Chester Bennington, a Creative Talent Imprisoned by His Mind.

It starts with one thing, the instance of shock, when the news reaches you that a known name has died. It chills a touch more, when the cause is a suicide borne out of depression. The nagging discontent with living is a pain we all share to varying degrees and it haunts us to think that as a fellow human we are capable of a similar frailty. The artists so often fall, surrendered to their craft; but what they leave behind is not as important as how they lived.
Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, has taken his own life. I was never a tremendous fan of their music but I had a stored affection for a few of their songs, in particular ‘In The End’ & ‘Numb’ (as well as the crossover version with Jay-Z). What struck me most often was the emotion that was buried within the lyrics and meaning of these songs, and although I’ve been ignorant of the band’s recent music this was a consistent motif.
In parallel for reasons I’ll explain, I was hit hard about the news of Robin Williams taking his own life. I knew he was a dominant extraverted intuitive, a mind ruled by ideation. This type has a strained relationship to sensing the inner body — a problem producing drug-addled legends and ending brilliantly creative men. It became clear, post-mortem, that the prospect of dementia must have been unequivocally terrifying, and Robin could reason no existence without mental faculity.
I write this post as I watched a video, describing Chester offering what is described as a “cry for help” in an interview. I sensed there was more than clickbait at work, so I watched. This video was recorded before Cris Cornell’s death, which was said to have affected Chester greatly — pushing him over the edge.
“I don’t know if anybody can relate; I have a hard time with life. (…) I find myself struggling with certain patterns of behaviour. I find myself stuck in the same thing that keeps repeating over and over.”
He goes on to describe that his mind is a “bad neighbourhood” and he shouldn’t be in there on his own, isolated among his thoughts. The mark of an extravert, struggling to introvert.
The inferior introverted element arises:
“There’s another Chester in there that wants to take me down. If I’m not out of myself, being with other people or using substances, being a husband, being a bandmate, I’m great.”
Chester was an ENTP, he was alive when extraverting with the world but trapped within himself he was confined and to such a degree that he couldn’t escape his negative thoughts, despite attempts to logically analyse them. Perhaps the world never understood his true issue, how surrendered to the object Chester was alive, but subordinated to his own mental considerations he was tortured. He looped through intuition and sensing, repeating the same mistakes over and over, the common pathway to depression for an ENTP.
Robin Williams was likely the same. The extraverted intuitives are endlessly innovative, in both thought and in language, and I’ve seen patterns develop among such types that threaten the lifespan of their creativity. My work with type is not to categorise people or malign them, it’s to analyse in this fashion, to solve problems with people that nobody can even see. The world will miss Chester’s energy.
Chester couldn’t find the positives in his own mind, but I’ll remember the positives he brought to many lives. For more writing on type and analysis visit Artful Man & follow me on Twitter.
