INFJ Traits: The Curse of Understanding

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 10:06:00 +0000

Happiness exists when you don’t know a thing. That sentence alone probably sums up what I want to talk about in this post. One of my questions has always been, is INFJs and intuitive’s more prone to depression because we understand the world and how it is connected better then other personalities? Honestly I can say that in periods of my life I’ve felt depressed about life and the world in general. It is not like others who might feel depressed because of rejection from people and feelings of loneliness. It’s more of a feeling of being depressed because you realize what a cold and horrible place the world actually is. Part of you rejects the world because it doesn’t add up to the same ideals as you have in mind yourself. Maybe this is why INFJs feels so alienated most of the time compared to the world, we truly stand apart in or ideals and morals how the world should be and we stick to them.

I have always believed that all people start out with good intension’s, but at some point in their life the world shape them or side track them and they might end up on the wrong course. As humans we all want the same thing, we crave happiness and want to end our suffering which tend to be a major part of living. The Buddhists see life as mostly suffering and to be truly happy you have to come to terms with this. However, people get caught up in their lives and forget about what truly matters. We built up these frameworks in or societies how people should be and live their lives in order to be happy. You get an education, get a job, get a partner, get a house, get kids etc. When we have all that we are supposed to continue in the endless cycle of consumers consuming our mere existence. No wonder some people take the turn for the worst with all the pressure of what to make of your life. The question is why some people understand the underlying systems we have in our societies and why some don’t. Some form their world view from what they know around them, other questions it’s existence.

As an INFJ I always felt cursed both for better and worse when it comes to understanding the world and the people within it. In school as a kid I was very stubborn, I rejected all of the systems in place because I could see that many of them was useless and built on principles that would not help me learn anything. Of course I got into trouble because of this on many occasions, but as you know INFJs can be very persistent with what we think about things and you can’t influence us easily. We are not prone to conforming to others liking so to speak, if we don’t feel it also meets our own values.

In the social realm this became more painful the older I became since I started to realize that most people are selfish and shallow when it really counts. Many cannot see past themselves. It’s all a competition and value is not placed on the things that matters, like compassion for others. Among most life is an endless race where nobody realize that there is no finishing line. Winning won’t bring you any closer to happiness. Of course seeing that much of how the world works early on made me unhappy as well. You see people following the same patterns knowing what their outcome will be even though you can’t help them.

What I’m trying to get at is since INFJs has such depth of empathy and understanding, we often see everything clearly when others do not. This might bring us great pain since people will hurt us without understanding it themselves. The way we see friendships and relationships other do not, people might not care about us the way we care about them. I guess when you realize this it is hard to find an angle on life that gives you a good outlook. Maybe this is simply why we are so prone to depression and sadness, we understand how life really is which is also why we understand the perfect ideal for things. We are good at connecting opposites and seeing everything that life is not might bring us much unhappiness.

On the other hand, this also gives us the talent to do many great things and to make the world a better place for ourselves and others. We need to remember that we understand people for what they truly are. They might hurt us and others, but people are only a creation of what they know from their own lives. A tiger can’t hide it’s stripes so we can’t expect people to be what we are. What we all want in life is to feel happy, and when you approach people with the compassion knowing that all they want is basically the same as you, it is easier to remember that we all wish for the same world in the end. We just see it from different angles.

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INFJ Social Skills: Surviving in Your Social Life

Sun, 04 Aug 2013 14:29:00 +0000

One of the core talents of INFJs is our interpersonal skills. We are good at getting people to like us and at keeping harmony in the social environment around us. I never realized these things about myself until discovering my personality type and reading about it. I simply thought that most people function like I do. A perfect example of my INFJness in practice is when sitting around a table talking to people. In this situation I want to have eye contact and at some point address everybody around the table personally, in order to make them feel important and included. If somebody is silent to long and I sense that they might feel excluded, I always find a way to address them to push them back in to the conversation. This even happens unconsciously for me and I just do it without thinking. Another thing is that sometimes I let people be wrong in order for them to feel good about themselves. Like when somebody wants to tell you a story which it turns out you have already heard. I don’t want to tell them that, since people get excited entertaining each other. They might tell it to you wrong or inaccurate and instead of pointing it out to them I let it go since there is no reason to argue or give remarks on such minor things.

One of the reasons we focus on keeping harmony in the social realm around us has to do with the nature of our auxiliary function Fe (Extroverted feeling). The nature of Fe is to express our emotions outward, applying what’s inside us to the outside world. This is the reason why INFJs occasionally can get very irritated, angry and complaining when we don’t feel harmony on the inside. Or the opposite when people around us are very happy, which in turn feeds our Fe and makes us even happier. I read an article awhile ago and in it they mentioned this as the ‘oil on fire’ effect. Whatever feelings burns inside us gets intensified from equal feelings from the outside world, i.e. pouring oil on the fire ignites it more. Of course this is both a good and a bad thing for an INFJ as it can be a source of anxiety and overloading us with feelings.

A problem with being and INFJ sometimes is that I can doubt that other people like me or enjoy my company. This in turn make me try even harder and give more to people around me. Often however we can end up being taken advantage of when we put ourselves in such situations. It all has to do with self confidence and being highly idealistic often comes with having a not very balanced self esteem. It is not that we don’t value ourselves, it is that we often value others higher because we care about them. The reality in it all is that even though we feel so different and are different, people often tend to like us even though we think that they don’t. Sometimes after interacting with a lot of people, I can realize that I did better then I felt I did at the time. I can remember so many times people and even complete strangers, opened up to me and talked about things most would not without knowing each other better. How mentally unstable, mentally ill and people that are hurting tend to be drawn to me in some magical way. Among a group they often feel most comfortable talking to me because I never judge them like other people do.

It is because people are insecure about themselves and even though they might not understand it consciously, unconsciously they feel that you can see past their imperfections and understand them and who they really are on the inside. Sometimes this might have the opposite effect with shallow people, maybe they sense that we see past their persona and know that there actually is nothing else there besides fear and insecurities

The core of it all is that we want to bring social harmony to our outside world and the people in it because it also fuels us and makes us feel better about ourselves in the end. However, when other people feel bad, we feel bad. I would go so far as to say that we have one of the purest forms of empathy. We can feel exactly what other people feel and therefore we can relate and understand people, even at times better than they can understand themselves. INFJs are deep, caring and kind people at heart. We see and feel so much of the world and it affects us in such a way that it’s highly unlikely for us to ever want to hurt other people. We want to help them because helping them is in turn also helping ourselves.

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empathy – INFJ Ramblings

INFJ Traits: The Curse of Understanding

INFJ Social Skills: Surviving in Your Social Life