Everything Wrong With INFJs
New psychobabble episode. Watch on Youtube or listen on Anchor below.
Everything wrong with INFJs
Today I’m talking about everything wrong with INFJs.
Why? Because we criticize ourselves enough and we don’t need any help.
I recently shared my video “Why no one listens to INFJs” and someone commented that no one listens to INFJs because they can be in a room with 5 other people, and be right about every single one, but they forgot that there’s 6 people in the room. (Shots fired).
Instead of arguing, I decided to take the cue. Thank you for the content.
The truth is, we aren’t good at reading ourselves because we have extroverted feeling. Some types are better at connecting to themselves (introverted feeling), and some types are better at connecting to others (extroverted feeling). But there’s no mixtroverted feeling, there’s no one who can do both well. There’s no one who’s good at reading all 6 people.
INFJs do need someone else to reflect for us, but we don’t trust any of you other types to do that. Because we’ve spent our whole lives being misunderstood and invalidated. And we don’t need any more people telling us that the way we feel is wrong.
So here’s my list of everything that INFJs tend to struggle with. Because we’re also human (at least mostly). We’re imperfect, we make mistakes. And we actually do want help seeing ourselves when it’s coming from someone who respects and deeply understands us.
Show notes
We are sensitive to criticism
Critism is ties to traumatic events and creative wounds for us
Have to find the balance between not enabling people, but also not feeding them
Responding= watering plants, even bad attention helps them grow. Don’t water them
A sense of humor can help; channel your inner bartender (That’s a good burn henry but also you’re cutoff and i’m keeping your tip).
Think of it as alchemy. You can repurpose it. If you’re a creator, everything is content. Now they’re actually watering you. (Fight club vibes).
Like martial arts moves, or a book of energy signatures with blank pages, once we know the energy signature or the move to use we’ve got it.
Brene Brown carries a list of the only people who’s opinions matter.
We want to be humble, we want to be accountable, we make mistakes, feedback has to be people we know, trust, and respect (a very select few).
We do not want your advice
Yes, I realize my last video was about how no one takes our advice but self-aware hypocrites are the best kind.
We don’t care about anything normal people care about.
We only want advice from people who have what we want but we’re too nice to tell you that.
Your way doesn’t work for us. Trust us we’ve tried. We wish it did work because it would make our lives a whole lot easier. It’s frustrating for us when people treat their personal truths like universal ones.
We overthink like it’s our job
We get stuck in Ni/Ti overthining loops
To get out of the loop, express our emotions, lean into extroverted feeling
Leaning into your feelings= secret weapon
We get bored very easily so our minds are always looking for something to do. If there’s no outlet, we will start overthinking
We speak in metaphor
Logical vs magical thinking. It's not one or the other.
Moai legend said that the statues walked, scientists discovered that was true.
The words we need don’t exist, we have to exaggerate or oversimplify or use metaphors to communicate.
People, even therapists take us too literally (omg she thinks statues can walk).
We’re trying to talk about a forest and people are arguing with us about trees. “The forest is dying” “nu-uh this tree is alive”.
We struggle to finish things
We’ve already done all the work in our head. We don’t want to do it again in real life.
Fear, perfectionism, scared of failure and success.
We don’t want success because we don’t want attention.
We will door slam the shit out of you
We’re not good at boundaries or speaking up for ourselves.
We aren’t good at making people uncomfortable because we have to feel it too.
If we doorslammed you, you tested us multiple times and we didn’t say anything.
We work backwards in time, we’ve already grieved the loss by the time we cut you off.
We struggle with relationships
We are demisexual, only attracted to people we have a close emotional bond with.
We don’t bond with many people and actually find most people are boring.
We need a lot of depth and mental stimulation which is hard to find.
We are drawn to different, unique, enigmatic people, sometimes toxic people.
It’s so hard to find someone we like, when it does happen we can become obsessed, enmeshmed.
Then we start projecting idealistic scenarios onto people, that idealism can create unrealistic expectations.
We get hung up on people who have traits we wish we had, or people are who are meet needs in themselves that we’re neglecting.
We are highly sensitive
We can stay triggered for 1-2 days.
It takes us a long time to process things.
We are stuck on the fear grid, our thoughts and actions are very fear based, to the point we try to push our fears onto others.
We are overriding our nervous systems to get through the day which causes functional freeze, workaholism, over-achieving, feeling emotionally numb.
We are people pleasers
We try to rescue people which makes us easy to take advantage of.
We don’t speak up for ourselves.
We blend in to be accepted.
We care too much what other people think.
We betray ourselves because we don’t want to let other people down.
We are bad listeners
We care deeply about making people feel heard but we zone out when people are talking and have trouble remembering names.
We dissociate when we’re stressed.
We are listening more to the tone of your voice, inflections, everything you’re not saying.
We need you to talk so we can read the energy in your voice.
INFJs are are tired of being nice. As soon as we learn to regulate our nervous systems, it’s over! The challenges for INFJs in dealing with these issues are going to be getting comfortable with discomfort, widening our window of tolerance, building up our self worth, and talking to people we can trust.