INFJness – 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 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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INFJ People Meetup: Compatibility and Traits in Different INFJs

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 20:21:00 +0000

A week ago I attended an MBTI meetup for the first time. This particular one was focused on the idealist temperament and the amazing thing with this meeting is that we ended up being only INFJs attending. Before going I had never been sure if I ever met another INFJ or not, at least not another male INFJ. So this was going to be a great social experiment for me and maybe I would get some answers concerning the thoughts I have been having about MBTI and how valid it might be.

I always wondered if the negative aspects of me as a person was something every INFJ suffered or if it was strictly me and something my life has shaped me into. This is a question that has been haunting me for some time since I would like to find comfort in being an INFJ and that it would explain a lot of it.

Anyhow, I had a great time at this meeting. The most amazing part was the instant chemistry that we all had as a group (7 people). It seems like we got a long straight from the start and had such interesting talks about deep things and MBTI. What strike me the most is that one of the INFJ guys was really similar to me in interests and life experience, he was even originating from the same country as me. Similar humor, taste in music/film, both artists working in almost the same field. Using similar body language and expressions. Quite amazing. We seemed to have a lot in common and sadly enough this person told me he also suffered a bad childhood.

I realized at this meeting that there is other kinds of INFJs that are not very similar to me. Maybe they are not an INFJ but who knows. My intuition tells me that MBTI is mostly a type of tool that tries to describe and predict something that is way more complex then simple cognitive functions. We all use different cognitive processes but in the end there is so much more complex systems in action that make you who you are and how your personality is. MBTI only scratches the surface so to speak. I would like to say that the biggest thing we INFJs share amongst each other is that we have the same moral and value systems in action. Which is why we don’t fit that well in society and might struggle in our lives. We value concepts that simply do not exist easily in the world the way we imagine them. For example the concept of a perfect world where we are all treated equally and live in harmony. This is not the basis of which humans are created from. We are alienated among others because we see things in another light, we see them for what they really are, and we act upon this. But honestly, who would like it any other way?

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INFJ Celebrities: Frank Ocean, INFJ Musician

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 22:39:00 +0000

I wanted to share one of my favorite INFJ musicians with you guys, Frank Ocean. If you have not heard his music you should check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/artist/frank-ocean

He does a mix of RnB/Hiphop/Soul and is very creative in his songwriting and lyrics. I usually don’t listen to RnB or anything like it but there is something with Frank Ocean’s music that sounds amazing to me on every level. He puts a lot of thought into the lyrics and the message in his songs. When I found out he is an INFJ I got even more interested in him as a person, he has a great personality. You should check out some of the interviews with him on Youtube and you will see the INFJ traits. He was as selected as Rookie of the year in “GQ Men of the Year 2012“, great win for INFJs.

This BBC interview below is a great example. Notice the pausing in-between words (introversion), deep N oriented explanations, using whole face for expressions and smiling (extroverted feeling). This is just a few giveaways.

Frank Ocean interview – BBC Sound of 2012

Frank Ocean Interview – GQ Men of the Year 2012: Music: GQ

Get his records here:
Frank Ocean – channel ORANGE
Frank Ocean – nostalgia, ULTRA. (MIXTAPE)

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