Emily, Sorry I missed this.
I wouldn’t want to turn my empathy off. PTSD turned my soul off. I worked hard to get to the other side and out and I did. I learned quickly that I felt dead because I had hidden my empathy, especially. I can bandage my bleeding heart. I’d rather bandage it than not have it bleed, at all.
The introversion in the I of my INFP is all about how I process the world around me and get my energy. And my N represents my over-active imagination and how I pick up the world, through intuition rather than my senses.
While we all are both introverted and extroverted at different times in the sense above, we each have a preference. Same for all the letters: F for Feeling rather Thinking (T) and P for Perceptive rather than Judging (J).
If you aren’t aware of these types, you might enjoy reading the site to which I have linked above. Learning and understanding who I am, that others are different, that we all are motivated differently and take in the world differently changed me life. It opened me to develop and use what I don’t prefer, allowing me to better to adapt and interact. And it freed me to truly accept others as who they are. When I managed people and systems for a living, it was such a great help. I could motivate and reward my employees in ways that they wished rather than in ways I might have wished. Obviously we were all happier and the company more successful. And no one felt intimated by control. It was fun and I miss the collaboration, mentoring, and letting people fly!
Now, when I’m stressed, I know it is usually because I am spending too much time outside of my preferences, pushed there by culture or expectations or even by me. I step back and into my preferred ways of living.
Contemplative meditation works for me, I believe, because of both my introversion and intuition even though it is so hard. And if I miss a day. I lose my habit of 20 years, still. But you will know your best ways to cope and squeeze the misery from your sponge when you can listen to you.
Honestly, no one with a child under 5 can truly listen to oneself, and has to feel stressed. One doesn’t sleep or have much autonomy. As Zig grows and develops into his own unique and special self, you’ll get to be just yourself, yet again, and revel in who you are as well as revel in being his mom. I think it is hard when one is in the trenches of sleepless early motherhood to even remember life before the loud and rambunctious blessing of a baby boy.
Multitasking, thy name is Mother.
