MBTI Type: ISTJ
Miss Higgins is meticulous and organized; she comes into the doctor’s office and takes great pleasure in putting it all to rights, turning each patient file into a meticulous card full of information, and in cross-examining information. When Dr. Turner wants to find out anything, she insists upon doing it herself since she knows where all the data is and how to access it. When she moves into Nonottus House temporarily, she disrupts others with her settled routine – she says she always takes a bath on Thursdays and will be “quite a while,” not noticing how she is inconveniencing the others. This is typical of Miss Higgins—she is principled and dutiful and driven, cares a great deal about her interests and routines, but is so efficient, she doesn’t always understand the effect she is having on others. Many episodes play this up for humor, as Miss Higgins gets lost in her Fi fascination for something that bores everyone else and goes on about it at length, including playing her recorder (badly) in the talent show, or refuses to eat what others want and specifically tells them exactly what she expects them to make for her. She can be somewhat blunt in how she bosses people around or gets on them for making a mess of her files, but is also good at teaching Timothy how to keep his matters in order. Miss Higgins shows a little creativity and intuition in how interested she is in traveling and in various books, but she’s not particularly innovative on her own and isn’t always keen to embrace change. She says she regrets never having traveled in her youth, but she always assumed she would do so when she got older (and she is happy to take a rare holiday now and again, sometimes with her friend Phyllis).
Enneagram: 1w9
Miss Higgins is very particular in having things done a certain way; she is exceptionally organized and fussy, and gets annoyed at Tim and his father if they mess about in her files without returning things “to their proper place.” She makes a good secretary because of this, but can also seem harsh to others who won’t obey the rules (“no visitors!”). Under stress, she tends to become emotional and finds it hard to move on, showing her line to 4. In one episode, her flat is burgled and Miss Higgins cannot stand the thought of ever returning to that place again, since it has been “ruined” for her forever; she can never feel safe there again. She winds up moving in with the midwives for a bit, and driving them just a tiny bit nuts with her meticulous routines and need to control her situation; everyone is relieved when she moves into a flat up the street instead, since it gives Phyllis more room to breathe. Her 9 wing makes her fussier and more withdrawn than some of the 1w2s on the show – she prefers to help from behind a desk and can be a bit oblivious at times to how others are responding to her. She does not like conflict, but is also critical of others (she complains that Phyllis is huffing and puffing too much with her exercises in the morning, because it’s making it hard for her to read her book on the love language of flowers).
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