When Reality Knocks

I remember when the hostages were finally allowed to come home from Iran. The media coverage was unbelievable, really overwhelming. Some of the hostages were more than happy to talk to reporters after they arrived home and some of them just wanted to be left alone and refused to talk to anyone. I remember there was a fair amount of talk in the media about how these people had been damaged by their experience, because they were being so insular and uncommunicative.

Although the hostages clearly were badly traumatized by their experience and none of us would want to go through something similar, it seems clear that the people who wanted to be by themselves were simply introverts. They most likely wouldn’t have wanted to talk to someone in the media even if they hadn’t been through a traumatic experience. They were simply quiet, introverted people.

It seems to me that in our culture, especially in the incredibly extroverted culture of the Excited States of America, that it is assumed that there is something wrong with someone who is quiet, that they are broken in some way and must be fixed. It seems to me that trying to change the way someone is fundamentally, even with the best of misguided intentions, can be very damaging and there are many people who have been very badly scarred by families and institutions such as schools, because they were forced to be extroverted when they just weren’t.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Personal Growth, Personality Type. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.