Fake Personality Inventories

Any personality inventory which forces you to make a false choice, or excludes your real choices, is fake — not just useless, but dangerous.
One of the things I learned under Dr. Tom Yarbrough’s tutelage was never trust personality inventories. To this day, it seems everyone swears by the Myers-Briggs personality type test. We were shown some of the background of how this test was constructed, along with several others. In our single class, we found a significant minority felt excluded by the test. I am one of them. The unspeakable arrogance of those who write and use such tests, when you tell them you find certain questions unacceptable, is simply amazing. No, you do not have to settle for one of whatever answers are offered; stop the test and walk away.
It’s as if you aren’t permitted to be different. In reality, the people who develop these things are not the least bit interested in knowledge, but control. They are forcing the whole world to fit into their neat little categories. When you find as many as three questions wrong for you, the whole thing is broken. Their model of human behavior becomes no better than a conversational working model, and it’s not serious science any more.
Granted, the whole point here is helping people to understand the very limits of any such testing. Regardless how widely it may be accepted, it says more about the folks using it than it does the people tested. It helps to indicate how unwilling they are to actually think about what makes people tick. If they use something so completely acceptable to everyone else in the same business, it becomes an excuse to avoid self-examination.
We who sincerely wish to help other folks find some measure of peaceful negotiation with the world in which they live should never forget our limitations. I can only help you with those things I understand. If I admit up front to the limitations of my abilities, you won’t be suckered into making me some kind of guru. I become just a friend who views the world from a different perspective, and can broaden your options when you make a decision. The whole point is enabling a decision to act in one way or another, and you feeling better about the choice.
Fundamental to the counseling field is helping people bring themselves closer to reality, or to something identified as normal. At the very least, we should be helping folks understand realistically the cause and effect of choices they make. If you do this, you should expect others to respond with that. When the model by which we seek to establish what’s normal, or at least what’s common, is broken, we can’t offer so much help. If we who offer help understand we have limits, we can be honest and send you elsewhere when your needs exceed our ability to help. When we construct highly involved frameworks for this work, and forget it doesn’t include every single person we encounter, we are breeding our own form of blindness to reality.
There is a small move in the field of counseling psychology which finds less is more. That is, instead of attempting to answer all your questions, we offer just the bare minimum to help you answer the very biggest problem you have at one time. Instead of pretending we are experts with all the answers to the world’s ills, we humbly insist we can’t really answer our own all the time. But what we do have, we offer. We have a wide body of evidence you can work out most of your own answers with a very minimum of pointing out things you would not think of on your own. We have noticed, given some time, most people come up with a pretty good answer. Counseling consists of guiding you to actually think it through with your best capabilities, without cheating yourself. Once that single worst blind spot is exposed, that job is done.
We don’t want you dependent on anyone who is clearly not big enough to carry you. That would be any human counselor alive on this earth. That includes the geniuses who came up with all those wonderful personality assessments, and insist your answers which don’t fit in their neat little matrix are simply not important. Again, if there are a hundred questions and you find three which don’t fit your reality, that assessment will not help you. The whole thing is broken and pointless, at best. It will create an image of you which is false enough to miss your needs, and runs the risk of misguiding you for a very long time afterward. You trade one false reality for another.
You are in charge of your own counseling. The most powerful moral force on this earth is someone voluntarily doing the right thing. If something inside you needs to keep bouncing off brick walls until you are ready to stop the pain, then I should be willing to wait. If, in the process, you keep hurting others, then maybe I need to find a way to help others stay out of your way, or maybe even force you to find other brick walls to bounce off, but there are always distinct limits to what I can do or should try to do. Yet, even if what I say causes a reaction, a rejection, which then puts you in a better place, I call that success. I am hardly the final judge of success, when the whole cause for you coming in the first place was pain. However you find peace, that’s the best hope I can have.
Don’t let anyone ignore your reality and pretend to have all the answers you need.