As an ENTP with pretty significant ADHD, I’m just curious what those without it are like.
Those with ADHD feel free to weigh in on what things you think are symptoms of ADHD vs personality or both.
Also, I know it’s not black and white, and it’s probably not possible to totally separate the two.
This post piggybacks off a previous post I made about some psychoanalytical testing that was done on me by a friend studying for a PhD in clinical psychology.
There was one thing that really struck me in a way that was surprisingly validating for something that I never realized I needed. I scored extremely high in empathy and have very high interpersonal awareness including, but not limited to, the emotions of others and myself.
That being said, my moral and general judgements are fully based in rationality/logic. Emotions of myself and others don’t play a role. However, I still feel them very deeply in the process.
This really struck a nerve in me because I feel like on the surface I’m very misunderstood in this aspect. I’m wondering if many other ENTPs might feel the same way.
Sometimes decisions I have to make based on what is correct, fair, rational, etc. are actually deeply heavy for me because of the emotional implications to myself and others. I feel like I make rational judgements DESPITE the emotional implications, and chose to carry that weight for the sake of what I believe is right and correct.
I’m a truth seeker at heart and I believe many of us are as well. I think this can come with a lot of invisible emotional weight because what’s true and right and correct can be emotionally heavy. I think many people assume we chose this way of thinking because we are less affected emotionally and it must be easier for us.
My friend is studying to become a clinical psychologist and let me be her guinea pig for the WAIS, Rorschach, and TAT test administration for her final paper. I just wanted to share a few of the results because I thought it was super interesting.
The cool part about the tests is they have low face validity which means you really can’t tell what traits are being measured when you’re being assessed or how so there’s nothing you can do to skew it towards what you think is “right” or how you would like to be perceived.
Anyway here were some themes:
- I have high processing ability, high pattern recognition, and high emotional and interpersonal modeling. I also have strong creative abilities and tendencies.
- I tend to think through things before I act and tend to have very accurate perceptions of reality. I naturally simulate and model potential outcomes based on information to make decisions. This applies to interpersonal situations as well.
- I tend to process things in relation to context and known systems and experiences. I tend model things based on my knowledge of unrelated systems and apply logic across them in ways that lead to accurate understandings and conclusions.
- my main coping mechanism is my tendency to intellectualize negative interpersonal experiences when they give me intense negative emotions which alters my perception of how they actually made me feel. However, I don’t do this to an extent where it would be considered unhealthy or concerning and have overall well-adjusted coping abilities. I tend to have a slight “rose colored glasses” view of past experiences for this reason.
- I have a strong drive to understand how things work and how to recreate or apply them.
- I have very high empathy, but my moral judgements and conclusions do not include emotional input.
- I have an overall high IQ score with my biggest strengths being verbal reasoning and perceptual organization with slight dips in my working memory and processing speed with patterns indicative of ADHD (due to the score discrepancies and some other things I guess), while still falling above average in those weaker areas.