Confusion over the Judging/Percieving scale in MBTI....
Why is it so hard for introverts to decide wheather they are J/P in MBTI? Myers said that whether you are a judger or perciever depends on the
outside world, not the inner one. Everyone is both judging and percieving, but the letter that you put at the end is suppossed to be based on how you act in the outer world. So an IxxP type will be clear-sighted, but be disorganized with his space, and an IxxJ type will organized but be more drunk-brained. Theortically. What Myers is basically saying is that if your base, introverted, function is a judging one, and your extraverted function is a percieving one
then you should test as a perciever. So what happens? These introverted-perceptive people, defined by Myers, generally test as JUDGERS instead! It only makes sense...
When your dominant function is a judging function, you tend to THINK like a judger; it is your "main" world. Whether an introvert or an extravert. Your secondary function
is not always there, so why would you test as your secondary function tells you to?? This is why rational types have all of the stereotypical "judging" traits.
So, this leads to confuse as who is what type in MBTI (especially the introverts). There are people who are clear "percievers", yet their extraverted function is still a judging one, but they would never think to test as a judger (talking about Ni and Si types). What starts to happen here? People see someone who they think may be an I-S-F-P, based off of the acronym and which scales the person leans to more. So they start to see all these ISFP types as being FiSe, because Myers set up the system that way. The problem is that this type that seems to lean more towards the P scale is actually an SiFe type, because dominant Si types are always based off of their perceptive function
first, and they THINK the way a perceiver is "suppossed" to think. The Si and Ni types do NOT follow plans and scheduales (generally), they do NOT mind changing or adapting, and they usually wait until the last minute to do something (or not finish anything), like the definition of a perciever says. But that is not what Myers meant when she defined the J/P scale, and which one should be your last letter. Still, people seem to ignore that, and they have two totally diffrent views of who are the IxxP types and who are the IxxJ types.
This is how Jung described the introverted types. He said that the Ni and Si types were irrational introverts, and the Ti and Fi types are the rational introverts. He described the irrational introverts as being the more sporatic ones, bouncing around from one thing to the next. The rationals were the more stable and consitent types. This is
totally diffrent from what the types have gained meaning today. Now people think that Si and Ni are stable, while Ti and Fi are the adaptable ones!
Myers should have just saved herself the trouble of all this, and said that your dominant function dictates what the last letter of your acronym is.
This (and other things) is why J/P is such a mess, and to keep the scales around you would have to go through all this explaination of it. According to Myers definition, I should be an ISTJ, because my inner world is disorganized, and I am not clear-sighted, nor do I stick to my plans or care about adapting. According to Jung, I am an irrational type. The stupid J/P scales should be dropped altogether, in favor of just ordering the functions the way people are dominanted by them. That way you can just refer to a person as a "rational" or an "irrational" and be done with it.
EDIT: I'd like to add that this can be complicated with the ID functions, which Myers was not aware of. For example, the SiFe above could also be using his Se function while extraverted, or his Fi function while introverted. This means when he is extraverted he is not *always* judging, and when he is introverted he is not *always* percieving.