'OTROVERTS', A NEW DEFINITION OF BASIC PERSONALITY TYPE

I am a voracious reader and have always been one, since my earliest days. Due to the tug of familial dynamics I have described previously in other writings, I grew up with a strong internal sense of ‘otherness’, complicated by paternal loss at an early age (4 years) and a multicultural upbringing (White European and Hawai’ian Kanaka), compounded by undiagnosed ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder, today characterized in the DSM-V-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as ADHD (ADD with a hyperactive component). Although I did not seem to give any evidence of hyperactivity, my ADD and the fact that I was clearly a ‘brighter than average underachiever’, relegated me to a certain category of adolescence which didn’t conform to the usual, conventional type definitions that are commonly applied to most adolescent youths.

I was neither ‘extrovert’ nor ‘introvert’ by any casual observer’s determination. I grew up largely in the company of well-educated adults and had few peer playmates to socialise with. As a direct consequence, I spent a lot of my time either alone or with a single other young friend and my ‘social circle’ was necessarily quite limited.

Given the fact that I spent my summers at my maternal grandmother’s home in rural southern Idaho in the company of my school-teacher mother, I found myself with a lot of spare time to fill, bereft of young peer companions with which to amuse myself. Fortunately, my maternal grandmother (who had graduated in the 1860s with a degree from a respected women’s college, back east and whom had emigrated to Idaho via wagon train with her pharmacist husband on the Oregon Trail) was quite a literate woman who was also a talented classical pianist. She maintained a voluminous library in her home, which also served as my bedroom when we visited her, so I was literally surrounded by several thousands of books, as well as a complete collection of every single National Geographic Magazine published since its inception in 1888.

I am proud to say that having precociously learned to read at an unusually early age, I eventually read through every issue of that compendium of discovery and world knowledge in the summer months of our yearly visits. This habit of reading anything and everything remained with me through my entire life and the result was an inexhaustible curiosity about human affairs, behavior and experience.

This was back in the 50s and naturally we had no cellular smartphones, no internet, no video games and...thank God!...no social media to destroy our tender young brains’ ability to think, reflect, meditate, analyse and problem solve. We did have a (then) rare television (an early Zenith color set, equipped with an archetypal “electronic beam” remote control, that was the envy of everyone in Grandmum’s community), but access to it was strictly rationed and daily “TV time” was severely limited to less than an one hour. For the record, back home in Central Valley California, most school teachers like my Mum were too poor to be able to afford many basic luxuries, such as even a simple B&W set constituted in those days.

Recreational outings and social gatherings in rural Idaho in the Burley/Twin Falls area in southern Idaho at the time were typically conducted in the presence of my physician-Uncle’s and Grandmum’s adult friends at Country Club activities, mostly attended by Unk’s golf buddies and the adult members of their families. There were also numerous Bridge and Canasta gatherings organized by the local Presbyterian Church (of which Grandmum was a prominent member and ‘leading citizen’) and precious few, if any early-adolescent-age activities that I could avail.

All of these influences resulted in my growing up as a preternaturally ‘serious’, well-behaved, courteous and ‘cultivated’ child, who after a decade or two of exposure to the constraints of this social milieu, had developed a rich, imaginative and innovative ‘inner’ life. What I lacked externally was any real ability to relate to peers of my age, most of whom were totally immersed in typical youthful social and group settings. That posed no problem for me, however, since I had learned from both exposure and conditioning to all of the foregoing to be utterly reliant upon myself, my intuition, my acquired understandings of human behavior (from books) and personal experiential discoveries.

The only real contact I had had during these long summer removes was with my two male and one female First Cousins (my Uncle’s kids). Unk was a stern disciplinarian, also a leading member of the town’s First Presbyterian Church and the town’s physician and surgeon, having graduated with a medical degree in the early 1900s from Northwestern University, back east. He had served as a Medical Officer with the Allied Armies in North Africa during the Second World War and resigned from his military commission as a Lt. Colonel (medical service) at war’s end, before returning to rural Burley (ID), which was then still a small town of only several thousand inhabitants. He almost single-handedly established the town’s first community hospital (as well as a flourishing, private medical and surgical practice).

My cousins, therefore, were subjected to the very stern paternal outlook of Unk, who expected and demanded complete and unquestioned compliance by his kids to extremely demanding standards of behavior and decorum. Each was sent off to military school (Shattuck School, later Shattuck University, an Anglican/Episcopalian institution) in Faribault, Minnesota, when they graduated from high school, and each went into so-called ‘upper middleclass’ professions (the eldest graduated from Northwestern’s medical school and eventually became Chief of Infectious Diseases at the University of Oregon’s medical school). The younger cousin eventually took over the Honeywell Corporation’s Far East operations in Japan as its First Vice President.

Interestingly, Unk’s daughter (my First Cousin) turned out to be a Tomboyish girl, who excelled as a barrel racer and calf-roper; she also served as the County’s Rodeo Queen on several occasions. I suspect that the ‘Tomboyish’ tendency was attributable to the fact that my disciplinarian Unk raised her pretty much as he would have a boy. [This theory later gained weight when she suddenly divorced her physician/surgeon husband and began living with a female companion in an obviously conjugal relationship; a circumstance kept on the quiet, owing to the then-extant Presbyterian proscription against same-sex relationships. She had two daughters from her first marriage. One of them got married in the conventional manner and had kids, and the other preferred a female 'partner.' Interesting.]

As I continued to grow, repeating this yearly pattern of summer seasonal life, I found myself somewhat disconcertingly at a loss to socially fit in smoothly at high school, attending a small Central Valley community that my mother had relocated to in order to teach at grammar school levels.

I found that I wasn’t interested in team sports, preferring solitary sports like swimming competition, where one competed largely against the clock and mostly against one’s best efforts. I enjoyed music (probably thanks to my Grandmother’s endless efforts to get me to study violin and the piano, both of which failed...I ended playing trombone at school).

I found I knew everything there was to know about sex, reproduction, marriage and the biological/scientific facts of nature, but was hopelessly awkward and ill-at-ease around girls, having had almost no opportunity to develop typical young male interactions with girls. Some peers attributed this to a sort of sniffy snobbery, but I was actually just embarrassingly shy and couldn’t strike up a casual conversation with any girl I was interested in to save my life! I’m sure that several of my imagined ‘high school sweethearts’ hadn’t the faintest awareness of any feelings I had for them as I tended to be always ultra-courteous, considerate and respectful of the female sex...characteristics that absolutely NO young girl has ever, even remotely found attractive. Try as I might, I could never succeed being a ‘bad boy’ in any way, a flaw that effectively set me off, as if I didn’t exist for them.

But the above is merely a bit of backstory to give the subject I am about to discuss some necessary context for understanding  what emerges in the following paragraphs.

My teachers in school, for their part, felt that while I was clearly an intelligent child, the fact that I was quite nonchalant about my grades and wasn’t a good student in the conventional ‘straight-A’ sense (meaning a diligent homework completer and intensely focused studier), this simply warranted my being labeled as a “bright and potentially capable but underachieving student.” The ADD I was afflicted with and that complicated my life considerably, remained completely undiagnosed throughout my school years and it wasn’t until mature adulthood that the possibility of this developmental liability existing in my life was even considered by an HMO primary care provider!

When I entered college, the Vietnam War was just starting to loom in Southeast Asia and having had an ambition since childhood to fly military jets, I applied as an applicant to the US Navy’s NROTC (Reserve Office’s Training Corps), acceptance into which would provide me with a full scholarship to complete college at Uncle Sam’s expense, after which I would be commissioned as a Naval Ensign and attend basic flight training.

After being recommended by our local congressman (given that my father was a veteran of the 1898 Spanish War), that candidacy was effectively shot down by my mediocre GPA, although I remain convinced that the Navy found an excuse during my medical examination to wash me out as having an “abnormal carbohydrate response”. This determination was, I am sure, based purely upon my disclosure that there was diabetes on both sides of my family, although I never had nor have ever developed any such medical affliction then or since, based upon repeated laboratory testing I have undergone.

I suppose, thinking this all over, that it was a fortuitous turn of events, given the fact that had I been flying a Navy jet fighter over Vietnam, the chances of my ass being shot out of the skies by a well-guided NVA Sam-2 missile were astronomically high. I also learned, after taking gliding and powered private flying license instruction, that although my ‘piloting skills’ were up to snuff in an eye/motor reflex sense, I had a persistent middle ear condition (chronic otitus media) that ruled me out for any serious piloting role in an aircraft. [As it was, I not long after ended up as Aeromedical Specialist in the US Air Force, having enlisted to avoid being drafted into the Army; this allowed me to go on ‘flying status’ as a crew member but that proscribed any hands-on-the-stick piloting role.]

When I was discharged from the US Air Force back into civilian life, I entered the civilian medical technology field and quickly developed a career in pulmonary and cardiovascular medicine (although my ability to learn quickly was still hampered by my ‘hidden’ ADD, of course).

That was quite a while back, given that I have now been retired from my professional work for almost 12 years. After having spent decades coping with the circumstances and experiences alluded to above, I have still spent a considerable amount of time (as a keen reader, and by necessity a sort of lower grade auto-didact) trying to gain a deeper understanding of myself and, perhaps because of my medical background, trying to attribute my perceived failures and failings in life to something that heretofore seemed to be beyond my understanding.

Let me apologise here for boring any of you needlessly by going on at tedious length about myself and my various “developmental impediments”, since few may be expected to take much interest in others and their problems in an age of wide-spread narcissism, self-obsessiveness and social media preoccupations, but I felt I had to give you some coherent understanding of my finding much in what follows: the recent rise of a new diagnostic hypothesis by one Dr. Rami Kaminski that describes a new, third, basic psychological profile (joining long-accepted “Introversion” and “Introversion” types), that he calls the “OTROVERSIVE” personality.

I just recently happened to catch a review of Dr. Kaminski’s new (2025) book, titled The Gift of Not Belonging, in which he develops and explains his newly defined Otroversional Personality hypothesis. The book is quite interesting and it struck me that perhaps what he has identified and fleshed-out has direct relevance to my own life-experience. At the risk of succumbing to an overenthusiastic subscription to what is still a new and not widely accepted psychological profile type, it could be a dead-ringer explanation that uncannily mirrors many of my own experiences.

To that end, I’ll let OPEN-AI fill you in on the details of his work, via the following report.

Dr. Kaminski, a psychiatrist with over four decades of experience in psychiatric practice, has recently introduced the concept of the Otrovert personality type, which he describes in his book, The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners, and through his Otherness Institute, an organisation dedicated to full exploration of the new personality type. This hypothesis proposes a distinct personality style that differs from the commonly understood introversion and extroversion.  

Dr. Kaminski's Hypothesis of the Otrovert Personality Type:

The core of Kaminski's otrovert hypothesis revolves around a fundamental lack of communal impulse and a sense of non-belonging to groups, regardless of the members within those groups. Key characteristics and distinctions include:  

• Non-Belonging in Groups, Comfort in One-on-One: Otroverts feel alienated, uncomfortable, and alone in group settings, even if they are socially embraced and popular. However, they are capable of forming deep, fulfilling, and less "diluted" one-on-one relationships. They can be quite gregarious and rarely tire from individual social interaction.  
• Distinct from Introverts and Extroverts:
  • Not Introverted: Unlike introverts, who crave solitude to recharge and are easily drained by social interactions, otrovert don't necessarily avoid social interaction. They can be quite sociable in individual settings and are not shy or quiet. While introverts may also feel a desire to belong, otroverts fundamentally lack the communal impulse to begin with.  
  • Not Extroverted: While they might appear extroverted due to their sociability in one-on-one interactions, they are not energized by large groups and do not seek external stimulation from them. They feel no genuine affinity for a group.
  • Not Loners or Marginalized: Otroverts are often well-liked and socially integrated, distinguishing them from those who are marginalized or genuinely isolated. Their "otherness" is an internal state, not a result of social exclusion.  
• Independent Thinking and Non-Conformity: Otroverts are characterized by their inability to conform to what a group collectively thinks or cares about. They tend to be independent, original thinkers who eschew "groupthink." This allows them to offer unique perspectives and insights from an "outside" viewpoint, acting as an antidote to conformity.  
• Observer Rather than Participant: Otroverts often feel more like observers than active participants in group dynamics. They are preternaturally observant and intelligent.  
• Empathy and Sensitivity: Despite their non-belonging, otroverts are described as empathetic, friendly, considerate to a fault, and very sensitive to other people's feelings. Their empathy stems from understanding the internal state of individuals rather than assuming others are like them.  
• Comfort in Aloneness, Discomfort in Group Loneliness: While they value their own company and are comfortable being alone, they experience a particular kind of loneliness when within a group setting, as they cannot connect to the shared communal bond.
• Resistance to Indoctrination: Otroverts have a strong resistance to cultural and group indoctrination. They struggle to comprehend why someone would trade free thinking for group membership or blindly follow group rules.  
• Practical Implications: Kaminski argues that identifying as an otrovert can lead to a more fulfilling life by embracing one's unique gifts instead of trying to force belonging. He suggests that otroverts thrive without external pressure or direction in their personal development. In a professional context, they may struggle with teamwork but excel in solitary or untethered creative and professional endeavors.  

The Otherness Institute:

Dr. Kaminski founded The Otherness Institute in 2023 with the mission "to explain and decipher the unique phenomenon of otherness and otroversion." The institute serves as a platform to:

• Promote awareness and acceptance: By building understanding of the otrovert personality, the institute aims to reduce the suffering and misunderstanding often experienced by otroverts.  
• Provide resources: It offers information for mental health professionals, teachers, colleagues, friends, and family to help them identify and support otrovert individuals, and to collaborate and communicate more effectively with them.  
• Offer guidance: The institute helps otroverts embrace their traits and thrive in a world that often prioritizes communal belonging.  

Other Sources of Information and Critical Analysis:

The primary source of detailed information on the otrovert personality type is Dr. Kaminski's book, The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners. This book, along with the website for The Otherness Institute, provides the most comprehensive explanation of his hypothesis.  

As a newly introduced concept, the "otrovert" personality type is gaining traction and discussion. While many find personal resonance with the description, it's important to note the following regarding its acceptance within the broader psychological community:

• New Concept, Not Yet Mainstream: The "otrovert" is a term coined by Dr. Kaminski and is not yet a widely recognized or formally classified personality type within mainstream psychological literature or diagnostic manuals like the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
• Reliance on Clinical Observation and Case Studies: Kaminski's theory appears to be primarily based on his four decades of clinical experience treating patients and his own self-identification as an otrovert, rather than extensive, peer-reviewed empirical research with large-scale studies. Reviews of his book often point this out, with some critics suggesting that the concept might overlap significantly with existing understandings of introversion or specific facets of other personality models.
• Potential Overlap with Existing Constructs: Some critics suggest that the characteristics attributed to otroverts might be re-descriptions of traits already covered by existing personality theories, particularly those related to introversion, high sensitivity, or aspects of the Big Five personality traits (e.g., low agreeableness, high openness). For example, the emphasis on independent thinking and aversion to groupthink could align with aspects of "openness to experience" or certain aspects of introverted thinking in Jungian psychology. The distinction from shyness and a preference for deep one-on-one connections are indeed common traits found within the broader introvert spectrum.
• Value in Validation: Regardless of its formal classification, for individuals who resonate with the description, the concept of the otrovert can offer a sense of validation and understanding, helping them to frame their experiences in a positive light rather than feeling "abnormal" or "misunderstood." This self-identification can be a powerful tool for personal growth and acceptance.

In summary, Dr. Rami Kaminski's otrovert hypothesis presents a compelling new way to understand individuals who feel an inherent sense of non-belonging to groups while still being capable of deep individual connections. While it's a relatively new concept in the field of psychology, it offers a fresh perspective on personality and the dynamics of social interaction, with its primary current sources being Kaminski's book and The Otherness Institute.

Does any of the above information relate to you and your own life? In terms of myself, I personally find much in Dr. Kaminski’s hypothesis of Otroversive personality types that seems quite congruent with and reflects, almost uncannily, my own path through life. That path has been neither extroverted nor introverted, but has always felt somehow uncomfortably ‘different.’ Kaminski’s hypothesis of ‘otroversion’ serves to greatly explain many aspects of my own life, the essencve of which I have previously only had a dim, fragmented, vaguely illuminated and incomplete awareness of.

Kaminsky points out that although his hypothesis has not yet achieved widespread following by fellow psychiatrists, yet history regularly shows us that often what was once merely regarded as an early, yet-unproven and emerging understanding of some uncertain, previously unexplored aspect of human psycho-social development, has ultimately come to be accepted as not just valid but evidentially demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.

To that end, I would highly recommend Kaminski's book to all of you. Especially to those of you who feel you’ve never quite fitted in with the conventions of mass society and ‘group-think’ social conformity norms. Those who've followed not just a different drummer (as Thoreau characterised it) but developed (in many cases) their own drum-orchestrations that were quite fulfilling and satisfying in their own right.

Sources used available (upon request)