News & Events

The Truth about College Crises and Personality Type

Was I lucky because I was one of the few who knew about personality type going into college? Not really, because what I knew couldn’t help me. I thought because I ‘preferred Intuition,’ I liked the new and didn’t care about the past. As I stepped onto a campus where every single thing before me was new, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As someone with Fi/Ne preferences (INFP), I now know that Introverted Sensation (Si-3rd) has an Eternal Child energy for me. What in the world does that mean? It means memories and what’s known to me (rather than what’s new) excite me but are also vulnerable and sacred. Like a child, I can get excited and giddy over the past, yet also feel empty and lost without it. What’s new can seem scary at times. And with college over 700 miles away from home (and a place without one familiar face), you can imagine what the child inside me experienced freshman year.

Sure, most college students get home-sick, but this was different. It wasn’t the typical missing of family and friends, it was that I didn’t have something familiar to cling to. I had no security blanket. I had been so anxious to try something new and live somewhere different, yet all of a sudden I yearned for something old – something that was well-known to me and felt safe.

What many counselors may not realize is that this sort of Eternal Child Crisis is common for college students and that it tends to vary by personality type – some long for the familiar like I did, while others skip class or dread the decision of choosing a major. Thankfully there’s a solution – getting the students to take care of themselves by tapping into their Parental mental function in a practical two-step process. You can discover this modern method in Freaking Out, Part II.

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