ideals – INFJ Ramblings

INFJ Extraverted Feeling (Fe) and Making It Work for You

Sun, 18 Jan 2015 10:28:28 +0000

One of the most prominent functions for INFJs is extraverted feeling (Fe). It is one of the things among INFJs that can be easily observed by others and can be something to look out for in order to spot an INFJ. Fe is what INFJs use primarily when dealing with other people and the outside world. To sum it all up in a simple view, it can be seen as having a keen sense of the outside world which easily affects us emotionally. It helps us to understand how the people around us are feeling and also how to express how we are feeling to them. If INFJs have strong feelings or opinions about someone we often tend to express them in one way or another since this type of expression comes natural to us because of Fe. This is why INFJs can be very loving and caring with the people we like but find it hard to get along with people we don’t like. INFJs can often end up in heated debates with other people when we feel they act careless, selfish or in any other way pose a treat to our values. Similar to ENFJs, but INFJs as introverts also more often choose to avoid arguments with others. We instead internalize a lot of feelings which can end up affecting us in a negative way in the long term. Fe is a natural process for INFJs to deal with emotions and we need to express them with our Fe in order to deal and process them. This is why therapy and expression through art can be so beneficial for INFJs.

What is important to understand as INFJs is that our happiness depend not only on learning to understand why we react, think and do what we do. But also how we can predict and change our behavior accordingly to benefit us. Life can be more difficult for INFJs then many other personalities at times, and that’s why this is even more important for us. From what I have learned it is crucial for INFJs to start understanding and taking charge of how our emotions affect us. INFJs are a very feeling oriented type of personality, we are deeply emotional and most of our problems in life will relate to this heightened emotional sensitivity.

Taking control of how your Fe affects you in everyday life is a good first step to gaining more stability in your life. The steps to succeed with this is more simple then you might think and applying them in practical situations will help you gain an understanding and start changing yourself over time. This is how I would break it down in three steps:

1. You need to start noticing Fe and how your emotions fuel you in your everyday life. You need to realize how much your feelings control your well being, and how much the external control your feelings. Notice how your negative thought loops are often created from what happens out in the environment around you. How other peoples feelings somehow affect and get ahold of yours. How the external world often creates all the thoughts and feelings you experience at the moment. Practicing meditation is also a fast way of gaining this realization because when you shut out the external often, you start to realize that without it what you are left with inside is stability, calm, clarity and peace. That without all the things happening around you a lot of the negative feelings you might experience start to fade away. Use this as proof to help you understand how really extraverted your sense of feeling is. INFJs depend much on their environment for how they feel inside. Surrounding yourself with loving and caring people is crucial for your development.

2. Your second step is to start to predict your emotions. Understanding and predicting what causes you your pains starts to separate you from it. It helps you understand that even though your feelings can sometimes take ahold of you or jump out and surprise you, it is not who you are. When somebody gets you angry, it is really that external energy that affects you and how you choose to react to it determine how you will feel towards it. Your emotions are not much different then any other sense in your body like smell, taste etc. With practice you can change how it affects you.

3. The last step is to learn to let go. When you respond with anger or sadness to what somebody did to you or something that happened, what you really did in your mind before that was to create presumptions on how something should turn out. You create an ideal of how you want something to be or how somebody should act. You have to realize that trying to control what other people do or what happens in the outside world is pointless because you simply can’t. Hence chasing negative emotions that result from them is only you causing yourself more pain because you can’t control the situations. Every time it happens to you again, your mind is as surprised as the previous time and have failed to learn that grasping ideal situations really is pointless. The mind is fascinating in that way that it still thinks it can control the situation the next time and ends up letting itself down over and over. I like to picture it that it is no different then hitting your head against a brick wall, over and over.

Realize that how you react to your emotions will form the foundations for how you feel inside. Start to let go of what you cannot change and the mind will stop holding on to these negative feelings and there will be more room for what makes you happy instead. Extraverted feeling is a great ability of INFJs and can bring you much happiness in your life as long as you stop letting it control you and cause much negative emotional feedback. Start cultivating love and stability inside yourself and this will end up being what you express with your Fe to the outside world.

Here is a book I highly recommend to cultivate emotional health and stability, a great book on meditation and mindfulness:

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INFJ Sexuality and Relationships

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 21:13:00 +0000

I’ve written before about how emotionally demanding relationships can be for INFJs and I though I’ll touch on it again in this post. This past week has been quite rough on me and some of my close relationships, so this is all very fresh in my mind right now. Today was one of those days where I once again felt like I just hit a brick wall running, in my expectations on others and my never ending struggle to keep relationships which are healthy for me. I guess it all boils down to the classic case of we INFJs longing to be able to relate to someone and be accepted for who we are. We pick our relationships carefully and when they let us down it hurts us more then most people. Because that act proves our ideal about this person to be false, and it was that ideal that made us invest our time and emotions in these people to begin with. Not only do the person let us down but we also let ourselves down in believing that it would be any different. As we INFJs all know we tend to praise our ideals highly so this can be a real punch to our belief in our own abilities.

As with everything when it comes to INFJs, when it rains it really pours. This whole week set me up in a negative emotional spiral where I ended up internalizing everything to the brink of feeling physically ill. I’ve been there so many times before but still I never realize it in the moment. Afterwards when I finally gain some footing and perspective I can look at it with fresh eyes and feel stupid. Stupid that I let these things get to me on such a deep level. Hell maybe I am bipolar, maybe being INFJ equals bipolar to some degree, or bipolar equals INFJ who knows. Before considering writing this, being the INFJ that I am, I of course googled and read everything there is on bipolar and MBTI. Ironic enough being bipolar is more common among INFx’s, and so is depression. No wonder my friend letting me down spun me completely out of proportions and I ended up feeling that I’m either way of the chart with my expectations on relationships or I will be alone for the rest of my life. These are the times I completely despise being an INFJ, dragging myself down an bottomless pit, being my own worst enemy. Caught in the thought loops in my mind endlessly contemplating that when life doesn’t work out, it must either be something wrong with the world or something seriously wrong with myself. With the latter often winning the battle.

I can’t seem to get a grip on these things in the moment, when emotions are running high. At some point I always swing back into reality and see it for what it really is. I know I have unrealistic expectations on people sometimes because I expect them to think like me. What I forget is that I’m an INFJ, and most of the world are not. They do not think like me or see what I do. Even though the world would probably be better off if it did. Thanks for reading, end of rant… :)

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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 Characteristics: Idealist, Morals and Hardships in Life

Sat, 27 Jul 2013 11:51:00 +0000

Been reading a bunch of INFJ articles lately and it sparked some thoughts about our idealistic tendencies and implementing our intuitive ideals in our external physical world. In other means the constant struggle we have between Ni and our inferior function Se. I can relate to this in my line of work since I work with digital arts for a living. I often get a feeling or image in my mind of how I envision the result to be, or how it should be in order to get the result I want (Ni). However, the real challenge comes in actually creating it in real life (Se).

Often the outcome in the real world does not meet up to the envisioned ideal or moral in our mind, it’s not enough and this is where the pressure point for our intuition and inferior function lies. Where we create our stress. This is the source of our perfectionist tendencies, INFJs have the ability to envision a perfect ideal that is not possible to reach in the real world where things are chaotic and much the opposite of what we want. We gain many of our talents from this since we somehow are able to see these solutions that are not based on anything we previously know in the real world. They just appear to us out of the the blue. One theory could be that this has to do with the connection of opposites and our talent of jumping from A to D without having to pass by B and C.

This is where the internal power struggle lies and the part of us which we should all strive to understand better in order to live a life free from stress and anxieties. We create these ideals for everything in our lives. Like how we should behave in situations, how things should play out , how our relationships should be, what job we should have or how we should feel about things. When these ideals turn out the opposite of what we envision them to be we can feel unhappy, full of disappointment and regret. One might even argue the question of what is the point of there existing INFJs and having this ability if our morals and visions can never be actualized in real life.

I think that even though this might bring us much unhappiness in our lives this is how we are meant to be and we should not strive for being something we are not if we ever want to feel good about ourselves. This is our driving force which pushes us forward in our lives and let’s us see and feel things others simply cannot. We need to follow our hearts in this and when things does not turn out how we wished them to, we have to remember that this is how life is. The important part is trusting yourself and staying true to what you think and feel about things, even when life tries to tell you otherwise. Intuition is our key.

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