Highly Sensitive People and Socionics

last edit: 31 Oct 2012 (theta brain state)

Introduction 

I recently learned of a trait commonly termed "Highly Sensitive Person," or HSP. This is a trait I have long wondered about in myself and others and have called different names at different times (e.g. self-awareness, introspectiveness, sensitivity, etc.). I used to loosely associate it with ectomorphy; I think I was identifying a kind of ectomorphic variety of high sensitivity and ignoring other varieties. Since then I've noticed HSP traits in people of different somatotypes.

After investigating the subject, I'm convinced that it is a very influential personality trait that has important ramifications for intertype relations and personal development. So influential is the trait that HSPs may be practically untypeable socionically, having a set of traits that appears to conflict with or override typical type traits.

Further information online

In addition to the Wikipedia article, there is some really good information available in research articles on Elaine Aron's site, as well as large amounts of personal accounts and feel-good sites on the subject online. Lots of podcasts and interviews on the subject can also be found.

Distribution

According to studies, 15-20% of the population is HSP, and the numbers are evenly distributed among men and women and hetero- and homosexuals. The numbers are about the same for different nationalities, though different cultures may be more (e.g. Japan) or less (e.g. U.S.) accepting of the trait. Of particular interest is that the trait is also observed in animal species.

Psychological and physiological aspects

It is speculated that roughly 50% of psychologists' clients are HSPs. HSPs are more sensitive to childhood experience and display more maladaptive behavior with suboptimal upbringing and more well-adapted behavior with optimal upbringing relative to non-HSP children.

HSPs appear to be more prone to certain mental and physical conditions, such as neuroses, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, etc. Their brains appear to spend more time in theta state — typically, a drowsy or meditative state — which may indicate more reflection/"recharging" and deeper processing of impressions received during their daily activities.

I would estimate that 30-50% of socionics aficionados are HSPs and that these are many of the same HSPs that are likely to end up in counsellors' offices.

HSP and Asperger's Syndrome

Both of these groups have their online "fans" and often resemble pop-psychology. I've seen lists of famous people who supposedly had that or the other trait, and there was quite a bit of overlap... My personal opinion is that many psychological conditions are overdiagnosed. I myself have been wrongly labled as "high-functioning autistic" by at least two non-specialists who only saw me in certain settings. Of course, this did nothing to improve our interaction... While many AS and HSP online hobbyists seem confused about which diagnosis to give themselves, this article makes a good attempt at separating the two.

Difficulties with the HSP construct

Upon learning about HSPs, a lightbulb flashes on in your mind and many things begin to make sense. Then, once you start identifying sensitivity levels in different people, you realize that each HSP has a different variety of sensitivity, making it hard to generalize. Things that you would tend to attribute to sensitivity in yourself are absent in other HSPs, and vice versa. The search for an overarching, fundamental HSP trait runs into the needle-in-the-haystack problem that plagues socionics and other personality characterizations.

The exact nature of high sensitivity is not yet entirely clear (e.g. "processing sensory data much more deeply and thoroughly"), but there are some interesting lines of research that suggest that the trait can be pinned down physiologically and/or through behavioral testing. That is much better than personality questionnaires which are subject to biases and misinterpretation.

A problem with practical application of the HSP construct is that it has no well-developed counter-category with a potentially positive image — e.g. "low sensitivity person, or LSP." People only read about HSPs and may incorrectly self-identify with it because it seems to suggest creativity or intelligence or provide justification for problems they may have experienced. HSPs, on the other hand, are probably unlikely to wrongly identify themselves as non-HSPs.

Highly Sensitive People and Personality Type

In terms of the MBTI, introverted intuiters were most likely to be HSP, followed by extroverted intuiters and lastly by introverted sensers. Most HSPs are MBTI introverts, and extroverted sensers were not found among the admittedly small sample group studied (I believe under 30). Keeping in mind MBTI type skews relative to socionics, I would expect the trait to be more evenly distributed among the socionics types. For instance, I think I have known at least two SLE HSPs and at least one LSI, two LSEs, a few ESEs, two ESIs, and probably at least one SEE, not to mention many intuiters and SEIs and SLIs.

One can take the approach of examining the trait in isolation from socionics types, or in the context of types. The second approach might help one to identify the uniquely HSP-specific characteristics that are always present regardless of the type, but the risk is becoming too conceptual about the trait. The first approach often leads people to inject too many of their own individual qualities and experiences into the trait.

Effects of sensitivity on socionic type

High sensitivity seems to have a huge effect on personality. In my experience, the HSPs I know are all psychologists in a way and are particularly sensitive to other people's emotional lives and internal experience. They are all at least a bit brooding and are introspective and focused on processing their personal experiences. This is true whether their type is IEI or SLE, EII or LSE.

Such is the sensitivity of HSPs that an HSP LSE may be far more interested and thoughtful about things like perception, trauma, and overcoming internal obstacles than a non-HSP EII (this is coming from my personal experience). Non-HSP LSEs may listen to discussions of these topics with interest, but they have relatively little to say about them or their comments lack depth.

HSP SLEs, LSIs, ESIs, LSEs, etc. tend to lack the callousness that is often attributed to their types. On a philosophical level, HSP types with extraverted sensing (SLE, SEE, LSI, ESI) may reject any form of interpersonal coercion and may be wholly uninterested in politics, power, etc. They may often seem "unsure of themselves" or hesitant, and their extraverted sensing may seem to "flicker" on and off. Of course, this is all happening in the mind of the observer, who has a construct of what extraverted sensing is and is not. Without that mental construct, there's probably nothing particularly paradoxical about an HSP's behavior.

HSP ILEs and IEEs I have known (myself included) appear less extraverted than their non-HSP counterparts. More time is spent ruminating about things within oneself, and less time is spent gathering and distributing "random," superficial information, which is more typical of non-HSP ILEs and IEEs.

Effects of sensitivity on socionics schools

The best example of this I can think of is the contrast between Yermak's hard-headed analytical socionics and Gulenko's School of Humanitarian Socionics. Both are LIIs, but the first is non-HSP while the second is HSP.

Effects of sensitivity on intertype relations

HSP-ness seriously impacts intertype relations. The "truest" form of many potentially adverse intertype relations, for instance, is when an HSP is affected by a non-HSP. In other words, an HSP SLE may be more traumatized by a non-HSP ESI than a non-HSP SLE. Put an HSP ESI in place of the non-HSP, and the "supervision" would likely be seriously altered. A HSP IEE might not be much of a "supervisor" at all to a non-HSP ESI. The effect of the supervision might be so gentle as to basically be negligible for the ESI. In fact, the "supervisor" HSP IEE might well experience more distress as a result of the interaction as the "supervisee" ESI.

An HSP child might find even virtually optimal intertype relations with parents to be "traumatic," while another non-HSP child gets by just fine with parents from a completely different quadra. HSPs seem to need things to be "just right" in order to feel good in relationships and in general in life. As a missionary at age 19-21, I experienced many varieties of poor-to-awful relationships and just a few good relationships with missionary companions, while many non-HSPs seemed to "have a great time" with just about everyone they worked and lived with. So much for intertype relations!

Duality and sensitivity

Dual relationships may be quite different depending on partners' sensitivity levels. Two HSPs will probably have higher levels of understanding, but may need to take great care to regulate personal space and autonomy in order to avoid feeling "repressed." An HSP with a non-HSP may experience less mutual understanding, but the non-HSP may provide a greater degree of emotional stability in the relationship. Two non-HSPs may have a more stable and conventional relationship and fewer problems regulating optimal emotional/physical distance.

These are just suggestions, since I would need a lot more relationship experience than I have to make any far-reaching generalizations. Elaine Aron comes to similar conclusions, saying that both combinations have pros and cons but that she believes two HSPs together is probably a better combination than an HSP with a non-HSP.

Comments

I'm particularly interested in readers' comments on this post. I'm sure people will have a lot to say. 

How Life Circumstances Influence Perception of Socionics

Now that I've criticized socionics in several blog posts, I will present a new perspective that may begin to reconcile different viewpoints on the accuracy of socionics*.

* When I write "socionics," I am referring to intertype relations — the core and purpose of socionics theory.

How acutely a person experiences socionics depends on their current life circumstances. You may go through phases where socionics seems to hold little sway over you, and phases where socionics seems to imprison you or dictate how you feel and what you are able to accomplish.

Here are the kinds of things that influence your sensitivity to intertype relations:

• How well-adapted you are in general at this stage in life. How stable your work and close relationships are.
• How much freedom you have to choose and regulate relationships and activities.
• Whether you are spending more time one-on-one with people or in groups.
• How much variety is built into your lifestyle.

The "worst" possible situation is when you are poorly adapted, have few friends, unstable work, are stuck with whoever you live and work with and are unable to maintain personal boundaries and spiritual hygiene, belong to no groups, and live a lifestyle with little variety. In these life circumstances socionic relations are likely to be experienced very acutely, with many or most intertype relations producing distress. The range of acceptably compatible people narrows to a very small group that is able to reach you through your chronic stress and defensive position.

The "best" possible situation is when you are well adapted, have several close friends and confidants, a stable work situation, freedom to choose and adjust your partnerships and activities to suit your tastes, belong to groups where you participate in interesting and enjoyable group interaction, and have variety built into your lifestyle such that you are engaging the mind, body, and emotions in a number of different ways on a regular basis. In these life circumstances socionic relations may seem to hold little sway over you, and virtually everyone seems compatible in some way or another. The range of people you are able to connect with meaningfully expands, and your openness and sense of security makes it easy to brush off slight manifestations of incompatibility that you might otherwise be sensitive to.

But beyond the influence of life circumstances, it seems that some inherent and developed personality traits can make a person more or less susceptible to socionics. For instance, a typical extravert (in the popular sense) may find that while they personally don't sense incompatibility with other people, for some reason others often react negatively to them and say they are "pushy," "overbearing," "too talkative," etc. Typical extraverts may generally feel untouched by socionics, while occasionally experiencing periods of intense loneliness when they feel that everyone dislikes them and they have no true friends (or for other reasons). Typical introverts (in the popular sense) may generally feel highly susceptible to intertype relations and only able to tolerate a narrow range of highly compatible people. Occasionally some of these introverts may experience states where they can open up and briefly abandon their sensitivity.

Furthermore, one can develop attitudes that affect how acutely socionics is felt. I'm not sure "develop" is the right word, because I think even this type of development is largely outside of conscious control. For instance, if one comes to believe things like — 1) one's own perception is innately limited and prone to error, 2) all people contain some amount of wisdom to be learned from, or 3) all people experience the same basic things and can thus be empathized with — then a greater openness can be felt towards other people, softening the effects of socionics. Likewise, beliefs such as — 1) I know the truth, 2) it is my duty to bring the truth to other people, 3) some people are good and others bad, or 4) some people are innately defective — will tend to make one's experience of intertype relationships more acute than otherwise.

Some life circumstances allow a person to escape the "necessity" of duality (or let's just say, "fulfilling intimate relationships"). The formula I have discovered for this is:

• a vastly simplified lifestyle that allows you to keep your mind uncluttered
• a high degree of freedom and elective solitude
• large amounts of group interaction
• frequent new acquaintances with the option of getting to know people quickly and thoroughly

This is the lifestyle of the wandering philosopher, the spiritual teacher, the long-distance hiker or skilled solo traveler. Those in this position get to experience the best of people (their life experiences, accumulated knowledge, hopes and dreams) while avoiding the worst (finding ways to cooperate in day-to-day living). Living this way, you may develop a kind of "love of mankind"; instead of emotionally latching on to particular individuals you know well, you experience positive feelings for everyone you meet and for the world in general. In this state duality and deep intimacy may lose their importance because you are regularly connecting deeply with many different people. This is the lifestyle of Jesus (assuming the New Testament is accurate), the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, and some long-distance travelers I've met. I think some types are more predisposed to develop this way.

(I encourage readers to think about if there are other types of lifestyles that produce similar effects but work for different kinds of people.)

To summarize, sensitivity to intertype relations as described by socionics is highly influenced by how healthy your life circumstances are at the moment, how sensitive you are physiologically and psychologically, what attitudes you have developed, and whether you are traveling.

Creating a Positive Type Environment

In a previous post I mentioned that I had used socionics to help create a better type environment for myself:

Thanks to socionics, I became aware of the kinds of interpersonal factors that might have been causing my multi-month blues. I came to believe that the types of the people around me were having a great effect on my general emotional state, and that results could be obtained by changing the types in my environment by choosing more carefully whom I lived with, worked with, and was emotionally close with. This strategy worked! It took a couple years to make my "type environment" the way I wanted and to learn to stop nagging people with the "wrong" types to try to get them to start understanding and validating me. But since then, I have never had anything that I would call full-fledged depression.

This generated some questions, so I will go into some more detail here about my personal experience.

Before my turning point at age 23 when I learned of socionics, my type environment had depended almost entirely on forces outside of my control. I was born into a particular family with a particular lifestyle and set of life circumstances. Location, infrastructure, and family values influenced my personal contacts while I lived at home. As an exchange student, I was placed in a host family; at the university, I was placed in a dormitory with people I didn't know. As a missionary during a two-year mission, I was moved around and put with different missionary companions at others' will, as if a guinea pig in a gigantic socionics experiment where two months of peace might be followed by two months of hell.

This is often the situation for many adolescents. Part of becoming an adult is to begin making your own choices of "who, what, where, when, why, and how." Only a lucky minority get ideal conditions for their own personal growth and harmony handed to them on a silver platter right from their infancy. In my case, some things were given to me while others weren't. For instance, I had ideal conditions for intellectual development and imperfect conditions for emotional development. I had always managed to find friends at school and elsewhere who would listen with interest to my insights and laugh at my humor, but only by my mid-20s was I consistently living and interacting closely with people who could balance out my own tendencies and bring out the best in me.

At the time I learned of socionics, my personal and interpersonal lives were a complete mess. I did not have reliable confidantes that I felt secure sharing my problems with. I was trying to manage my inner life by applying learned religious formulas which did not work because I had such unfulfilled emotional needs and because my personality did not fit the formulas. I had not learned to recognize and trust my instincts regarding relationships, and had been dating a girl that I had had constant doubts about. I tried to ignore my doubts because on the surface it seemed like a really good match. I had years of personal and relationship issues that were eating at me, and I was unconsciously looking for a way out.

When I met my first teacher of socionics, I began to see the way out of my particular mess -- to stop looking for the sources of problems within myself and to start seeing the external causes, in this case the types of people surrounding me and affecting my emotional life. I quickly realized just how random my type environment had been until then, with just a few periods of good fortune where I was with compatible people (but not of my own choosing). I resolved to master socionics and work my way out of my problems into a happier situation. For a few years this was the guiding purpose of my life around which all my inner forces were "crystallized."

Immediately, I started making different decisions. For instance, I was living at the time with an EIE-LSI couple that I felt very uncomfortable with, and yet baffingly had never considered leaving. I moved out of their home and rented a separate apartment with a friend's help. I started relating to people at my work a little differently, allowing myself to be a bit more personal with some and remain comfortably distant with others. I found this took some stress off me, as I had previously worried about what kind of distance to keep with people. I found that I tended to relax around certain people and grow tense around others. I began to let these internal responses influence my actions with people, pushing myself to be more spontaneous and self-revealing whenever I felt comfortable with someone. My teacher helped by identifying the types of many people at my office, mostly correctly.

Fortunately, my teacher planted some very handy, if somewhat esoteric, ideas in me. One was to treat my own psychological type as a powerful piece of machinery that I had in my possession and could learn to use to my advantage by paying close attention to my machinery's "output" in response to the environment's "input" and by cleaning the machinery of stereotypes and other people's values that I had unconsciously picked up over the years. I found this to be a valuable metaphor for all the psychological and physical traits we are born with. It was exactly the kind of thing I needed to learn after having mistrusted my natural impulses for so long.

Another idea he planted in me was that to allow dualization to happen I had to do certain things to trigger a response in the other person. I needed to learn to "act my type," in a very general way. Then, the other person would respond in a typical way that would in turn set off a related mechanism in myself, and the process would start rolling and gaining a momentum of its own. This type of guidance from my teacher concreticized the things I needed to work on and helped me see a clear path of development in front of me.

I returned to the States from Ukraine and had a very peaceful senior year with vastly less personal and interpersonal anguish than before. Instead of opening up indiscriminately to whomever came along and seemed willing to listen (and often feeling burnt by their lack of response), I now tried to open up only to people who could realistically respond in the way I needed. I kept my eyes pealed for possible duals and tried to find ways to spend time with them and get to know them better. Luckily, a college setting is ideal for meeting different people. I wasn't wildly successful, but the results were at least quite promising. From my perspective, I had a lot of things inside me that needed "fixing," and only duals could provide the deep level of comfort and trust necessary to be able to fix them.

Luckily, I had met a dual in Ukraine who had started this process, so I was not thinking in abstract terms, but was simply looking for someone like my female friend in Ukraine, because I knew that's what I wanted and needed. Compared with just a year earlier, I was consciously paying attention to entirely different traits in other people.

From then on, I chose carefully who I lived and worked with. I moved in with some people in Kiev whom I'd never met before, simply based on their types. We turned out to have fairly little in common, but I did feel a basic level of comfort with them that allowed me to more or less be myself. I felt that each significant life change (move, change in employment, etc.) needed to put me in a more favorable situation than before.

At one point I was working for an American businessman of my own type. As a way of resolving some of the difficulties I was having as his assistant, I hired a local assistant of my own, using my teacher to help screen people based on type. In essence, I "bought myself a friend." Later we ended up sharing an apartment together, and he was an important source of moral support for a couple years and is still a friend today.

And still I had not been able to have a romantic dual relationship, which had basically been my goal all along. It seemed like there were some powerful barriers in place that I had to find a way to circumvent somehow. I found I kept ending up having purely conversational relationships with girls without a deeper emotional or physical connection. Since the sharing of broad insights and life experiences is perhaps my strongest trait, it makes sense that other people would respond to this aspect of me first. As I later discovered, for anything to work between me and a dual, I would need to experience a strong interest in them that compelled me to direct my mental energy at them. Then, they would respond physically and emotionally. In my "undualized" state, it actually seemed easier for me to develop relationships with other types, but these relationships wouldn't provide me with what I needed.

I tried meeting people through a socionics dating site but was ultimately not as lucky as other people (I know several married couples who met on the site). Something about the awkward format of meeting someone in person for the first time with all the attendant hopes and expectations did not work for me. Also, I was just too different for people to digest, and all the girls I met had ordinary histories and life experiences. At one point I had a relationship with a dual I met on the site, but it was not fueled by enough sincere interest and attraction, and I look back on it with regret. It turns out, duality only works if you fall in love! In fact, dualization is basically a synonym of falling in love and having your expectations fulfilled. Who knows -- maybe any two people who fall in love experience the same thing, regardless of their types?

Well, eventually I did meet someone through a more organic process, my hopes and expectations were fulfilled, and this chapter in my life gradually came to a successful end.

In my case, I was fortunate to come across a socionics mentor who helped me out on a personal level and gave me important keys for my further development in addition to mere socionics lessons. Also, my intent to improve my life situation was very strong and involuntarily drew certain opportunities and people to me. With this intent, I chose to make personal and professional sacrifices in order to pursue my single most important goal. It was more important to me to learn to be myself, attract compatible people, and become balanced than, say, to earn money or make my family proud.

I thought of myself as climbing up the steep side of a plateau. Until I had made it to the top through great personal effort and focus, there was always the danger of sliding backwards, but once I had reached the top, I would be on a whole new footing and my new relationships with others and with myself would begin to sustain me with a new momentum of their own. This analogy holds for any conscious improvements people try to make in their lives, be it emotional, interpersonal, physical, mental, or spiritual.

Using Socionics to Solve Personal Problems

I really think socionics can be a very practical tool for personal growth and change, not just an abstract discussion topic. Most likely, in some way or another the desire for change in one's personal, intimate life is the primary motive for most people who spend time learning about socionics. However, the personal accounts with all the really interesting and poignant details usually go unsaid in public (I guess forums allow for more anonymity), and attention instead focuses on the theoretical and descriptive shell of socionics. Yet the real driver of socionics is the search for solutions to personal problems. Of course, you can solve all these problems without socionics, just as you can be completely physically fit without ever visiting a gym.

The main motivation for pursuing personal change comes from experiencing problems in one's relationships: with intimate partners (love and close friends), society (social adjustment, work, and casual friendships), and oneself (self-concept and living skills). The strongest motivator is love relationships, because they involve the most aspects of one's being at once, potentially can satisfy the most needs, and hence cause the greatest adjustments and can be the most problematic.

Let's look at some of the common personal problems people who are into socionics may face and what can be done to address them:

"I have never been in a relationship"
In this situation a preoccupation with socionics might not be very helpful at all. It takes hands-on experience to develop the unconscious skill set (effective behavior patterns and natural, uninhibited physical, mental, and emotional reactions) needed to attract a "soul mate," and no socionic or other mental knowledge can provide this. I know of no other way than trial and error. Even if you hit it right the first time and spend your entire life with your first relationship partner, will you really be satisfied with yourself and your successes in this area? (okay, granted a few semi-autistic people would be) So, find the environments for pursuing a relationship that you find the least stressful, and go for it.

What might be wise is to search for information and advice that would address specific fears of yours that might be holding you back from meeting people and having relationships. Simply look for the fear; that is where problems are sure to lie. If the fear concerns rejection, find a place where you can air your fear or find out about how other people have dealt with it. If the fear concerns physical intimacy, find out about stages of intimacy and what to do at each stage, and find a place where you can talk about it comfortably and see how others have overcome problems and fears. If your fear concerns commitment and relationship expectations, learn about different relationship forms and how different people satisfy their needs in different ways. If your fear concerns your own attractiveness, find a place where you can comfortably talk about the specific things that you fear make you unattractive to potential partners. Much fear can be alleviated this way, leaving you more receptive to other people and potentially intimate situations.

"I am depressed or have some other emotional problem"
Look at the types of people you live with and interact with most. Are your Super-Id needs being met? Is your Ego being fully appreciated? This are indeed silly terms, but thinking about socionic functions can help concreticize your personal situation and identify specific problems. People have a harder time being happy and emotionally stable if they do not have a dual among, say, their top 3 confidants and significant friends and partners. Consider changing your living, work, and/or social circumstances to get away from negative stressors and bring a dual or duals into your inner circle. Yes, it really works, even if your choice of duals is somewhat artificial. If you're not sure of your own type or those of others, at least look for people you can trust and feel comfortable around.

"I'm having trouble choosing my path in life"
Learn about your type and what other people of your type have done with their lives. In general, look for people who are living the way you would like, and learn about their biography and background, but focus especially on happy people of your own type. How did they discover their career path and main interests? How did they stumble upon the right opportunities, organizations, and people? What do they consider to be the key to their success? What false roads did they discover along the way? Especially look at people you have met personally, because daydreaming about the lives of famous people can be unproductive. If you have a particular skill or skills that you know would like to base your life on, focus on learning about people with that skill in addition to people of your own type who are content with their lives.

"I can't seem to get along with anybody" or "I don't connect with people"
These are usually sentiments of people who have difficulty or take a long time getting to know and understand other people. Studying socionics theory will help them understand what makes all those "difficult people" tick and will help them to be more tolerant of the things they used to view as "faults" or "defects."

"I'm looking for the right relationship"
Now that you have some relationship experience under your belt, you have probably learned about some of the complexities of relationships and the difficulty of trying to make things work with a seeming vast majority of people. If you've preserved an ideal of what kind of relationship you would like, you're probably ready for some socionics "meat": learning about duality, how your and your duals' types operate, and the roles that different socionic functions play in interaction. It's time to hone your relationship behavior to become as natural, effortless, and spontaneous as possible and provide potential soul mates with what they are subconsciously seeking (I'm speaking of spontaneity in the use of one's functions, not the kind of impulsivity usually associated with irrationality). They will undoubtedly begin to return the favor.

You can get "hints" of how to develop your behavior by studying other people of your type and how they interact with others. Some of what they do may seem "cheesy," but other things will make you say, "I can/want to do that!"

In general, you will need to make sure you have opened up more to Super-Id input and that you are providing "real goods" with your Ego functions, and not just talking or boasting (see also this article). Let's say you're an SLE. Do you dig wackiness and imaginative fun? Do you actively motivate your partners and provide them with real-world adventures? If you're an LII, have you learned to resonate with Joy, or is all you care about the Truth? Do you help others resolve their organizational difficulties and mental madness? If you're an IEE, are you open to the many varieties of physical experience, and do you initiate new opportunities for your partners, and not just talk about yourself? etc. etc.

Many people may find they need to work on reducing inhibitions against "imposing" on potential partners with their strong functions. Your duals are unconsciously expecting to be "imposed upon" (even the feminist ones) in certain ways, and do not perceive your Ego-block initiative as an intrusion on their personal space. In fact, if you don't "intrude" upon their suggestive function, they won't feel deep down that you really care for them.

Finding the right relationship is basically finding yourself. The more you are "yourself," the more likely you are to find the right relationship, and vice versa. This is not because of any romantic mushy-mushy stuff, but because the "right" relationships are grounded in compatible physiological automatisms and impulses (my opinion).

Daulization and Harmonization

"Dualization" is a vague term that is generally used to mean either a whole-scale harmonization of personality -- a sort of massive transformation of one's habits and attitudes to adapt to the values of one's duals -- or, more commonly (among Russian enthusiasts), the mundane act of hooking up with someone of a dual type. Let's take a more discriminating look at what dualization entails.

In any area of activity -- from database design to jogging and from frat parties to prayer and meditation -- all eight information aspects are present (albeit in wildly varying proportions). In other words, aspects of database design can be found, aspects of jogging, etc. Depending on our socionic type, we are equipped to recognize and master certain aspects of activities more rapidly than others. Socionic type also outlines where we are more likely to act on our own assessments of things (functions 1, 2, 7, 8) and where we tend to rely on others' judgments more than our own (functions 3, 4, 5, 6).

In most cases, people are most adept at handling and responding to aspects of activities that correspond to their strong functions -- especially the first two. How well they handle and respond to other aspects depends largely on whom they have had around them to emulate. Often there is a great discrepancy between the ability to deal with different aspects of activities effectively. If a person has had no suitable models to copy, certain aspects of tasks and situations can cause them great stress and anxiety. An example would be someone who falls apart in distress when people are coming over to visit because he/she doesn't know what food to make for them or how to make it, but believes they must feed their guests something homemade and special. In this case, the person is in the grip of a low-quality stereotype and apparently has not had the right contact with people who could properly dispel this myth and replace it with a better set of attitudes.

So it goes in all areas of life. We may apply the best practice known to man in one aspect of an activity and cling to random, inaccurate stereotypes in another.

In my opinion, harmonization involves raising the quality (i.e. effectiveness) of attitudes and habits related to different aspects of one's life activities -- especially in the areas that were least adequate to begin with. In the language of memetics, harmonization might be called the "process of replacing counterproductive and distress-causing memes with more viable ones."

This process is a bit broader than dualization, since attitudes and habits can be improved by people of any type, not just duals. However, duals have special access to each other's emotional world and can help correct self-concept problems more easily than other types (assuming a friendly relationship). Also, duals are more likely to effectively help adjust attitudes and behaviors in other areas as well, since the psychological distance is smaller and the level of receptiveness is especially high.

Can I get dualized or harmonized once and for all?

Ha, what a question. Imagine you are a professional Don Juan -- always learning new techniques for seducing women, always sharing experience with others like yourself, and constantly studying the best sources available in the field. What are the chances that your skills in other aspects of male-female relationships will keep up with your ability to seduce women? How confident will you feel if you are put in a position where seduction is not allowed or not possible and all your well-honed skills become irrelevant? If you consistently have the right people around you to observe who effectively manage other aspects of male-female relationships, chances are you will eventually pick up on their main attitudes and habits and will be able to respond effectively to most situations that don't fall into the "seduction" category. But if these people disappear from your life, you may find you quickly revert to many old habits and attitudes.

Maybe this is a clumsy example, but the same patterns apply to any area of activity. When key role models are taken away, people regress to many of their previous less-effective behavior patterns.

Can one person completely dualize me?

"Complete dualization" or harmonization would imply removing all ineffective or inaccurate behaviors and attitudes from all areas of one's life. To be completely dualized by one person, the person would have to share every single activity of yours and delve into every single imperfection in each activity. Imperfections are not hard to notice, since they are accompanied by distress, but who is going to take the time to painstakingly analyze and correct each and every distress-causing behavior pattern? A dual partner (or any other, for that matter) will focus on the ones that 1) affect them, or 2) they are asked to address.

Conclusion

Basically, harmonization and dualization can and need to take place at work, at home, in the kitchen and the bedroom, on the tennis court, in one's e-mail box, on the phone with the insurance company, and even in one's sleep. A whole chain of people will help you along the way over the years, with different activities receiving different emphasis depending on the circumstances. Some people get a head start by having had the right balance of role models early on. Other people wake up and realize what they've been missing later in life. The overall process -- as outlined here -- is the same for everyone.

Balancing the Internal and the External

As Jung explained, each person has both extraverted and introverted mechanisms, but betrays his dominant orientation under pressure and in times of stress. Each of us has a certain tendency to take one's own instrument a bit too far and ignore the other side of life, unconsciously expecting that "the socium" - i.e. society and the people around us - will take care of the rest for us. Often they do, baited by our valuable Ego-block "goods."

But other times, for various reasons, no one comes to the rescue. This is the chronically imbalanced (and often non-dualized) individual. Even dualization doesn't completely fix the problem of finding a balance between the internal and the external. With a dual nearby, one may find that, after an initial balancing-out where partners "soak up" each other's strengths and build up their own Super-id block, yet more energy is loosed to direct towards one's strengths, and the problem of keeping balance simply moves up to the next level of self-realization.

This is why, after the mechanisms of dualization have done their work and the hormone bath of passionate love is past, self-development requires will and effort. You need to consciously value the areas that balance you out and strive to maintain them and not let them go down the tubes as you coast down the road of least resistance.

For extratims, the path of least resistance is to be drawn into the external world with its chatter, competition, interchange, and rewards so much that you cease to maintain and develop your inner world or do the hard work of improving your skills and thoughts.

For introtims, the path of least resistance is to focus on developing and improving inner products and experiences that either have little or no real-world application, or you simply neglect the task of introducing people to them.

Examples of these are easy to find around us. However, successful people of extraverted and introverted types alike display competency in both the extraverted and introverted realms. Some examples:

Charles Darwin (ILI) was a pronounced introvert who almost spent too long of a time developing his ideas and could have missed his chance to be the first to publish them. However, he made the effort and carefully wrote a book that others would understand easily (and not only himself, which some ILIs are prone to do).

Vladimir Horowitz (ESE) was an extraverted performer who managed to take the time early on to submit himself to concentrated discipline and meticulously develop the piano skills necessary to achieve fame.

Garrison Keillor (IEI) is a rather quiet introvert who made the effort to take his rich inner experiences public and create a radio show that people would actually listen to.

Thomas Huxley (IEE), "Darwin's bulldog," was a master at exchanging ideas and engaging public discourse who took the time to become a specialist in his field (and not just chat about everything that is interesting as some IEEs are prone to do) and work on his understanding of different theories to the point that he could recognize Darwin's as being superior.

As we can see, great achievements involve a combination of internal and external effort. The internal component creates quality and depth, and the external is responsible for correctly assessing societal needs, expectations, and competition.

Duality and Dual Relations

A unique aspect of socionics is the discovery of complementary psychic structures. Jung and his followers recognized a particular attraction between individuals with certain leading functions, but these observations were not developed into a full-fledged theory. In Myers-Briggs typology there is no one recognized paradigm of intertype compatibility.

In socionics, each of the 16 socionic types has its dual type. The essence of dual relations is that the natural information output of one type is the preferred information input of the other. Having a dual or dual around stimulates one to use one's strengths more, which creates a sense of achievement and fulfillment. Even duals' mere physical presence tends to exert a calming and balancing influence. Dual relations develop around the strongest functions of each partner and keep mental, emotional, and physical functioning balanced, while directing partners' energy towards constructive and rewarding activities. This does not mean that duals never disagree or are never upset or in a bad mood. However, these are generally short-term deviations from the norm.