The Necessity of Calibration
Much like an electric guitarist on a sound stage checking resonance before a performance, it is our task to ping off other people and calibrate against them. We don’t need to change our whole personality, but the way we express it can change so that it better aligns with who we want to become.
As we move through individuation, change rarely looks grand or dramatic. More often, we simply become more ourselves—slowly chipping away at parts that were previously unseen, disowned, or unintegrated.
No inner work happens in a vacuum.
Moving Beyond the Echo Chamber
Without outside feedback—or without the capacity to critique our own thinking—we risk becoming personal echo chambers. Reflection then turns into reinforcement rather than growth.
What I’m describing is, in essence, shadow work—but a more embodied kind. Not just noticing patterns after the fact, but cultivating awareness while living. Turning self-knowledge into something usable.
How do you understand yourself?
Why do you understand yourself that way?
Is that understanding helping you—or quietly limiting you?
These questions are recursive and often uncomfortable. And they are not purely functional in a Jungian sense. Jungian attitudes are not personality traits, neurological categories, or pathologies—but they do shape how we habitually approach life’s questions, often without our noticing.
It is in falling through the holes in the subconscious—like Alice—that we begin to see ourselves clearly enough to repair what we encounter along the way.
This work requires both emotional and intellectual rigor. It also benefits from compassion. That is where Jung’s ideas interlock well with those of Carl Rogers and Jean Piaget: we grow unevenly, in stages, and in ways that are at once deeply personal and universally human.
Growth Strategies by Cognitive Orientation
(Interpretive, not prescriptive)
What follows is not a typological checklist. These are edges—points where a dominant way of knowing tends to benefit from tension, feedback, or contact with what it neglects.
The Extraverted Lenses: External Engagement
Extraverted Thinking (Te)
Growth often comes from confronting abstraction—moral, philosophical, or hypothetical ideas that resist optimization. Thought exercises work best aloud, in conversation with trusted others. Smaller ideas are frequently sacrificed for efficiency; giving them space is an act of trust, not inefficiency.
Extraverted Sensing (Se)
Se-oriented people often grasp immediacy and action with ease. Growth tends to come through sustained engagement with principle, especially ideas they initially resist. Practices that build an internal locus of worth—such as noting reasons for pride—can help balance the pull between social accomplishment and inner satisfaction.
Extraverted Intuition (Ne)
Ne grows by holding certainty and ambiguity together—and by staying with ideas beyond initiation. Revisiting unfinished projects and asking “Why did I stop?” creates a powerful feedback loop. Creating without the pressure to succeed builds durability instead of novelty for its own sake.
Extraverted Feeling (Fe)
Growth often lies in examining how one thinks, not just what one values. Questioning assumptions and routines can be grounding. One useful exercise is attempting to explain empathy logically, even privately. This often reveals why others are experienced vividly while the self remains comparatively faint.
The Introverted Lenses: Internal Expansion
Introverted Feeling (Fi)
Fi grows through outward movement—making a small but real mark on the world. Rather than letting emotion simmer until it spills over, grounding in what is possible and taking one spontaneous, values-aligned action can catalyze becoming. Expression need not be polished; it needs to be honest.
Introverted Intuition (Ni)
Ni benefits from practicing theory of mind in real time. Instead of rehearsing conversations internally or building mental “castles,” iterating live—responding to what is actually said and felt—helps intuition become relational. Feeling conversation in the body often softens rigidity and increases contribution.
Introverted Sensing (Si)
Growth often involves letting ideas move from inner clarity into shared space. Dialogue over interests allows others to guide creativity without destabilizing core steadiness. For Si, newness can feel like walking the plank, but the water below is calmer than expected: no crocodiles, only dolphins offering metaphor and meaning.
Introverted Thinking (Ti)
Ti-oriented people often hold vast, unused architectures of thought. Growth comes from releasing these gradually—through a public outlet, a “brand,” or even one trusted interlocutor. Handled carefully, this does not fracture coherence; it lubricates it. Unused patterns are either dynamite or fuel, depending on how they are released.
Conclusion: The Mind as a Rare Garden
Growth happens at the edge—where shadow work and individuation overlap. Jung is not a checklist, and following him too literally would miss the point. One might argue that individuation requires enough perspective to depart from the map when necessary.
Carl Jung recommends submersion into the whole. I recommend slow, practical steps toward personal holiness.
The mind is a rare, sprawling heirloom garden—overgrown in places, dormant in others, filled with plants never meant to remain isolated. They want cross-pollination.
What will you do?
You have choices. We all do.
Footnotes
Developmental unevenness – Piaget’s stage-based model reminds us that growth does not occur uniformly across domains; adults may be highly developed in one area and underdeveloped in another.
Individuation – In Jung’s work, individuation refers to the lifelong process of integrating unconscious contents into consciousness, not self-improvement or personality optimization (Collected Works, Vol. 7).
Psychological attitudes vs. personality – Jung’s attitudes and functions describe orientations of consciousness, not traits, diagnoses, or fixed identities. Later typologies (e.g., MBTI) simplify and systematize these ideas for practical use.
Shadow work – The “shadow” refers to aspects of the psyche that are repressed or disowned, often because they conflict with the ego’s self-image. Integration occurs through recognition, not eradication.
Unconditional positive regard – Carl Rogers emphasized that growth is facilitated by acceptance rather than judgment, a principle that pairs well with Jung’s insistence on meeting unconscious material without moralizing it.
Featured image by Tom Barrett + video created with Google Gemini’s Claymation Explainer.
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