Pondering the question of "me"

In my previous post: Am I a person or a diagnosis; I was seeking some insight on the relationship between me as a person vs me as "depression" as it would relate to and in the context of therapy. Now I must go one step futher and pose the question of "me".

First off does anyone know if personality type indicators, such as Jung and MBI, are considered valid or at least note worthy to therapist? For example, knowing a person has the predisposition to introverted traits allows the client to feel secure with who they are (and have always been), at the core of their being, instead of automatically "assuming" or "labeling" the client as having "social phobias", "shyness", "self-esteem issues", and the like. Especially when the clients reason for seeking therapy has absolutely no mention of any concerns about their "social well being or self esteem".

Secondly, is anyone familiar with "Intellectual Giftedness" and the "Overexcitabilities" inherent in their nature? Can, Should, Does, these factors have an affect on the effectiveness of therapy for the clients who have theses traits?

I await your valued opinions-justatoaster

Hi, justatoaster, welcome to PC!

What interesting questions you ask. For myself, I like to think of factors, attributes, skills, abilities, etc. as being wonderful tools for my use rather than as "limiters" of any sort. That I was born with the attribute to be "shy" does not mean I have to act that way. That I did act that way in my youth, is more a "habit" because it was "easy" rather than what I consider negative "finger pointing" -- once shy, always shy, give it up, you ARE shy.

I am only Perna and Perna is too complicated and diverse to be wholly known, especially from the "outside." :-) My "goal" in life is to learn as much about Perna as possible and because I AM Perna, I get to say what is true and what is not.

I used therapy, first as support as I was a confused little thing :-) but then as a tool to help me in my figuring out who I was and where I had been/was going, etc. I think the "effectiveness of therapy" is only related to what one wants in therapy, what one brings to it and how one uses it individually. My T wasn't big on what her training or outside indices said about us and what we were doing, it was more what I "wanted" and was doing. I still remember the day we had a session and right before I left I said, "I don't think we talked about what we should have" and my T looked thoughtful and then said, "I think you're right" and that was the end of the session :-) From then on I understood that my T wasn't running/in charge the session, I was, she was just along for the "ride" and to help if/when she could.

Interesting post, justatoaster. I'll respond to just one bit of it.

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First off does anyone know if personality type indicators, such as Jung and MBI, are considered valid or at least note worthy to therapist?

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I am familiar with the MBI, and I don't think it would give my therapist any information he doesn't know already from firsthand experience with me after 20+ hours of talking. I figure he knows a lot more than MBI would tell him. Anyway, my T tends to not use labels. I always thought it interesting and even empowering that he trusted me to tell him what I thought he needed to know in order to provide therapy. For example, it fascinated me that he never asked me what my job/profession was. He depended on me to tell him that, IF I thought it somehow important to our therapy our relationship.

I can't remember how the conversation begain, but my T and I did talk about MBI once. (sorry if I'm completely offbase, but you're talking about Myers Briggs right?) I think it was because I mentioned we'd done the test as part of a work thing. We talked about it briefly and then moved onto something else. I think it was just one more piece of information for us to work with. Maybe it helped my T understand how I see the world and myself.

I like using Myers Briggs in work contexts because it helps me understand how other people like to function and tackle a project. I think there are probably mixed thoughts on its relavance to therapy. I did google it once and read that there are some studies trying to coorelate depression with different Myers Brigs types. If I remember correctly, the study seemed to indicate that rather than a certain personality type being more likely to become depressed, the reverse was true. By that I mean, if someone is depressed they are more likely to act in Introverted ways.

sorry for the ramble!