Gifts Differing

I've been trying to wrap my mind around Myers-Briggs (MBTI) theory for a couple of years. I've read Understanding Yourself and Others by Linda V. Berens, Personality Type: An Owner's Manual by Lenore Thomson, 16 Ways to Love Your Lover:Understanding the 16 Personality Types by Otto Kroeger and Janet Thuesen, participated in a few online discussions about it (and a couple in real life), and watched DaveSuperPower's YouTube videos, which say that you can't rely on those online tests because it's all about cognitive functions, and the only way to understand MBTI is to study the cognitive functions. I am still stumped!

Gifts Differing by Isabel Briggs Myers and her son Peter Myers was recommended as a good book to help understanding the functions, so here I am, with the book, determined to figure this thing out.

First off, the four letters of everyone's MBTI are really describing two things:
How We Perceive (what we see in a situation depends on whether we prefer to notice things through our five senses or through our intuition; this tells whether we're S or N)
How We Judge (what we decide to do about the information we take in depends on whether we're driven more by impersonal logic or personal relationships; this tells whether we're T or F)

One difference between this book and others:

Linda Berens defines the four core types as:
SP (the Improvisor)
SJ (the Stabilizer)
NT (the Theorist)
NF (the Catalyst)

But Myers describes them using only the middle letters:
ST (practical, matter-of-fact)
SF (sociable and friendly)
NF (inspired, enthusiastic and insightful)
NT (logical and ingenious)

I did note that, where Myers takes a paragraph to briefly explain each of the core types, there are two paragraphs to explain NF's. It also did not escape my notice that Isabel Briggs Myers was INFP, her mother, who started the family's MBTI research, was INFJ, and her son is ENFP. In other words, a pack of NF's wrote this book, so it's no surprise that NF's get the most thorough description. :-)