My daughter is home from college (yay) and is going to be 20 this summer (oh my gosh).  She shared with me a conversation she was having with friends and wondered my opinion. “When did you feel like an adult?” she asked.  What a great question, I thought, and have been thinking about it ever since. Her question stirs up a lot for me, about what it means to be an adult and just how that happens.  

My first thought about burgeoning adulthood was that it was when I became financially independent, able to pay all my own bills.  But then I thought about when I became a parent. Having a child and being completely responsible for someone else really made me feel like an adult.  But then as I thought even more about it over the next few days, I realized that I truly, truly felt like an adult after my Father had passed away and my mother became ill.  It was not until I felt like I had no parents to turn to, and instead had to take care of my parent, that I really,really felt like an adult. But even with that, there are still days when I long to be taken care of and hardly feel like an adult at all.

And I know plenty of people who pay their bills, or have children, or who care for a parent that still don’t actually function like adults. In reality, there is no event that makes you an adult, rather it’s the accumulation of psychological growth secondary to  life events that brings maturity. In paying your own bills, you take responsibility for all of your actions and decisions. In having a child, you learn to put aside your own desires for the benefit of another and also learn to trust your own judgment. And then, in taking care of a parent you come to understand the existential paradox of being alone in the world, living our one and only unique life in connection with others.  Life events don’t make us adults, but they offer the opportunities for some kind of growth process.

So what is happening? I think the answer that best describes it is integration.  We all have many parts of ourselves, disparate feelings and needs, desires and identities.  When we can integrate these disparate parts of ourselves, we feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for all of them, finding compromises and balances.  We don’t have to shut out certain parts, or act one way in one area of our lives and a different way in another. We don’t have to blame others, but can accept our mistakes and weaknesses. If we are integrated, we can hold competing wishes, such as wanting to party with needing to get work done, and competing opinions, such as being angry with a partner and still wanting to be faithful to them. Integration is a process that happens over time, that steadily leads to a more and more coherent and comfortable sense of our self. Because we have more of a balance within ourselves, we have a more consistent sense of identity and function as more of a whole, reliable person.

Recently I have heard the term, “adulting”.  According to the Urban Dictionary, “Adulting (v):  to carry out more and more of the duties and responsibilities of fully developed individuals (paying off that credit card debt, settling beef without blasting social media, etc.) “  Both aspects seem right to me. One, that it’s a verb that describes a process, and, two, that it’s moving toward increasingly full development. In other words, we never stop adulting.

At work recently, we were asked to take the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator in order to explore how our leadership team interacts.  It had been a LONG time since I had taken the Myers Briggs, and I was surprised to learn that my profile had changed with time (I am now a “Defender”, an ISFJ).  It was fun to compare our profiles and make sense of how our areas of strength and vulnerabilities intersected. I was so taken by the process that I encouraged my family members to also take it.  We had some good laughs in reading our profile descriptions (a bit like horoscopes), but in fact, it helped to illuminate some of our areas of misunderstanding in a way that was non-judgmental and clarifying.  So in this weeks post, I thought I would share the link for you to take the Myers Briggs (MBTI) for free and print out your own profile, along with some background about it. I hope it will give you some self knowledge and a way to communicate more compassionately with people close to you.

The link for the test and your profile is:

16Personalities: Free personality test, type descriptions, relationship …

16personalities.com

The MBTI was constructed by Katherine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers.  It is based on ideas of personality developed by Carl Jung. It was first published in 1962, but has been updated and used in much research since that time.  It is often used in business as a way to analyze and enhance team development. It is a simple self report measure that does not measure aptitude or ability, but instead captures our preferences in how we perceive and make judgments about our world.  In scoring the MBTI, it gives you a profile based on four pairs of preferences, or dichotomies.

The four dichotomies are:

Preferred World:  Do you prefer to focus on the outer world (Extroversion) or on your own inner world (introversion)?

Information:  Do you prefer to focus on basic information you take in (Sensing) or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning (Intuition)?

Decisions:  When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency (Thinking) or first look at the people and special circumstances (Feeling).

Structure:  In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided (Judging) or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options (Perceiving)?

Based on the four preferences for each  category, you have your own personality type which is expressed as a code with four letters.  The creators explain that each of the 16 personality types is more than the sum of the parts and represents a unique way of being in the world.  Based on your preferences, you can see how certain relationships may run into misunderstandings.  For example, a person with a Commander personality profile, ENTJ, tends to focus on getting things done and naturally tends to lead.  They also tend to be a little insensitive to others along the way to their goal.  This may clash with an Advocate type, INFJ, who is extremely valuable to the team in facilitating team work, but tends to take things a little personally.  By understanding these as personality tendencies rather than taking things personally with one another,  these two co-workers can be mindful of how they interact and work more comfortably together.

So, go ahead, take the Inventory, it’s worth the 20 minutes.  Then, see how you compare to your loved ones!