MBTI Type: ESFJ
Dominant Extroverted Feeling—ease of emotional communication and shaping their actions around how their decisions affect others: Amanda is a warm, approachable, and likable woman who speaks her mind without hesitation. She complains to her mother that men do not know how to talk about their feelings and “sidestep the issue.” She talks Lee through his emotional hang-ups and is a sounding board for his disappointments. Her ability to make people get along and work together is remarkable; one Christmas Eve, she gets American and Russian spies to engage in a “cease fire” so they can all bandage their injuries, drink vodka, sing song songs, and remember it’s Christmas. She’s busy running around, taking part in all the usual “mom” activities, because she feels she owes her children her best self. It bothers her to lie to her mother, because it feels disruptive to their relationship and to the honesty built between them. Amanda also sees herself in the context of her relationships, as a mom and a daughter and a spy and Lee’s partner, and thinks about what affect her actions are going to have on her loved ones before she does anything.
Auxiliary Introverted Sensing—working with what exists and their personal history to make an immediate impact: When they need to conceal a Russian refugee from the KGB, the CIA turns to Amanda, because “she knows this stuff.” And boy, does she go at it. She turns up with a thousand details about the neighborhood, the people in it, where to purchase a used car, lists of what’s in the cupboards and where to find them, emergency phone numbers, and a poppy seed cake. From there, she tells Lee she doesn’t trust the man’s wife, because the details do not add up. If she’s been in a Russian prison for six months, how come her lipstick and bath beads are almost gone? A lipstick lasts about six months. She also has a gun, and Amanda took the bullets out, because “you know how I feel about guns in the house.”
Tertiary Extroverted Intuition—an interest in many possibilities and in seeing connections between unrelated ideas: Amanda is a lot better at recognizing patterns and unraveling them than Lee is, because she sees the bigger picture faster and is curious about what everything means and how it connects. She will draw conclusions based on the world around her, such as in the first episode where she’s puzzling over a mysterious message and realizes, in watching her mother’s cooking show the show is the source of the messages, and it’s a cooking code! Elsewhere, she goes through a list of potential reasons why people are doing things and marks them off on her fingers, then finds the right clue. She easily figures out a woman has left coded messages in pieces of art drawn all over Germany and if they follow them, they should find her.
Inferior Introverted Thinking—critical under stress, can get hung up on the “logic” of things: Amanda sees herself as “very logical,” where others see her as irrational (Lee), but she needs things to line up and to make sense, and methodically goes through her ideas in order to reason them out and explain them to Lee. But she can get caught up in over-explaining what she means and run into Si/Ne rambling (telling a long, drawn out and pointless story that doesn’t get to the point).
Enneagram: 6w7
Enneagram 6—attaches to and tests people and sources who could provide guidance in a desire to understand everything: Amanda is a worrywart, but also loyal. She stands up for her friends when others accuse them of being double agents and spies and tries to figure out why they would make the choices they do, or defend them, or reason out how to solve the problem, since she assumes it’s her problem to solve. She is always logically thinking through things and going point by point, trying to account for everything. Amanda overthinks and reasons out things where Lee would take action, but she gets him out of scrapes by figuring out what’s going on… or she gets herself into trouble because she knows too much. Whenever her cover gets blown or a danger might exist, Amanda frets about what could become of her, who is going to pay for her car repairs, and how she is going to explain this to her mother. She hates lying to her, since it makes her feel like a bad person and talks about this with Lee, who doesn’t see the problem. Amanda can’t separate her spy actions from who she is as a person, and she doesn’t want to be inauthentic.
7 wing brings in a sense of fun, humor, and laughter, or avoidance of pain through mental distractions and adventures: She is adventurous and willing to take risks, within reason… flying all over the world on missions and hoping to be useful, but also wanting to see the sights and take pictures and meet people. Amanda is likable and easily charms others. She teases Lee and uses banter, wit, and cleverness to appeal to him, and has the idea of a romance with him in the back of her mind, even if he is oblivious to it.
