I think I am in many ways an ENFP as I like to try new things all the time. This includes meeting new people, although I like to form long term close friendships with a small number. As my social life tends to be very dynamic, I tend to disappear from the less close people's lives for long periods of time and occasionally reappear. This is how I learned about this dependency issue. Fortunately, nothing really bad came out of it, but it scared me a bit.
My interests plus my desire to go very deep (all the way) into them requires a fair amount of time. For this reason, I do spend a fair amount of time outside a social life. I don't feel any strong dependency for people other than my own child. Does this make me an intravert or just someone with big goals?
I don't think this makes you in Intravert - I don't see how Extraversion and dependency on any one individual person are related. I would guess rather that Intravert more often find themselves dependent.
I remember that when I first learned about myself as an Extravert, I put more emphasis on my 'need to talk so I can see what I think' - which I do. But later I was telling my 'mom of a gifted kid in public school' story to a couple of homeschool moms at a gifted get-together. Their only words were to prompt me to keep going. Their faces were rapt attemtion and consentration, and they exhuded absolute horror at what I had allowed my son to have to put up with. I realized that another way of looking at Extraverts is that they have very highly tuned receptors to other people's body language, and being sensitive to the feedback, miss it when it isn't there. I would rate myself as an 'Extra-Extravert' - I even find housework easier to do if I can mentally carry the image of Flylady and all the other Flybabies working in their homes while I work in mine. I've even been to 'knitting conventions.' Some of my bonds with people are deep, some are superficial, with everything in between.
So, JaimeH, I'm going to peg you as an ENFP cousin of my ENTP. Your P is really your most striking trait - it pops up all over your posts on this thread. Must be pretty interesting all the thoughts that go on in your head in responses to posts here. I'd encourage you to write them all down - even if you don't post them, as a way of sharpening that big skill of seeing every side to every statement. That way eventually we all get the benifit of your periscopeic perspective without having to wade through 5 pages. That's my birthday wish anyway.
Enjoy,
Grinity
