Temperaments and such

Temperaments have been on my mind again lately. It stemmed this time from struggling with the the 3yo because he was so intense. I forgot he leans towards the melancholic temperament, they can be intense at times.  So things that worked for his brother, who doesn't have a melancholic bone in his body, won't work for him. It's a good learning experience and the scientist in me likes figuring out this stuff so I go with it.

I've also been thinking about the connection between the four basic temperaments and the Myers-Briggs personality type tests. You see I always thought I was a choleric, but when I take a MB like test I'm an idealist, which is not choleric in the temperament overlap analysis. I looked forever today trying to find the connecting analysis, and I did finally find it.  I remember a book I read last year on temperaments and prayer said the same thing, but the correlations at the time seemed off. You see, I was sure I was one thing, choleric, but I was getting another result, melancholic. I think this whole time I've been mistyping myself. When I truly examine myself and my traits, I can see it too.

When I take a temperament test these days, I've not been getting choleric as a main temperament. Instead I will get melancholic or phlegmatic. It threw me for a loop, but the correlation analysis helped me to see why. And if you would have told me I have any bit of phlegmatic in me before now, I would have told you that you're crazy. But I started looking more into it, and I realize that it's there, it may not be my most dominant trait, but it's there. It comes into play when I want to not rock the boat about things, even in discipline things with my children. But the thing is I feel deeply about things, and sometimes that makes the melancholic override the more minor phlegmatic. My husband says it like this, "You want to be okay with just going along with things, but sometimes you just aren't."

I've been bugging a dear friend or two about this stuff all week and I'm sure they think I'm crazy at this point, but hopefully they won't disown me just yet. And maybe the melancholic in me is why I love emo music so much and associate such songs with different rights of passage. Who really knows, but I'm happier that I figured this all out today. Scientist Kiera is smiling.

The baby is smiling too.  See everyone is happy. :)