introverts
< Psychology
< skepticalpaul
After ten years as a psychologist practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy , I reclined on the couch of my own analyst feeling burdened by my chosen work. After a day of seeing patients, I was drained. I had been trained to listen at many levels—words, emotions, unconscious disclosures—and I took all of that in and sorted it out in my mind. I was good at helping others discover and pursue what they wanted out of life. But at day's end I had no resources left to do it for myself.
It is my personal impression that introverts take a terrible beating where stress is concerned because everywhere we go, everything we do, we are coping with a world set up by and for others. We are very prone to chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and agoraphobia, conditions which, though horrible, give us the excuse we need to have time for ourselves. It is part of my mission and consciousness raising outreach as an infp healer to suggest that if we give ourselves the time we need by ourselves, we can skip the part about chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.
I'm all about self-affirmations this week. I covered affirmations for pessimists on another blog, now I'm thinking about affirmations for introverts . Self-affirmations, when spoken aloud, can sound kind of silly. OK, sometimes they sound a little silly even when you say them silently to yourself.
