How a Clinical Psychologist Uses the MBTI Assessment: A Conversation with University of Texas at Austin Professor Dr. Raymond Hawkins

Dr. Raymond Hawkins is Clinical Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, and co-founder of the Austin Stress Institute — the first private clinic in Austin to specialize in biofeedback and clinical health psychology. He’s also an expert on The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) instrument — in particular, he’s been a pioneer in applying the MBTI assessment to clinical practice.

In this article, as part of a series on MBTI experts, we present a few portions of a recent interview in which John Hackston — chartered psychologist and Head of Thought Leadership for The Myers-Briggs Company — and Hawkins discuss how MBTI types are applied in clinical settings.

To watch videos of the interview, check out How a Clinical Psychologist Uses the MBTI Personality Assessment, Diagnosis in Clinical Psychology and Clinical Psychology, MBTI Type and People’s Life Context.

How a Clinical Psychologist Uses the MBTI Personality Assessment

Hackston: So tell me a little bit about your own use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Ray.

Hawkins: Well there’s a story. I’ll focus on my clinical research because I tell my students, both at University of Texas at Austin, and at Fielding Graduate University which is a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology, that some of my or basically all of my best ideas have derived from my clinical interactions with people in the course of therapy.

And so back in the mid-80s as I was using the MBTI on a voluntary basis with all of my counseling clients. I also did some consultation in an alcohol treatment outpatient clinic where we gave a problem-focused measure to the prospective participants in the clinic called the MMPI — the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory — an excellent well-known measure of personality problems. I was very appalled to learn that, without my knowledge, the reports that I had generated based on the MMPI and some other data to determine suitability for a client to enter the program were actually being shown to the client.

And so the pathological pictures or descriptions were things like, ‘this individual has passive aggressive tendencies and may react with impulsivity and anger’. That was completely unethical and in the Myers-Briggs type indicator our ethics, our values are very important. We want to appreciate Type. We want to help people see their strengths, and so forth.

So I said, “I just learned about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, may I include this in our assessment package?” And they said sure. And so I incorporated that so we’d have what I called the MBTI/MMPI sandwich, which basically combines how a person’s healthy personality can manifest and can be developed to enhance self-esteem. And how at the same time, under stress, we have distinctively different, shall we say, ‘shades’ or ‘varieties’ or ‘flavors’ of stress syndromes or problems.

And so I did this two-layer package, and the clients loved it. And that’s been my experience ever since with my clients. It really gives them a handle on their sense of self and their personality.

Diagnosis in Clinical Psychology: INTP Example

Hawkins: Let me talk about the whole diagnostic process. You know, the diagnosis of different kinds of disorders. It has been done by psychiatrists for 140 years. And yet it’s controversial and some people and some counselors don’t like to assign diagnostic labels.

What did I learn with the Myers-Briggs? Well, you know, the Myers-Briggs was not designed as a measure of pathology. It was not designed to be used to predict a person’s difficulties under stress. This is a later adaptation of it, which I think is useful.

However, what the Myers-Briggs taught me is a distinction I’ll call ‘narrow band’ versus ‘broadband’. In plain language, what does that mean? If you are an INTP — I’m going to use your example John…

Hackston: Okay, go right ahead.

Hawkins: Now remember, this goes for everyone. If I say a certain type has a proclivity toward a certain reaction pattern under stress, it doesn’t mean that all INTPs or all INTJs or all ESFPs are going to react that way. It’s a tendency.

But let’s say I’m working with a teenager whose preference is Introverted Thinking with Intuition. From the data I’ve gathered over the years with over a thousand clients, I’ve noticed a narrow band pattern that my male INTPs tend constitutionally and then under stress to have more issues around inattentiveness. In other words, not paying attention the way a teacher or boss would want you to, and also a tendency towards social anxiety or awkwardness. Like Mr. Spock in Star Trek.

So that’s an example of where there may be a particular predisposition under stress to develop or manifest the problems in that area. And I could give you that for others. But that’s just an example of narrow band.

Let me say the more common pattern is 16 different types of problems. That is to say, if I’m depressed and I’m an INTJ, my pattern of depression may involve more obsessionality and isolation. And if I were working with a client who prefers ENFP — an Extraverted Intuitive with Feeling — that individual is more likely to have depression manifest in social relationships, in terms of trying even harder like a butterfly to connect, so that other people may not even think that this woman or man is depressed at all…when they’re really very depressed.

So the different flavor, different manifestations of depression are a function of one’s basic type. I hope that I’m making my point clear. That was a revelation to me, when I saw it.

Hackston: That makes perfect sense to me. And I think it speaks to the idea that if we don’t think about these things, if we haven’t looked at things like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or other ways of understanding human personality, perhaps we’d see others through our own lens. So the behavior we see may be for all sorts of different reasons, which you don’t realize because we’re seeing it in a way that we would experience it. And tools like the MBTI have perhaps opened that vision up a little bit.

Hawkins: Yes, well I haven’t done research on this but I really want to amplify what you’ve just said, John, because type practitioners have used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in group work to help people to appreciate differences.

So if you take individuals, and you have a heterogeneous group of people of mixed race or ethnicity, and you have gotten permission to have them take the indicator and to share their results — that’s important, you have to get permission to share results with anyone else but the individual — and let’s say you then group the individuals where their race or ethnicity is different but their type is the same — let’s say INTPs in one little subgroup and ENFPs in another group. You’ll find that the type-alike — even though they’re dissimilar in other respects, including politics — they’re more likely to come up with a common ground. That’s fascinating.

If you take the opposite, if you take people who are alike racially, ethnicity-wise, politically, and their types are different, you will find more…I call it turbulence, kind of like a weather or meteorological analogy. There’ll be more misunderstanding in that context.

Now what does that tell us? It tells us that instruments that look from a healthy standpoint at people’s individual differences, at their type differences, could be used as a model for

bridging certain conflict situations.

I very much would like to do more work in that area. I think it’s profound and I’ll just allude to this. Several research studies show that with liberalism versus conservatism, there are certain predispositions that the different types have toward those.

Clinical Psychology, MBTI Type and People’s Life Context

Hawkins: So I like to see people in the context of their lives — whole people of particular types in the context of their primary relationships. Like a parent child, a marital relationship, or in terms of their family constellation, in terms of their neighborhood and school or work, and in terms of their larger nationality or their culture.

Now where does the Myers-Briggs come in here? Well, there’s a very interesting notion about matching and mismatching, and I alluded to it earlier.

So if we were in together at a conference, John, like the British Association of Psychological Type, which is a good group, and the NTs — the Intuitive Thinkers — were to congregate, we’d feel like we could really converse quite well.

But suppose in a family or in a work group or — I’ll just say a family — that there’s one child who is an Introverted Thinker. And let’s say both parents and the two siblings are Extroverted Feelers. Or say one parent is an Introverted Thinker or an Introvert. So can you see how that parent who is similar to that child may understand the child better and there may be more affinity?

Hackston: Absolutely.

Hawkins: Whereas if the INTP child were to be very different from the family there might be more, as I said earlier, turbulence of potential for misunderstanding and blaming.

So in my work I try to — with permission — get my clients to take the indicator themselves, and to administer the full Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for the spouse or for the parents.

Check out the previous article in this series in which Hawkins and Hackston discuss how he was first introduced to the MBTI, and why its critics are wrong.