Episode 40: Look Back On Self-Judgments

Good morning everyone, and welcome to Sparkle School, where together, we access our innate, iNtuitive wisdom as unique, self-valuing, and deeply Feeling women … and share who we are becoming in a safe, sensitive community.

Today we continue our exploration of the thinking and feeling personality preferences, the T or the F that is the third letter in the four-letter, 16 personalities code. These preferences help us to understand where we look for inspiration when we are making decisions, with thinking types looking to logic, and feeling types looking to how their decisions and actions will feel, to themselves and to others. Last week, we explored some of the key messages of Thinking and Feeling types, and shared about at least one Thinking type individual in our lives that was or is especially difficult for us to relate to. Today, we’re going to look at how these preferences ...and our cultural stereotypes of them ... show up for us as iNtuitive-Feeling type women, in our school years.

A brief reminder: Thinking and Feeling personality preferences are the only ones that are influenced by gender, with about 7 out of 10 women reporting a preference for Feeling and about 7 out of 10 men reporting a preference for Thinking. We all know of both boys and girls who are sensitive ‘feeling’ types, but our culture teaches us to assume that girls SHOULD BE the ‘feelers’ and boys SHOULD BE the ‘thinkers’. Here’s an old adage to prove that point: “Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice... Boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.” “Sugar’ and ‘spice’ are words we use to describe ‘feelings’ of love and delight... and ‘everything nice’ brings to mind someone who cares about the feelings of others. ‘Snakes’ and ‘snails’ are words that summon just a little fear, or revulsion for a lot of people, suggesting that boys are people who have (and SHOULD have), no fear of such things. In fact, our Sensing-majority culture, takes delight in stories that portray little boys who put frogs and spiders in their teachers’ pockets, because deep down, we approve of the idea that little boys are a bit callous when it comes to feelings.

However, we all know of both boys and girls who are sensitive to the feelings of others from a very early age, so it’s easy to imagine that it can be very difficult for little boys who are ‘feeling’ types, to feel approved of in our culture. They are often teased with words like “sissy” and wimp”, and bullied, and even demonized by other children, and even by adults, because boys are “supposed” to be tough ‘thinking’ types. Now, we’re learning just how difficult it can be for iNtuitive-Feeling type little girls to be educated in a male-dominated, Thinking-prevalent, Sensing-majority world! It’s like we have three strikes against us from our first day of kindergarten. Let’s move on to our journal prompts to learn more.