A Tribute to Katharine Myers

By Cindy Stengel Paris

   I am blessed to be able to say that Kathy Myers was my mentor and my friend. We met at a local chapter meeting of the Delaware Valley Association of Psychological Type (DVAPT) circa 2001. I had just started my consulting business, and was looking forward to getting involved in the Type community. I was introduced to Kathy by her friend Shoya Zichy; so impressed that I was meeting a Type celebrity, I sat myself at their table.

   After the meeting, Kathy mentioned that she was in search of an assistant to help her organize her home office. I promptly volunteered and what started as a part-time and very helpful gig, blossomed into a mentor-ship, and a close friendship, with a woman I much admired.

   Over the course of the next 15 or so years, Kathy and I spent days on-end sitting in her apartment drinking coffee (she loved what she dubbed her “yucky cappuccino” – the kind with caramel and whip cream, that I would bring her from Starbucks) and lunching in the dining hall, theorizing about the meaning of life, sharing our joys and sorrows on a personal level, and talking and writing about Type. I was most honored to author and edit her personal website, to write articles about Type together, to create and deliver workshops for DVAPT, and to travel together to Type conferences and retreats.

   (Another proud moment was to snap this picture of her with her new puppy Hermes for her annual Christmas cards; it became the picture she used and loved the most!)

   As I spent time with Kathy, I learned that a central theme of her life was one of gratitude. She spoke often about how she was living a blessed life on two levels – her life in her retirement community, where she had many friends and was treated with an abundance of kindness and respect, and her conscious journey of Jungian Individuation through her work with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®. Kathy was perpetually humbled and grateful for the gift of Type that Isabel Myers had given her, which reached back to her childhood.

   So many different times, and in many different ways, Kathy would talk about how thankful she was for Isabel’s teachings, especially the notion that it was “OK” for her to be an introvert. This insight into herself at a young age allowed her to move about the world – or extravert – in her own introverted way.

   Kathy often spoke to me about the value of Type, and of knowing ones four-letters, and how it cut across all aspects of life. She recounted the many people for whom the knowledge of Type had impacted in profound ways, often mentioning how she had witnessed Type saving marriages, and how it deepened her own personal relationships with her family and friends. She knew that Type insights can be life-changing.

   For Kathy, learning about Type was a life-long process of self-discovery that was constantly surprising and always rewarding. Kathy saw studying the deeper aspects of Type as a journey toward wholeness and self-fulfillment, and was dedicated to teaching people about its depth and richness; a lesson I learned well.

    “I believe that Carl Jung, better than anyone else, explains human behavior, development and the wholeness of wrestling with the conscious and the unconscious, which I came to through the doorway of my journey with Isabel Myers, her family, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.” -- Conversations with Katharine Myers

   I will be forever indebted to Kathy for providing me with an understanding of the deeper aspects of Type which I not only apply to my daily life, but bring forward to my clients. Everything I write about, or speak about, and each workshop I deliver, is tied together by the golden threads of what I learned from Kathy Myers.  And, most assuredly, I will forever be grateful for the depth of a friendship that will always remain close to my heart.

 Editor's Note:  To learn more about Katharine Myers' life, click here.