Hello everyone.
Some backstory: I've had a shallow understanding of MBTI for like a decade or more, but after a traumatic break up (about a year ago), I found myself in something of a crisis, trying to understand how it is two good people who care about eachother might still come into intractable conflict with one another. Up until that point I had been able to clearly identify flaws in past partners so I never really had to confront this head on. But with this relationship I fully appreciated that my significant other was both intelligent and ethical and there was nothing "obvious" working against us, and yet we still could not make it work. I felt completely destroyed and helpless. Anyway, this caused me to completely re evaluate basically everything and I made a huge effort to try to understand what was really going on with interpersonal relationships. This inevitably lead me to Jung, and after almost a year of reading his books and absorbing as much information as I could possibly get my hands on, to here, where I have many questions.
I consider myself an ILI, which I'm about as sure as an ILI can get about such things, which is to say I'm open to the possibility of being wrong, but I don't think its likely.
I think of myself as an enneagram 1, which I think will come off as odd, but I can explain. My parents, as far as I can tell, were SEI (father) and IEI (mother), and growing up was indescribably difficult for me. I really felt like I could never do anything right and was fundamentally flawed. I really thought of myself as kind of stupid, like I somehow wasn't "getting it", yet outwardly I was a high achiever. I'm not describing autism or anything like that. My social skills are well developed, rather it was a kind of moral recrimination I could never shake. My mother was a hardcore Christian (and not in the deep Kierkegaardian kind of way, but the shallow, typical way that the internet has come to mock and deride constantly), and my father basically just acted as her enforcer, although I doubt he held any personal convictions beyond his simple loyalty to my mom. In any case, this resulted in my ego being under constant attack even as a small child (my earliest memories are of this kind--getting in trouble for not being Fe enough basically), and naturally it made me angry, but I was too young to really own that anger and so I repressed it all up until relatively recently, because I assumed they were right about me and that I was flawed. A hyper active super ego naturally followed.
Anyway the instinctual variants baffle me, because I feel like the descriptions are incomplete and the emergent properties of number/instinct/personality type are so varied that a comprehensive description of some of the more unique outcomes has yet to be written (for example most type1 descriptions seem to have an SLI in mind, etc). So I don't really know where I stand on all that.
In any case, I've signed up here after basically reading damn near every post and now I can no longer remain passive and continue to learn. So that's why I'm here. Also I find visual identification really interesting, because the more I'm aware of it in interacting with others the more I'm sensing there is something to it, so I threw my pic up.
edit: I would also like to add, in the interests of full disclosure, that pure knowledge is not my only motive. The more I understand these kinds of things the more I realize just how important it is to be around people with similar values and understanding as you in order to be healthy (or at least not at-war). I've felt like a fish out of water my whole life, but my general sense of this community (hopefully proven correct) is that you are kindred souls in many ways and so another reason for being here is to find a kind of social acceptance I've never really experienced, but that I've been increasingly hopeful lately actually exists...
