[SIZE=+1]By innate preference you were drawn in childhood to develop your imagination and creativity. Perhaps you created an imaginary playmate, or several, with whom you secretly lived while your parents wondered about your dreamy silence. Only a favorite friend or two, or a wise and gentle parent, was permitted to share your world of make-believe. Teachers frequently had to remind you that you were not paying attention. It is hard for you to remember the details of this period, especially as details did not engage your interest. But you do recall the general atmosphere, whether of happiness, sadness, pain, or pleasure.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=+1]2nd period - 12 to 20 years (Extraverted Feeling)[/SIZE]
[SIZE=+1]While continuing to perceive in a predominantly intuitive way, you now become aware of a desire to give expression to your life of feeling. Sensitivity to your own feelings and compassion for others became characteristic of you, and because you were led to manifest these qualities others came to know you predominantly through them. You perhaps surprised yourself by becoming more outgoing, in contrast to your previous shyness. You became more aware of ways in which you could help others, especially the poor, the suffering, the underdog, and you may have joined groups committed to the service of others. You may have found it difficult to find time for yourself in the process of obliging others.
3rd period - 20 to 35 years (Introverted Thinking)
At twenty you experienced a tendency to become more independent, more your own person, and became critical of your previous habits of submission to the wishes of others. Because this development was taking place in an introverted way, you were not fully able to explain to others your new determination to become more autonomous; hence others may have been offended or baffled by the change in you. At the beginning of this period you probably felt you were handling the transition badly, but your conviction that it was right helped you to persevere and grow. The solution to your occasional ineptness was, you believed, in going forward toward assertiveness, not back to your earlier submissiveness.
4th period - 35 to 50 years (Extraverted Sensing)
At this point you begin to experience a call to develop your least acknowledged gift, your sensing. Now you began to notice the details of life around you, which previously, in your basic preference for exploring the possible, had not engaged your interest. As if for the first time you took pleasure in the exercise of some or all of your senses. You probably became keenly interested in such things as doing things with your hands, playing a musical instrument, taking up a craft, or collecting and classifying objects; and you engaged in this type of activity with a precision which contrasted strongly with your previous vagueness about the life of the senses. Now in fact you became somewhat impatient with inexactitude, daydreaming, and disorder in yourself and in others. Your preference now was for engaging in the newly found life of the senses in company with others, not in solitude. You liked to have someone with you as you attended concerts or visited museums; and your companions were struck with your attentiveness to the fine details of artistic creation.
Since it is opposite the dominant function, people sometimes make dramatic shifts in their personality -- what is sometimes labeled a "mid-life crisis" -- during this phase of development. They may become radically different persons from how they were in the past, although this will not necessarily be so if has been able to embrace change along the way and have individuated previously in a healthy fashion. The fourth function usually develops sometime after age 35.
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