts that could describe anyone not just INFPs.

I think that INFPs are the worst at confusing Role and Identity because the idealistic part us wants our roles to be our identity. Everyone plays many roles in the life, but we only have one core identity.

In my daily life, I play several roles: father, husband, employee, blogger, friend, etc. Each of those roles requires a certain set of behaviors to be successful in that role. Also, those roles are transient. I haven’t always been a father and sometime in the future, my role as a son will pass away with my parents.

Our Identity or a better term, our Self, is a not so fleeting. We are who we are and I posit that we have always known who we are. Our Self is an amalgam of our values and beliefs. Our roles are an external manifestation of those values and beliefs.

INFPs tend toward depression and it’s not really a big mystery as to why.

It’s about making choices and decisions. I think that’s why INFPs who are extreme Ps are more depressed more often than INFPs who border the J preference.

A main cause for unhappiness is that I don’t think INFPs can define “happy” in measurable terms. Happiness is some vague ideal like Truth. It’s the P part of us, that keeps changing our definitions of happy. It’s hard to achieve a goal that can’t be define. However, I do feel that most INFPs grow out of that phase. Our definitions for happiness become more concrete as we get older because we realize we’re running out of time. Unfortunately, the goals we finally set for happiness tend towards unrealistic which starts effecting self-worth.

So why is it that happiness seems more elusive for INFPs than the other MBTI types?

I don’t think I’ve met anyone who doesn’t want to be happy. For INFPs, we are happiest when we are being ourselves. Our difficulty with happiness arises because we define ourselves by Ideal Self not by our Emerging Self. I prefer the term Emerging Self over Actual Self because the word “emerging” has connotations of movement, of becoming more.

INFPs are in a perpetual state of Becoming. We see ourselves as the butterfly even though we may still be in the chrysalis.