So we wanted to share with all of you a few pages from WHAT'S BEHIND YOUR BELLY BUTTON? that describes much about our first hand experiences with Isabel Myers and Dr. Mary McCaulley, director of the Typology Lab at the University of Florida, so you can get a true glimpse into the initial work of these amazing empowered women who struggled against lack of resources and how their work related to our work with gut feelings and the Somatic Reflection Process. If you enjoy this excerpt, then you will surely enjoy reading the book where it is all further discussed in depth and a complete protocol for the Somatic Reflection Process is given.
Excerpt below from page 119-124 of
What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological
Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct:The MBTI and the Development of the Somatic Reflection Process
Early on, when we began our work at
SFCC in Career Gap, we began to enjoy a special working relationship with Dr.
Mary McCaulley, Director, University of Florida’s Typology Lab, and our meetings
with Isabel Myers and Dr. Mary McCaulley, on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(MBTI). We mention the importance of the MBTI in our work because it was
through interpreting our own results before using it as part of a battery of
tests in the Career Gap Center that we first had a need to reflect on our early
childhood experience to assess if our type results had changed as adults, and
if so, what that might have meant in serving our needs as a person. We were in
search of the understanding if our type results were true for us naturally or
if our type had changed due to necessity and environmental adaptation. And if
our type had changed, we were interested to understand if the early type was
more satisfying of our human needs. This deep unconscious information could
only be accessed through a reflection on our feelings, rather than our thinking
process, beginning in childhood and brushing up to the present time. And it was
in our personal exploration and validation of the results of the MBTI that the
Somatic Reflection Process had its beginning and served as a further guide
toward understanding a new image of human nature. . . .
. . . . Many people in America during this
post ‘60s period were going through profound transformations in their lives and
experiencing confusion as they attempted to make drastic changes in career and
life style toward the goal of higher personal fulfillment. We soon found the
majority of people coming into the center not only had absolutely no idea of a
suitable career direction for them but also had no idea who they were inside.
We found that the usual career interest tests were meaningless for these people
because they had no real idea of their own inner feelings and thus had no way
to determine if the results were accurate and thus useful. Often the
test-results would point the person in a direction that had more to do with
their cultural and family values than their true inner feelings, instincts, and
personal values.
Fortunately for us, the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator (MBTI) was at this time, in the mid ‘70s, being extensively
researched at the Type Lab by Dr. Mary McCaulley at the University of Florida,
so we had the opportunity to abandon our idea of using standard personality
tests for career counseling and employ the MBTI. For several years we had the
opportunity to administer, interpret, and gather data from the MBTI for
hundreds of people using the services of Career Gap and fed this data to the
University of Florida Typology Lab, headed by Dr. Mary McCaulley. Because of
this association with Dr. McCaulley, we were introduced to Mrs. Isabel Myers and
had a number of private meetings with both of them.
Isabel Myers would come to town
several times a year to check on how the research was going at the Type Lab.
The MBTI was used at that time, more locally at the University of Florida and,
perhaps, a few other university communities. Dr. McCaulley and Mrs. Isabel Myers
were struggling to provide additional research data on the use of the MBTI,
though its validity and reliability had been proven in the early ‘60s. But the
funding was so skimpy for the research project that we had to meet at Dr.
McCaulley’s home, because the Type Lab at the university was just a small office
where she had a computer and one part-time assistant, whose name, our memories
have barely recorded was Penny. (We can now actually remember more about her
personality type than her name, as she was a very friendly ENFP). Funding was a
struggle and on several occasions Dr. McCaulley was not sure if they would be
able to keep the Lab open due to the lack of support. But somehow they managed
to continue their work, even with occasional cutbacks. Perhaps it was as they
thought and on occasion told us, that their intuitive preferences, both being
INFP’s, kept them persistently focused in moving forward, despite financial
lack of funds, toward a vision of a future time when their research would be
accepted and fully funded (Personal communication with Dr. McCaulley and Mrs.
Isabel Briggs-Myers, 1975).
On one occasion during a meeting in
which we were handing over data to Dr. McCaulley for their research, and Isabel
Myers was also visiting, we asked Isabel if she would come talk to one of our
freshman classes, an introductory course in psychology (BE100), in which we
were using the MBTI. She graciously accepted and appeared the next week. It was
long before the days of cell phones, and there was not an easy way to affirm
the appointment, so we were a bit surprised and very much elated that she
actually came. When she arrived at the class, she was wearing a simple
housedress and had her hair in a bun. She was a lady in her early 70’s and made
no pretense of being a professional. She sat with her legs crossed, in front of
the students, her hands folded in her lap, and a relaxed sweet smile on her
face. Everyone seemed to accept her as Grandmother for the evening imparting
the knowledge of a wise old woman. The following is an account of what we
remember of Isabel Myers’ personal communication to the class (Personal
communication 1975):
"My Mother, Katherine Briggs, was a woman that noticed even small things about people. She wasn’t a psychologist and I don’t think she had read a word of Carl Jung. She just noticed the different relatives acted the opposite from each other when they all got together for Thanksgiving dinner. She would say, Uncle [Hank] always talks about only facts and Aunt [Sarah] always talks about possibilities. Sometimes they had whole conversations, my mother would say, without really listening to each other. She wouldn’t judge any one for being so different. She was just interested that it seemed to be that way. So she sat down over a period of time and wrote all the characteristics of each relative and made up a questionnaire. It was very different from the one you take now, although it asked about the same basic kinds of preferences."
Isabel Myers went on to tell the
story of how the MBTI was developed, and we remember her saying she helped her
mother by working with a Jungian psychologist to develop the inventory, fitting
Jungian theory. What was really interesting to us was her account of how the
Myers Briggs Type Indicator had its root beginnings as a homespun personal
inventory. It was born out of the keen observations of the every day
experiences with people of Katherine Briggs and her interest in helping people
communicate with each other with greater understanding.
Most of the discussions we had in
our meetings with Isabel Myers and Dr. McCaulley centered around accounts of the
research in the Type Lab. They were both quite excited that the research was
going so well and the findings were coming up significant for certain job
categories. They found it interesting that elementary school teachers came out
a majority of sensing types and college teachers were showing results of being
a majority of intuitive types. We talked about the implications of how type
affects learning styles and how the difference in type can explain intuitive
types who may do better in higher math like algebra while having had difficulty
adding and subtracting, and sensing types doing well in applied math areas of
study as a career choice. They also found a difference between the type
outcome of police professionals—being sensing types, and the university
students—being intuitive types, and mused over ways they could bridge the
communication gap between these two types during student protests that were
quite prevalent on campus at this time in the ‘70s.
Over and over, Dr McCaulley and Mrs.
Myers expressed that we all have the ability to understand each other and thus
communicate more effectively if we can understand our different preferences
in type. We do not think it was Jung’s intention that we label ourselves and
obsess about our category or label or type. And we think that the MBTI was
meant to be used by both Isabel Myers and Katherine Briggs as simply a way of
thinking about ourselves and our gifts, not a device to trick us into a
typology box in our minds, but as a tool to guide us in life decision-making
and communication with others. We base our opinion on the many talks we had personally
with Isabel Myers and her close colleague, Dr. Mary McCaulley, whose
explanations of typology were always flexible and open to the person’s inner
decision about himself or herself. We will add that both Isabel Myers, her
mother Katherine Briggs, and Dr. McCaulley were all Introvert Intuitive Feeling
Perceptive (INFP) types, according to what we were told in our conversations
with Dr McCauley and Isabel Myers. True to their types, they meant the MBTI to
be a flexible and perceptive tool that the person could use as a guide to
illuminate one's inner experiences and accept their unique gifts of perception
and judgment.
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End of Excerpt
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