I think this is a good place to recapitulate my psychological, intelectual, and emotional development as I entered my young adult years. With my wedding to my beloved Mercie, the first twenty and a half years of my life came to an end. I'd "adulted" - maybe. The chapter of my life that included my childhood and early adulthood opened up to a new life together. A new geography beckoned and also the probability of starting a family.
The reader must not think these first twenty years were a non-stop train of good and bad things. All the events I've shared with you so far have been but the "peak of icebergs" with ordinary sea between them. They are but highlights, still photos between ordinary seas, with not much else to see. Every son and daughter of God has their own "icebergs," their own ups-and-downs in life. Although my story captures some extraordinary moments, these were a handful. I see my life as an ordinary one. Sure, it's been both painful and interesting, filled with joys and sorrows. Like everyone else's. Nothing special — until I began to love.
A Fractured Temperament
I was a "diamond-in-the-rough" and ask for the reader's forbearance for that "diamond" part. The truth is I was not a total lump of coal, thanks to God's grace. But I wasn't ideal, either. I was carrying all the hurts of my upbringing with me, along with the warps in my personality they presaged.
By then I have become adept at introspection, at least of its rudiments. I wanted to know myself. At the time of my marrying Mercie I had finally come to rate something on that test Fr. Guillermo had given me years before. I've come to know I possessed a "choleric-melancholic" temperament.
The ancients had been aware of the different temperaments in people. They ascribed the cause of each temperament to "bodily humors" and their interactions. The Church inherited their insight while discarding the "humors" theory. The principal question is what's one primary response to stimuli. Mine was anger, followed by sadness, even mild depression. Hence my mixed "choleric-melancholic" temperament.
Father Conrad Hock, who wrote The Four Temperaments, said this about my mixed temperament:
[In this case], two serious, passionate temperaments are mixed; the pride, obstinacy, and anger of the choleric with the morose, unsocial, reserved temper of the melancholic. Persons who have such a mixture of temperaments must cultivate a great deal of self-control, in order to acquire interior peace and not to become a burden to those with whom they work and live.
Not exactly a glowing assessment and yet it was true to my case. Yet, I ignored almost all the connotations beyond the mere label.
In retrospect I question how I'd ended up with a split temperament. It could have been I developed either one or the other to cope with what came my way. Throughout the years I've been able to master my choleric temper, thank God. But that has meant that my melancholic side has come to the fore and become my dominant temperament. I've found I can't master my melancholic side the way I did my choleric persona. That's why I've come to the conclusion my choleric temperament surged as a reaction to my rearing. I must have a dominant melancholic temperament.
Mercie became my whisperer. With the patience of a saint, she endured the worse from me as she chiseled the "coal" away from my "diamond" self. If I am a good man today I owe it to her.
Unknown to me, I was also an INTJ
If you're also familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality profile, you must know I rate as an INTJ. This aspect of my personality arose apart from my upbringing. It seems I was an INTJ from very young. I just I didn't know it. I was unfamiliar with the whole Myers-Briggs construct in 1985. It would not be until the late 1990's when I would first encounter it. According to psychologists who buy into the Myers-Briggs typing,
INTJs are the intellectual, quick-thinking masterminds of the Myers-Briggs® world. Known for their strategic prowess and powerful insights, they live with a constant thirst for knowledge and discovery. They rely on their dominant function, Introverted Intuition (Ni) to see hidden patterns and meanings for the future. They have extremely accurate and astute perceptions about how various plans and concepts could develop over time. INTJ personality types also use Extraverted Thinking (Te) to form efficient, strategic plans, create new theories, and organize their world in a logical way. The INTJ personality type is extremely rare, making up only 1.5% of the US population. Most people who get this type on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®) feel a bit of relief as they start to see why they’ve felt a bit like “misfits” in the world. (Source)
You may not agree with the Myers-Briggs construct, but let me tell you, all the above fit me to a "t." I wish I had known about it before 1985. It would’ve helped me introspect better and correct or attenuate my personal faults.
The profiles above describe very well the deal that Mercie and the world in general were getting in me. What I was short of what experience and maturity. Only time got to heal both deficiencies.
Deadpan Humorist
I believe that my blunt, ironic, laconic, or apparently unintentional sense of humor is also a product of my upbringing. I often deliver my jokes in a running commentary of what’s going on before me. Many people in whatever audience is around me, laugh. Many others hate it.
I like to play with words and make fully intended puns. I also like to embed allusions to books, movies, comedies, and songs in my humor. The effect varies within an audience, often divided between the younger and the older ones. My citations can be obscure or obtuse, and that too I do on purpose. I’m the only one who laugh when I joke in this manner and that’s fine with me!
My failure as a humorist often comes when being self-deprecating. Because I deadpan, it comes out as outrageous boasting. At that point, my whole audience feels insulted. Since apologies sound hollow after apparent boasting, my solution has been befriending those I’d alienated and create a space and an opportunity for me to apologize and explain myself. This approach seldom worked, and I lost potential friendships as a result.
It is what it is.
Rooted in the Past, but Forward Looking
One more trait I’d developed by this time was my sense of rootedness in the past that animated my forward-looking, forge ahead attitude toward life. My past, as dimly as I’d come to perceive it by the time I was 20, fascinated and defined me. At that time the “past” I’d more dwelt into was the Church’s past. I felt I was an inheritor of a 2,000 year old Tradition and felt a sense of continuity and solidarity to those that had come before me. I placed my cultural trajectory first as a Puerto Rican, and then as an American, within this large, bi-milenial current of people and events and drew great comfort from it.
Comfort and security: the past became my trampoline to the future. I learned to move away from those who insist the future is in the past on one side, and from those who say the future can dispense from the past. The former are atavistic and the latter, utopian. I thought both extremes a waste of time and effort. I developed an instinctive suspicion of both that remains to this date.
Commitment to Justice
Because of my upbringing I’d developed an acute sense of justice based on the truth of things. One can suffer only for so long under a narcissistic parent before beginning to ask but is what she says, true? And if it isn’t, it’s unfair, unjust to all involved but more so those who are innocent from the narcissist’s barbs.
Nor did it take long to extend the same sense of justice to everyone around me. Hesitantly at first, and then on a firmer basis as I matured, I began to question assertions that appealed to my biggest fears and biases. I then learned not to make any decision based on those appeals, nor affect any judgments, nor to give my assent or loyalty to those espousing them. That did make for a buzzing social life and in fact makes one a pariah in some situations.
But I remained free and vigilant to the injustices around me.
God Was For and With Me Despite My Shortcomings
That was me at the moment we started our married life together and my full-time entry into the workforce at the age of twenty. Though the outlines and boundaries of my personality had been formed already, they were a confusing hodgepodge of good and bad traits.
Although my abusive upbringing resulted in lasting damage, God would chisel the ugly excesses away in time. However, it remains a life-long project. For sample, my upbringing left me with excessive self-blame — and when one’s a Catholic that can end in debilitating scruples. I suffered from insecure attachments. I had to tame a need for an independence that alienated others — paradoxically, the woman that was to heal me. Many times I irrationally saw myself as a burden to others, or to her. Thankfully, God prevented I would become a narcissist myself, but the trauma of abuse and its mark on my personality persist to this day.
Mercie had her work cut out for her. She became God’s principal tool to mould me and heal the cracks of my personality into healthier whole. She would come to do a hell of a job.
In fact, one of the first shortcomings I was able to remove from myself was my inability to say “I’m sorry.” I’d never heard Papi, or Titi Gloria, or Mom say it. I got the impression that to say “I’m sorry” was to admit a weakness and put oneself in a disadvantaged position others might exploit for their own benefit. Apologies were given in terms of nice actions such as a present, or a trip or something else that I was given to understand had restored the previous order. I learned to apologize from the depth of my heart as soon as I fell in love with Mercie. I had no qualms about showing my vulnerability to her because she only showed me patience, understanding, acceptance, and love.
And then, there was the inchoate rage I still had to tame…
I also owe a debt of gratitude to all my mentors, before and after that point in my life. I’ve made it a goal in life never to betray their trust in me ever since. They too were instruments in the hands of the Divine potter who broke me, and began remaking me into the image of His Son.
Despite all of my excessive luggage, I was on my forward march, unstoppable.
Bonus Link
Why Catholicism Appeals to INTJs?, by Bryan C. Laesch