MBTI Type: ESFJ

Elizabeth is a very warm and loving woman, but also has a desperate need to express her feelings the instant they happen. She tells Max it’s hard for her to be with him, knowing that he’s just learning sign language, because there’s so much she wants to share with him, but he is too “slow.” And indeed, she starts signing about her feelings the instant things go down in her life. She reacts to everything, but also has a big picture ability to be detached; for example, she understands that the new cancer tests they just passed are important, but points out the test pool was only white people between a certain age, which could put others at risk when taking the treatment. This forces the hospital to pull out of authorizing the drug and start re-testing it on a variety of people. She often helps Max through his feelings by encouraging him to see things another way (Helen did this out of love for you; you need to face her; etc). Elizabeth chose a hands-on profession that requires her to be attentive and detailed. She is meticulous and makes judgments based on prior information—this worked for this patient, so it may work here; if it does not, or you stopped taking your medicine, bring me all the things you have been taking so I can figure out what is curing your rare form of cancer. She sometimes comes to the wrong conclusion, because it fits the evidence (a patient has an eating disorder, or so she thinks—later she finds out it’s leukemia causing her gauntness). She is excited about new things and experiences, loves new ideas, and generally trusts Max and his “hair-brained” schemes. Elizabeth is willing to change her mind and consider another career; she also reverses her opinion on dating Max and gives him another chance. She works hard, and is meticulous in trying to figure out what things mean, and why a patient is suffering or had a different outcome than she expected.

Enneagram: 3w2

Elizabeth is very ambitious; one reason she doesn’t want to date Max (and tries not to, even though she winds up later changing her mind) is that “you will slow me down.” She has a lot she wants to accomplish—and a lot she had to prove to everyone else who thought she couldn’t become a surgeon as a deaf person. Even though she says she always wanted that for herself, and doesn’t want to go anywhere else, when a fellow deaf doctor asks her to join a medical school for the deaf, Elizabeth actually considers a career change, because she feels a need to adapt to the new situation. It takes Max asking her to consider her own needs and heart for her to realize that’s not what she wants for herself. In this way, she constantly bypasses her own feelings in pursuit of being objective, but also “helpful.” Many times, her 2 wing shows up strongly in how she centers her entire life and career around helping others, and takes pride in that, but defers praise in general in favor of trying to be selfless and a “good” person.

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