[nikkii]

I don't know if this will be a touchy subject. I'm to curious, what was your childhood?
My childhood was bad, I lived back in forth with different unstable E personality type parents.
I'm coped with alot of it with staying away isolated trying to keep my mind peacful.
My dad is a abusive pri*k. Moms a weak self pity show who uses drugs whenever she feels like there is nothing better to do
Anyways despite everything, I'm happy with my life. I'm very resisting no matter how messed up things get I always get back up.

[NeedsNewNameNow]

Hmm, well it was mixed. My Dad was very critical, My mom was very intruding. My friends never treated me well. I don't know if that caused my introversion, or was because of it.

[propensity]

I was probably a lot closer to ENTP than INTP as I am now. I needed and relished my alone time, but I played with lots of children and the way I expressed my thoughts and feelings was brazen and extroverted. I was a smart aleck and a know-it-all, but I guess as I became older I more or less grew out of that. I played with Barbies, but I was more interested in the things I could do to them (cut the hair, dip the doll in dye, burn it, bury it, etc.) than fantasize about her life. I had a lot of chemistry and physics books as a kid too, as my grandpa tried to instill that in me early.

[Tranceman80]

I grew up the oldest of 4, think my mom has/had ocd/anxiety. She always worried and was over protective. My Dad is/was a bit aloof and unemotional. He travelled a great deal. I grew up in a neighborhood where there weren't any kids in the neighborhood, so I spent a great deal of time playing computer games (I would play sophisticated strategy games at age 8 that were designed for adults). Also, I did everything I could to be alone. For example, if my parents and siblings were watching tv upstairs, I would retreat downstairs. My house was a bit chaotic with 4 kids growing up and I always shared a room.

Interestingly, throughout grade and middle school, I was outgoing. I would do anything to be the class clown and get others to laugh. I would talk during class to whomever was next to me. This lead to me getting in trouble often, and I have to wonder if it solidfied being introverted in my now adult life.

[The Phantom]

My childhood was shaky from the start, parents constantly arguing, heavy shouting usually from my dad. They divorced when i was 5, I moved to Wales with my mum and two older brothers and we were the only black kids in a twenty odd mile radius which sucked seeing as we were in one of the most racist/racially ignorant countries in the UK. For that reason I had quite a few fights through primary school and won them all I might add. Made some good friends however, who i still see from time to time but we have less contact now I've returned home to London. I was quite extroverted too as a young kid growing up but slowly as I got older became more introverted.

[BadBrains]

My childhood was shaky from the start, parents constantly arguing, heavy shouting usually from my dad. They divorced when i was 5, I moved to Wales with my mum and two older brothers and we were the only black kids in a twenty odd mile radius which sucked seeing as we were in one of the most racist/racially ignorant countries in the UK. For that reason I had quite a few fights through primary school and won them all I might add. Made some good friends however, who i still see from time to time but we have less contact now I've returned home to London. I was quite extroverted too as a young kid growing up but slowly as I got older became more introverted.

Same here bro, my parents constantly fighting and they still do. For me I knew that I was strange from the beginnig. I thought I was crazy. I'm still at highschool right now I'm a senior and I thought the whole years at school were super terrible, but at the same time I realized that I made those years terrible due to my introverted habits. Once I graduate from high school it's going to be a big relief but at the same time I'm going to miss it.

[feefafo]

Well, I'm an only child. My parents got divorced some time ago (I might have been 7 or something) which, luckily, wasn't too messy. Sometimes I'd hear them arguing and I'd tell them to stop - I didn't get why they were so angry with each other. They'd tell me they were just discussing something. There weren't too many bad arguments - mostly, it was just like a discussion, only with raised voices and a general feeling of anger.

So, Dad moved out, stayed with my gran for a while, and then moved into a flat not too far from us. My parents were still okay around each other and I got to see my dad quite a lot. On the whole, it worked out pretty well. However, my dad had problems with alcohol and he'd sometimes be drunk when I went up to see him, which made things bad for a while.

A few years ago, he met another woman. They got married and bought a house together. I get on with her and the rest of my step-family pretty well, although I don't really talk to them much. My step-siblings are all in their twenties - one of them has a baby, so I'm a step-aunt too. I don't see my dad as much now, and I'm usually the one who has to phone and arrange something, but we're still okay.

Oh, and I used to have panic attacks when I was about 10 because I was afraid of missing the bus home from school. I had to go and see a psychologist for a while (I bet she had fun trying to talk to me about feelings) and I think we worked out that it had something to do with me being afraid of being left behind by my parents or something. It didn't help much, but I eventually got over it.

I'd say I had a fairly good childhood. I mean, compared to most people.

I was lucky in that my parents (for the most part) understood my desire to learn and actively taught me. My dad would come home from work with new books for me to read and I'd be encouraged to work out what new words meant based on context. Enid Blyton books helped expand my vocabulary. My parents gave me a highlighter to pick out words I didn't understand and they'd go through those words with me the next night.

I found school a lot easier than most of the other kids, despite being the youngest in the class.

[Vanargand]

Well, until I was about 13 or 14 things were fairly stable for me, apart from moving a lot cause my dad liked to not pay rent sometimes. Then we moved cross-country when I was 16 for my dad's job. He ended up not keeping said job and we moved back. My mom and dad split up and I moved in with mom for the last couple years til I went off to college. As it turns out, my dad had been sleeping around during the end of him and my mom being together and he got some skank pregnant. He's been living with her since which is really awkward for me.

All in all, things could be worse, but they definitely could have been better. *shrug*

[honestfi]

It's interesting here how many INTPs come from broken homes - my parents divorced when I was very small and I found out much later the divorce was very very messy.

I found it difficult to mix with other kids, and unusually I was brought up by my father and grandfather (a story I won't go into here, needless to say I was grateful that they both waited until I was about 19 before telling me the whole truth) - anyhoo I saw my mother most Sundays but did not have a regular female figure in my life, and was somewhat a tomboy.

As I believe that being INTP is much to do with external influence, I think it perhaps unsurprising that with turmoil in earlier lives, we become introverted, thinkers..observers....

[INTPenn]

My parents have been contently, but not passionately by a stretch, married for 25 years. I am the youngest out of three daughters. In our family, no one is particularly loving. That is not to say that we are bad to each other; we take care of each other quite well, and talk on a need-to-know basis. However, I grew up with the concepts of hugging, holding hands, making small talk utterly foreign to me. My father was emotionally neglected by his father and Alzheimer's-ridden mother as a child, and that combined with his mild Asperger's affected the way he interacts with us. My mother is a strong leader, but never really went out of her way to make sure she was in touch with us as children.

When I was young, I was an extrovert. However, constant rejection from my older sisters, 2.5 and 5 years older than me respectively, and two years of intense bullying in middle school taught me not to value and in fact fear any sort of deep attachment. I am still a free-spirit, but only when I can be alone and relax.

At 17, I still have not been able to comfortably force myself to make physical contact with others, or let go of my control over my emotions even in small amounts. I do what I can to cope with the outside world using my intuition - just as I did as a child. However, I am analytical to a fault when I contemplate the mysteries and paradoxes of my existence, which is a trait I believe I've always had that others affected little. I am mildly ADD, but I have it so lightly that I've learned to control it without medicine. I only struggle with things such as deadlines and replying to forms of long-distance communication. Basically, I'm very lazy. I have a knack for learning, but freeze up when it comes to the looming judgment of tests to gauge exactly how intelligent I am - I really don't want to know. I avoid competition for the same reason.

Judging by what I've experienced and seen, I postulate that us INTP types have been hyper-rational deep-thinkers since day one, but events conspired in a way that we developed into secluded individuals uncomfortable with emotions, relationships, and the constructs of our environments.

Our surroundings teach us from a young age, usually harshly, to stay out of the fray. We then proceed to observe from the sidelines, using our deadly intuition as a foundation for our logical minds to build upon, preferring to make our moves solo and from the shadows.

P.S. (I highly recommend the book "Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto" by Anneli Rufus to explain to others our tendency to avoid taxing social bonds.)