How trauma impacts MBTI

From Insectoid:

I’m aware that the topic of cognitive functions changing during one’s lifetime is controversial, however, what if the individual has experienced trauma? if severe trauma has proven to permanently impact an individuals mind, is it not possible that the individual may come out of it with new cognitive preferences due to being forced to develop to think and perceive that way in that environment? I believe that there is a link between the two that just hasn’t been found yet.

I opened up Request a topic just before the new year, and got many more reader requests that I expected. Thank you guys for the interesting asks, and I’ll try to answer as many of them as I can! Here’s our first one, on a very important topic: trauma and its impact on MBTI. 

Limitations of personality typology systems

In the face of serious trauma, it’s best to step away from MBTI and other personality typology systems. Major trauma can look like:

• Physical / neurological trauma
  • Brain injury and physical trauma
  • Neuropathologies
  • Bacterial and viral infections
  • Malnutrition and drug use
  • Cognitive decline
• Experiential (childhood) trauma
  • Traumatic experiences (e.g. natural disasters, war, suicide or loss of caregiver)
  • Emotional and/or physical abuse and neglect (e.g. bullying, exploitation, witnessing abuse of a caregiver, exposure to violence)
  • Sexual abuse

MBTI (and personality typology in general) is best used to understand and model cognition outside of major trauma. If you have major trauma, I would advise you to gather and lean on other frameworks. If all you have is a hammer (typology), then everything looks like a nail (all personality and developmental differences). With that said, I’ll spend the rest of this post exploring how trauma may impact MBTI.

What a healthy function stack looks like

Healthy development comes down to:

1. Do I have the requisite capabilities to solve my external problems?
2. Do I have the mental fortitude and direction to guide my internal compass?

Off the bat, you see that we must all develop introverted and extraverted functions in tandem. They may not be equally strong or valued (hence i/e dominant differences), but we cannot survive without both. Someone who collapses internally following trauma may find themselves developing introverted functions (Ni/Si/Fi/Ti) at the expense of extraverted functions, and hence lack the ability to handle and negotiate with their external environment (more on this later).

In healthy, maturity-driven development, we develop through a virtuous cycle of working on increasingly complex problems and succeeding via use of our naturally more valued functions. In traumatic situations, environmental problems forcibly override this process. For example, if you naturally use Te, but you’re in an environment where you must develop Fe for survival (e.g. an extremely reactive parent you need to constantly and accurately read the moods of), you learn to suppress Te and develop Fe. 

Finally,healthy development emphasizes positive uses of a function. Traumatic situations may instead reward negative expressions of a function, even if that function is naturally valued. It’s possible to wield a highly developed function like a knife, e.g. using Fe to spot someone’s guilt and exploit it. Highly developed but adversarial use of functions is detrimental in the long run. 

Further reading on a healthy function stack and its development can be found in the “Why this order?” section of my typing guide.

Function masking and survival techniques

Does trauma change our MBTI type? Fundamentally, this boils down to the age-old nature vs. nurture debate (with a few sprinkles of domains like epigenetics). Do we have one “true” type that we’re born as, or are we born with limitless possibility of change?

I believe there is a set of dominant+auxiliary functions that we are significantly predisposed to. Masking these, or having them continually devalued, is very painful. Developing a type that is not aligned with your natural functions is like being an orphaned gosling who finds its way into a family of bears. You can fly to treetops instead of climbing them, and learn to sleep during winters. But would you have naturally valued climbing trees? Would you have, in another lifetime, migrated south instead of weathering winter storms?

Temporary function usage outside of our stack is a completely normal and healthy practice. Below, I detail situations and consequences of long-term masking and how that impacts how you type. 

Neuroticism and unbalanced attitudes

Trauma is strongly correlated with neuroticism, which is a disposition towards emotional instability, impairment in handling negative emotions, and difficulties responding to environmental stressors. While neuroticism doesn’t map cleanly to MBTI and cognitive functions (Big5 is better for this), my theory is that heavy neuroticism results in unbalanced attitude (introverted/extraverted) development. 

In the face of trauma, some individuals collapse inwards because their external environment is unstable, antagonistic, and unable to be reasoned with. They focus on the only thing they can control—their minds. Other individuals walk the opposite path: giving up the self to fully align with their external environment. If one’s own wants and thoughts are never respected by the environment, why have them?

The result is very lopsided development—e.g. an ENFJ heavily leaning into Fe/Se to better serve their environment, completely ignoring the self-guidance of Ni and Ti, and instead developing Te as a partner function to Fe. I often get questions along the lines of “can I be an INFP with high Ni/Ti development?”, or screenshots that show people scoring significantly higher on all introverted functions than extraverted functions. This is often also a case of lopsided and unhealthy development.

Without proper development of both introverted and extraverted functions, we’re thrown around by the whims of our environment and the instability of our own reactive mind. Trauma may accentuate or be the cause of this unbalanced development.

Natural function devaluation

Sometimes our external environment devalues–or we have to suppress–our valued functions for an extended period of time. This happens a lot along T/F axes, N/S axes, and Je/Pe externalizations:

• Te/Ti being devalued: Continually told you’re insensitive; needing to tiptoe around emotions; being subject to emotional blowups of authority figures
• Fe/Fi being devalued: Being told to “man up”; being told you’re too sensitive; praised only for intellectual and professional accomplishments
• Ni/Ne being devalued: being told to “get your head out of the sky”; being labeled as idealistic; rewarded only for practical work
• Si/Se being devalued: being labeled as materialistic, narrow-minded, or shallow; practical concerns being continually unaddressed by parental figures
• Je (Te/Fe) being devalued: being labeled as bossy, overbearing; authority figures dismiss your asks of predictable structure
• Pe (Ne/Se) being devalued: only rewarded for “organized” activity; labeled as unreliable; forcibly constrained to structure

Negative interactions with parents (and other authority figures, like teachers and institutional structures) are the most common causes of function devaluation. For example, an ESTJ (Te/Si/Ne/Fi) parent may continually ask their INFP (Fi/Ne/Si/Te) child to demonstrate competency in their least competent functions, Te and Si. That’s a recipe for disaster!

Extricating oneself from the situation helps. The INFP gets to see that their Fi/Ne is highly valued in other contexts. Both ESTJ and INFP get space to mature their tert/inferior functions and re-meet with empathetic understanding. But if they’re locked into a continuous relationship, the INFP will have to unhappily develop Te in order to survive, and may even start to consider themselves a Te-dom or -aux while not having the Te-competency of one. 

It’s possible for entire societies to blanket overvalue or devalue functions. Under an opportunistic, capitalistic system, most of us are asked to express Te (and Se) because it’s highly rewarded. Although most of us gain some sort of proficiency in it, many INFJs and INFPs (with inferior+blind double whammy of Te/Se), and to a lesser extent INTJs and ISFPs (with inferior Te/Se) feel misaligned or misunderstood as a result. And consider a child in a war-torn country who optimizes for present opportunities. Is that dominant Se, or is that the inability to control whether one lives to the next day? 

How trauma results in mistyping

Here are some common patterns in mistyping:

• Dom/aux switch: ENFP (Ne, Fi, Te, Si) mistypes as INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te)
• Dom confusion: INTP (Ti, Ne, Si, Fe) mistypes as INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te)
• Aux confusion: ISFP (Fi, Se, Ni, Te) mistypes as INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te)
• Same functions, different order: ISTJ (Si, Te, Fi, Ne) mistypes as INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te)
• The non-cognitive functions user: INFJ (Ni, Fe, Ti, Se) mistypes as INFP (Fi, Ne, Si, Te)

Trauma–with its combination of lopsided development and environmental suppression–might result in mistypes that are more out of the norm.

Here is where you’ll get users with very lopsided cognitive function-based test results, or people who think: “if I don’t get Te as a dominant or auxiliary function, I’m going to retake the test until I do.” The latter comes from a place of identity protection, where someone–maybe themselves–has repeatedly told them that one particular identity is going to do better in their environment.

It really pays, in many different ways, to extricate oneself from an ongoing or historical traumatic situation; by having the space to experiment and develop your strengths, you’ll find that your type is no longer blurred by the forces of the situation, you are no longer applying judgement to your natural functions, and that you can meet the needs of yourself and your environment with your strengths and cognitive perpsectives.