I realized the other day that something my son and I have in common is that we are "wonderers." We wonder a lot. He asks all the time about how things work. Often, I have no idea. At first, I looked at this as a way we are different. He asks about things I would never THINK to wonder about. I don't care how my car or email work - just that they do.
I, on the other hand, wonder how people work. Someone tells me a story about something another person has done, and my first thought (or even my first audible response) is "I wonder why he does that?" I am far more interested in the things that motivate people -like the experiences from their past that cause them to act a specific way now. I wonder how it is that one person in a family is driven and knows exactly where he or she is going while another flounders. Part of it for me is the idea that if I can figure out what is behind the behavior, maybe the person could change it (if he wanted to).
I'm sure there are Myers-Briggs applications in all this. Perhaps my son is a budding NT, while I am ever more convinced of my NF nature. Whatever it is, I find it more fun now to listen to his wonderings because I know, in a way, that I wonder just like he does.
Is your husband a wonderer in a way similar to what you're noticing in your son?
ReplyDeleteI am amazed, too, at the various theories out there that attempt to explain human behavior, and how they haven't resolved themselves into a single unified theory nearly a century after Freud. I tend to lean towards the behavioral model because it seems the most intuitive (mathetmatical?) to me, but my understanding is that behovioral psychology is on the decline.