Apparently I’m an ISFP 6w5 so/sp

Woman holding a leather journal beside a candlelit garden gathering

What the Hel Does That Have to Do With Paganism?

Yesterday’s rabbit came with letters and numbers.

ISFP 6w5 so/sp.

I went looking at personality types and found one that seems to describe me rather better than I expected. That exploration belongs mostly over on Standing on the Ledge, because ultimately it is a discussion about me: how I think, why trust matters so much, why I research things into the ground, why I want people around me while still being extremely selective about whom I trust.

But there was another rabbit hiding underneath that one.

Because once I began looking at the description, I found myself asking the inevitable question:

What the hell does any of this have to do with Paganism?

Quite a bit, apparently.

The Paganism I Practice Has to Mean Something

The ISFP part begins with something called Introverted Feeling, or Fi. Strip away the psychological terminology and what remains is a strong internal value system.

I can learn traditions.

I can read books.

I can listen to elders, scholars, priests, teachers, community leaders, reconstructionists, historians, witches, Heathens, Druids, and the person sitting across the fire who has been doing this for forty years.

But eventually something still has to pass through my own internal filter.

Does this actually mean something to me?

That may explain a great deal about my Pagan journey.

I have never been particularly interested in belief merely because somebody tells me I am supposed to believe it.

A ritual performed only because the instructions say to perform it leaves me rather cold.

A tradition means considerably more when I understand why people did it, what it represented, how it connected them to their gods, their ancestors, their land, or one another.

I need some living meaning underneath the form.

That does not mean throwing tradition away.

If anything, it makes me want to understand tradition more deeply.

My Paganism Begins With Things I Can Touch

The sensing side of ISFP also makes an interesting amount of sense here.

My Paganism is not entirely philosophical.

It is fire.

Land.

Cold air.

Rain.

Gardens.

Animals.

Food.

Wood smoke.

Changing seasons.

A place that has been walked repeatedly until memories have accumulated upon it.

People gathered around something physical and sharing an experience together.

Then comes the intuitive part.

What does this mean?

What is underneath it?

Why did this particular experience affect me?

Why does this place feel different?

Why did our ancestors attach meaning to this season, this animal, this tree, this fire, this story?

That process is probably one reason so many of the rabbits on Unplugged Pagan begin with something very ordinary and end somewhere philosophical.

I notice something.

Then I want to understand what lives underneath it.

Then Type Six Asks Whether the Community Is Real

This is where things get considerably more uncomfortable.

The central questions associated with Enneagram Six concern trust, loyalty, security, reliability, and belonging.

Put that into a Pagan context and suddenly a lot of my writing makes sense.

Who are my people?

What does it mean when we call ourselves a community?

What obligations do we have toward one another?

What is loyalty?

What is frith?

What happens when trust is broken?

When somebody says that a place belongs to the community, what exactly does that mean?

When somebody speaks for a tradition, where does their authority come from?

What happens when community language and individual behaviour stop matching?

Those are not merely organizational questions for me.

Apparently they strike directly at one of the ways I understand belonging.

I Want Pagan Community

This needs saying clearly because introversion is so often mistaken for wanting isolation.

I do not want Paganism to be something I practice entirely alone.

I can practice alone.

That is different.

I would much rather have the fires, gatherings, conversations, shared meals, rituals, arguments, laughter, storytelling, music, work parties, and all the strange little interactions that happen when people build history together.

I want community.

I want people around me who understand at least some of the same language.

I want people who can sit around a fire until some ridiculous hour discussing gods, history, philosophy, mundane life, and complete nonsense without any clear boundary between them.

What I apparently do not want is the appearance of community without the obligations of community.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

If we call ourselves a community, then surely the word should imply something.

Maybe not agreement.

Probably not uniformity.

Certainly not obedience.

But perhaps some combination of reciprocity, memory, responsibility, hospitality, respect, and recognition that none of us exists entirely independently of everyone else.

The Five Wing Wants the Footnotes

Then there is the 5 wing.

This may be responsible for an unreasonable percentage of the material appearing on this blog lately.

Six asks whether something can be trusted.

Five responds by looking it up.

Where did this tradition come from?

Who actually said this?

When did this practice appear?

Was this ancient, or did somebody invent it in 1973?

How did Wicca affect modern Paganism?

Who influenced Canadian Pagan communities?

What did the scholars record?

What did the people who were actually there remember?

What happened to the gatherings that disappeared?

Who kept records?

Who did not?

And suddenly there goes another rabbit.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in separating history from mythology about our history.

Both can have value.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

If we are going to understand where modern Paganism came from, then somebody has to ask inconvenient questions about what we actually know.

The Social Instinct Changes Everything

The part of the personality description that really caught my attention was so/sp.

The so means Social instinct comes first.

Again, that does not mean being a social butterfly.

It means that questions involving belonging, groups, roles, responsibility, continuity, and shared identity tend to carry considerable weight.

And suddenly the rabbits I have been chasing recently look remarkably consistent.

Second-generation Pagans.

Third-generation Pagans.

Who keeps our history?

What happens when founders die?

How does a gathering change when the people who created it are no longer there?

What happens to traditions when nobody remembers why they existed?

Can a Pagan community become old enough to have institutional memory?

Can we transmit something to another generation without turning it into dogma?

These are not simply historical questions.

They are social questions.

They ask whether Paganism is merely something individuals happen to practice at the same time, or whether we are capable of creating communities that persist beyond the people who originally built them.

And Self-Preservation Asks Whether It Can Survive

Then comes the secondary Self-Preservation instinct.

This is the part that looks at all those lovely ideals and asks a rather mundane question:

How are we actually going to keep this going?

Someone needs to maintain the land.

Someone needs to build the fire.

Someone needs to organize the gathering.

Someone needs to clean the toilets.

Someone needs to preserve the records.

Someone needs to teach the newcomer how something works.

Someone needs to make sure the bills are paid.

Someone needs to remember what happened twenty years ago.

Ritual may create sacred space.

But eventually someone also has to stack the chairs.

That is not separate from community.

I increasingly think it is one of the ways community reveals whether it actually exists.

Maybe That Is Why Legacy Keeps Appearing

Over the last little while I have repeatedly found myself coming back to legacy.

Not legacy in the sense of wanting my name carved onto something.

I mean continuity.

What remains?

What survives?

What gets passed forward?

What disappears because nobody thought it was worth writing down?

What happens when Paganism becomes old enough that people entering it have no living memory of its formative years?

What happens when second-generation Pagans become parents and third-generation Pagan children begin appearing?

At some point we stop being merely participants in a young religious movement and become ancestors of whatever comes next.

That is a strange thought.

But perhaps it is an important one.

The Fire Keeper

There is an image in all of this that I keep coming back to.

The fire keeper.

The fire keeper does not necessarily own the fire.

They do not control everyone sitting around it.

They do not decide what everyone must believe.

They simply understand that if nobody feeds the fire, eventually it goes out.

Someone watches it.

Someone adds wood.

Someone notices when it is dying down.

Someone remembers how it was started.

Someone teaches the next person how to tend it.

Perhaps that is part of what I have been searching for when I talk about Pagan community.

Not authority.

Not ownership.

Stewardship.

People willing to keep something alive long enough to hand it to somebody else.

There Is a Danger Here Too

The same personality traits that make someone interested in history and community can also lead them badly astray.

If trust matters deeply, suspicion can become too easy.

If patterns matter, unrelated events can begin looking connected.

If research provides security, it can become difficult to stop researching.

If community matters, changes within that community can feel more personal than perhaps they actually are.

That means I have to remember something whenever I chase these rabbits:

The purpose of research is not to prove that I am right.

It is to find out what is true.

Sometimes those are the same thing.

Sometimes the rabbit should lead directly to evidence that forces me to change my mind.

That is not a failed rabbit hunt.

That is exactly what the hunt is supposed to do.

So What Does ISFP 6w5 so/sp Have to Do With Paganism?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe everything.

I do not think personality determines religion. I certainly do not believe all Pagans of a particular personality type will practice anything like I do.

But personality probably affects the questions we bring with us.

And apparently I bring questions about authenticity, trust, community, history, responsibility, and continuity.

I want Paganism to mean something personally.

I want to understand where it came from.

I want community, but I want that word to have substance.

I want us to remember the people and places that brought us here.

I want us to build things capable of surviving us.

And I want to know that when the people around today’s fires are gone, somebody will still remember how to light the next one.

Perhaps that is why I keep chasing these particular rabbits.

Maybe I am not merely trying to understand Paganism.

Maybe somewhere underneath all these questions I have been asking something else:

What are we building together that will still exist when we are gone?

That rabbit may keep me occupied for a while.

The Pain That Remains: Phantom Limbs, Trauma, and the Mind’s Fight to Heal

A man sitting on a wooden stool with a glowing digital arm hologram extending from him

A while back, when I was working through my Intro to Psychology course, I spent some time looking at post-traumatic stress disorder and the treatments being studied for it. One of those treatments was MDMA-assisted therapy.

Some people know MDMA by its street name: ecstasy. But there is an important distinction to make right away. Street ecstasy is uncontrolled, illegal, and unpredictable. Clinical MDMA is administered in a controlled therapeutic setting, with screening, monitoring, preparation, therapeutic support, and follow-up. Those are not the same thing.

That distinction matters.

The point was not, “Take a drug and trauma disappears.” That is not how trauma works. The point was that, under very controlled conditions, MDMA appeared to help some people approach traumatic memories without being overwhelmed by the same level of fear, shutdown, or emotional flooding.

In a 2023 phase 3 trial published in Nature Medicine, MDMA-assisted therapy showed significant improvement in PTSD symptoms and functional impairment over an eighteen-week period. The study reported that 86.5% of participants in the MDMA-assisted therapy group achieved a clinically meaningful benefit, and 71.2% no longer met PTSD criteria by the end of the study.

That is not nothing.

But science is not faith healing. It does not get to stop at hope. In 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not approve the MDMA-assisted therapy application as submitted and requested further evidence, including another clinical trial. In Canada, access to substances such as MDMA and psilocybin may be requested through Health Canada’s Special Access Program in limited circumstances, but those requests are assessed case by case and are not the same as general approval or personal possession.

So the honest answer is this: MDMA-assisted therapy is promising, but it is not a free-for-all, not a miracle cure, and not something anyone should confuse with street use. The setting, the therapist, the screening, the dose, the support, and the follow-up are not side details. They are the treatment.

And that brings me to another strange and fascinating area of pain: phantom limb pain.

I came across a story about a veteran who had lost part of an arm and continued to feel severe pain in the missing limb. Pain medication did not solve it. Nerve blocks did not solve it. The pain was so bad he would drink himself into oblivion just to escape it for a while.

Now, some people hear “phantom pain” and think that means imaginary pain.

It does not.

My father is an amputee. He lost part of his leg when he was much younger, in his late teens. Even now, roughly sixty-five years later, he can still feel pain in the part of the leg that is no longer there. That sounds impossible until you remember that pain is not only located in flesh. Pain is also processed in the nervous system. The body may lose the limb, but the brain does not always lose the map.

Cleveland Clinic describes phantom limb pain as real pain felt in a missing body part after amputation. It can feel like aching, burning, itching, stabbing, tingling, throbbing, twisting, or temperature change. More than half of people who lose a limb experience some form of phantom pain.

That matters because pain being “in the brain” does not mean pain is fake. All pain is processed by the brain. The question is not whether the person is imagining it. The question is what the nervous system is doing, what signals are being misread, and whether the brain can be helped to redraw the map.

That is where mirror box therapy comes in.

The basic idea is almost absurdly simple. A mirror is placed so that the person sees the reflection of their intact limb where the missing limb would be. The person moves the intact limb while looking at the reflection, creating the illusion that the missing limb is also moving. In plain language, it is a conversation with the brain.

The brain says, “The hand is clenched. The foot is cramped. The missing limb is hurting.”

The mirror replies, “Look. It is moving. It is opening. It is not trapped.”

And sometimes, the brain listens.

Mirror therapy is often connected to the work of neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran in the 1990s, who used mirror visual feedback to help some amputees experience movement and relief in phantom limbs. The therapy works by creating visual feedback that can conflict with, and sometimes soften, the brain’s painful map of the missing limb.

But the science is not as clean as the popular story sometimes makes it sound. Some studies and reviews suggest mirror therapy can help, especially as part of a broader rehabilitation approach such as graded motor imagery. Other reviews argue that the evidence for mirror therapy by itself remains mixed, and more robust long-term research is still needed.

Again, that is where honesty matters.

Not every treatment works for every person. Not every hopeful result becomes standard care. But these treatments tell us something powerful about human suffering: the mind and body are not separate kingdoms. They are one system speaking in different languages.

Trauma can live in memory, but also in the nervous system. Phantom pain can come from a missing limb, but be felt as sharply as any wound. A person can know intellectually that the danger has passed, while the body still reacts as if the danger is happening now. A person can know the limb is gone, while the brain still cries out from the place where it used to be.

That does not make the person weak.

That makes the person human.

This is where I think the lesson belongs on Unplugged Pagan. Not because MDMA therapy or mirror boxes are Pagan practices. They are not. But because Paganism, at its best, does not teach us to despise the body. It teaches us to listen to land, season, fire, memory, grief, and presence.

The body is land.

The nervous system is weather.

Pain is not always an enemy; sometimes it is a messenger whose language has become distorted.

The old wound keeps speaking.

The missing limb keeps speaking.

The trauma keeps speaking.

The question becomes: how do we answer without destroying ourselves?

Some people answer with drink. Some answer with silence. Some answer with rage. Some answer by pretending nothing happened. But healing, real healing, seems to require something harder. It requires the courage to turn toward the signal and ask:

What is this?

Where is this coming from?

Is this pain warning me about the present, or is it echoing from the past?

That is true of phantom pain. It is true of PTSD. It is true of grief. It is true of betrayal. It is true of the invisible wounds people carry while still showing up to work, still paying bills, still smiling at the grocery store, still pretending they are fine because explaining the wound would take too long.

The pain is real.

Even when others cannot see the limb.

Even when others cannot see the trauma.

Even when the wound has no blood on it.

And maybe that is the deeper point here. Science is beginning to show us that healing is not always about cutting something out, numbing something down, or telling someone to “get over it.” Sometimes healing is about giving the brain new information. Sometimes it is about creating a safe enough space for the memory to be touched without being relived. Sometimes it is about showing the nervous system that the trapped limb can move, the frozen moment can pass, and the body is not condemned to remain inside the first injury forever.

That is not magic.

But it is close enough to wonder.

Godspeed.

Sources

The DSM-5-TR

What is it?

According to the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-5-TR or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision is an assistive written text used by healthcare professionals to aid or facilitate in the diagnostic process of determining whether or not a condition exists given a set of criterion as specified by the manual¹.

The Manual itself originally started life as “The American Medical Association’s Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease “ in 1917² Furthermore, it has gone through several iterations and naming conventions until its present-day name of the DSM-5-TR hereto shall be referred to as “The DSM” for simplicity.

Features of the DSM As taken and interpreted from the APA Website

The DSM has three major components:

Diagnostic Classification: This is a list of mental disorders recognized within the Manual. It includes a diagnostic code for each listed condition. These codes are for billing, collection, and transmission of data between and by healthcare professionals and agencies.
Diagnostic Criteria Sets: For the lack of better verbiage, this is the general rule set used for making a diagnosis; it first lists the symptoms of the given condition for how long those symptoms should be present and other conditions that would rule it out before making a final diagnosis.

Descriptive text: as the name implies, describes each condition provided with each listed disorder. The most recent edition of the DSM provides the following descriptors under the following headings:
Recording Procedures
Specifiers
Diagnostic Features
Associated Features
Prevalence
Development and Course
Risk and Prognostic Factors
Culture-Related Diagnostic Issues
Sex and Gender-Related Diagnostic Issues
Association With Suicidal Thoughts or Behavior
Functional Consequences
Differential Diagnosis
Comorbidity

Weakness of the DSM

I cannot really express more than what I have already expressed in a previously written work, so I shall just re-iterate what I have already said

For over ten years, I worked as a technical support specialist in a call center and seven years as a field service technician for a small wireless internet service provider. As a Diagnostician, I have seventeen years of experience if I combine the knowledge from those two jobs. The jobs involved troubleshooting cell phones, computers, network infrastructure, and people.

Over that time, several colleagues and I attempted to write a Troubleshooting manual for computer, cell phone, and network-related issues; oh yes, and let’s remember people. Have You seen our book? No, you have not; why is this? There were many attempts, but the book never made it off the many pages written. The reasons for this were simple: the possible scenarios were too numerous, and the classification of issues became too cumbersome on cross reference, as were the potential fixes. In short, the unwritten book to help fix the broken became broken. It was too complex in its working and lacked fluidity; it in itself lacked the reasoning power of the Human Brain. And then there was a need for future updates. Yes, the book idea broke.

In walks the DSM, a diagnostic aid for. Wait one minute; please see the previous paragraph.

In addition to this, one may want to look at more scholarly works where issues are identified with measuring psychiatric illness. I will reference in particular, here the determination of ADHD utilizing the E-Swan test, which is a questionnaire utilized in diagnosing ADHD based on the criteria set out within the DSM IV and DSM-5. Both the papers listed below express issues with the wording utilized within the questionnaires, and both list potential issues with comprehension of the test by its recipients. How can The DSM set out the criterion for determining a condition if definitive, accurate tests cannot be established to satisfy its specification? Is the problem the test, The DSM’s criterion, or both?

Blume, F., Buhr, L., Kuehnhausen, J., Köpke, R., Weber, L. A., Fallgatter, A. J., … Gawrilow, C. (2020, June 25). Validation of a Self-Report Version of the German Strengths and Weaknesses of ADHD Symptoms

Normal Behavior Scale (SWAN-DE-SB). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x6bpd and Alexander, L.M., Salum, G.A., Swanson, J.M. and Milham, M.P. (2020), Measuring strengths and weaknesses in dimensional psychiatry. J Child Psychol Psychiatr, 61: 40-50. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13104

1 https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/about-dsm

2 https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm/about-dsm/history-of-the-dsm

Defining Abnormal Behavior

What is Abnormal Behavior?

In attempting to define what is Abnormal Behaviour the first thing that comes to mind is an axiom of Sherlock Homes “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.—Arthur Conan Doyle (author, 1859–1930, in “The Sign of Four”).” In the case of Abnormality, we must first understand what is normal, and whatever else remains becomes abnormal. Concerning the Homes axiom, it is interesting that people attribute deductive reasoning to his sleuthing skills; however, he utilizes inductive reasoning. Homes further states, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment. —Arthur Conan Doyle (in “A Scandal in Bohemia”).” Deductive reasoning follows the scientific method, meaning it begins with a hypothesis, examines facts, and, from the findings, reaches a logical conclusion that either proves or disproves the stated hypothesis. However, I believe the best approach is to utilize Inductive reasoning when one seeks to understand Abnormality. With my understanding of both methods, deductive reasoning begins with a preconceived statement that needs to be proved or disproved and can be biased. In contrast, Inductive reasoning starts with a question and sets out to answer that question with no preconceptions as to whether or not it is proper to conclude.

The World According to Garp

The DSM-5 defines abnormal behavior as “behavior characterized by one or more of the following four criteria: maladaptive behavior, personal distress, statistical rarity, and violation of social norms.Jul 24, 2023”

Maladaptive behavior is characterized as things that prevent an individual from functioning normally within Society and may cause the individual to harm others or themselves. Things such as withdrawal from social situations, outbursts of anger that are uncharacteristic of social norms. Substance abuse as a coping mechanism. ¹

Personal distress While similar to maladaptive behavior it is more self-centric; feelings of worry, anxiety, or discomfort are focused on the self without referencing how their behavior may affect others.²

Statistical rarity in clinical terms is the needle in the haystack so to speak. The zebra in a field of horses. This probably is one of the more important determining factors of what is abnormal behavior A Rarity looks at the overall norms of Society as a whole to determine whether or not the behaviour fits within the whole societal set. ³

Violation of social norms goes hand and hand with statistical rarity but sometimes may cause a false positive as the data set looked at may be too small. In a true determination, we must look at the Macrocosm, not the microcosm. In other words, Society as a whole vs. a cultural subset of the world society.

Setting the Stage

Several key groups are instrumental in diagnosing and treating abnormal behaviors. Amongst them psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers. The team is not limited to just these three groups, but for the purpose of this paper, we will focus on them for now.

Social workers are sometimes the front of the line, or near front of the line. Although they may not have the ability to make a diagnosis of a condition, they may encounter it before an individual ever encounters a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. Their role in treatment may begin with Identifying an issue, holding individual counseling sessions, setting up peer groups, referrals to health professionals: psychologists et al. le, acting as a liaison between organizations, assisting with setting up treatment plans, and many other things. ⁵

Psychiatrists have three main roles: first, to assess the individual and diagnose whether or not a condition exists; if one does, then develop a treatment plan that aims to help the individual incorporate new strategies and coping mechanisms that allow the individual to function within Society. Lastly, ongoing care to ensure that the individual continues on a beneficial path. ⁶

Clinical psychologists are more academic in their approach. They study individuals who may be under the care of a psychiatrist or may experiment with the regime of care for the individual with the express intent of promoting change for the betterment of future care. ⁷

Issues and values around abnormal behaviors and mental illnesses.

When looking at mental illness and abnormal behaviors, there are a multitude of facets from which to look at the overall picture. And they most definitely exceed the scope of this limited work. Looking at Values, one can only hope the underlying premise is the betterment of Society and the individual as wholes or parts thereof. Historically, however, there were dark periods in the world of psychiatry. I would highly recommend reading “Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates” Erving Goffman, 1961 First Anchor Books. Goffman attempts to answer some of the questions pertaining to Stigmatisms associated with mental illness, the treatment process, the conditioning that occurs as a result of treatment in the closed societies of mental health wards, prisons and other such entities. Not only does Goffman look at things from the perspective of the patient or inmate, he also looks at the perspectives of the clinicians, the people assigned to keep order, and the administrations.

The DSM5 is a tribute to the advancement of the betterment of Society as a whole. Being an organic document it is being updated to reflect new findings, and removing old and incorrect data. Its only drawback I can see is that its ability to change sometimes is slower than it should be. One can hope that it becomes more adaptable with advancements in cloud technology.

Going back to issues surrounding abnormal behaviours and mental issues first and foremost is the stigmatism associated to it by Society itself or internally ⁸ the stigma alone stop many from being diagnosed and treated. Historically we have to look at incorrect assessments and beliefs such as being gay is a mental illness⁹ This is one instance where the DSM took far too long to update. The initial vote to remove this category from the DSM was in 1973, and it passed that it be removed; it took nearly 14 years, 1987 to be exact, until it was removed in totality. So for 14 years the possibility for incorrect treatment existed.

In short, I have exhausted the scope of this assignment, for I fear that if I continue to delve into it, it may become a thesis.

1 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/maladaptive-behavior#types

2 https://academic-accelerator.com/encyclopedia/personal-distress

3 https://psychologycampus.com/abnormal-psychology-behaviors-that-lay-outside-the-norm/

4 https://psychologycampus.com/abnormal-psychology-behaviors-that-lay-outside-the-norm/

5 https://www.casw-acts.ca/en/social-work-practice-mental-health

6 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3410123/#:~:text=Overall%2C%20psychologists%20assess%2C%20diagnose%2C,to%20physical%20and%20mental%20health.

7 https://www.apa.org/education-career/guide/subfields/clinical

8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYP3kdWSEw

9 https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-a-mental-disorder