David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

psychology

Tell me the music you listen to and that’ll reveal quite a bit about you

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I have a friend who’s had the same hundred (or so) songs on his iPhone for a decade now. Before that, they were on an iPod. Before that, they were on cassette tapes.

But they’ve been the same hundred songs all these years.

He can’t imagine why anyone would want more music than that. And he certainly can’t imagine why he would want to find new music. He heard everything he wants to hear 20 or 30 years ago, so he’s set for life.

What do you listen to? Are you like the typical person whose music-listening is still dominated — partly or completely — by the music you first heard in high school or college? Does the music you choose — consciously or unconsciously — say something about who you are and how your mind works? I think so.

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Personal growth feeds a romance, but lack of honesty destroys love

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I was already in love with Amy, so her sudden outburst surprised me.

We were in Washington, D.C., for a film festival and I was happy to have Amy come with me. We arrived Friday evening just in time for the first screenings of the festival. My film wasn’t showing until Saturday, so our schedule was flexible.

I had printed maps — this was in the days before ubiquitous and reliable GPS on the phone — but when we got to a street near the Pentagon, something about the street had changed. Or maybe the directions were wrong. I followed the directions as written, but they quickly brought us in a loop right back to where we had been.

I thought it was funny. It didn’t seem like a big deal. It just seemed like a minor problem to solve. But she exploded.

“Why would you not have a better map than this?!” she shrieked with anger. “I would have had backup maps! This shouldn’t happen!”

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New information demands that I change some of what I think I am

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Have you done enough work on yourself that you know who you really are? If you think so, would you be willing to make a radical change to your narrative if you discovered something startling about yourself?

I’ve been changing some of my ideas about myself for the past two or three months. I don’t remember precisely when it started, but I know the words that made me uncomfortable enough to reconsider a lot of things:

“…[U]nder increased stress, unhealthy [Enneagram Type Ones] begin to behave like unhealthy [Type Fours]. When they are unable to maintain the intensity of their rigid intolerance and rage, Ones collapse into depression. Their depression can be severe and long term — and in this regard, Ones with strongly dysfunctional family backgrounds where stress was a constant factor may mistake themselves for Fours.”

I was listening to the audio version of “Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery,” by Don Riso and Russ Hudson when I came across these words around the first of the year. That was the beginning of changing some of what I think I am — and it allowed me to finally integrate the person I am now with the person I was before I turned 30.

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