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In this episode Joel and Antonia dive deep into the needs and desires of the INFJ personality type.
In this podcast on the INFJ Personality Type you’ll find:
- This podcast episode talks about the INFJ personality type
- We have an unusually high number of INFJs represented in Personality Hacker
- INFJs have the tendency to feel very misunderstood.
- 2 important components to understand INFJs:
- Their mental process is called ‘Perspectives’. They’re actually watching their own mind work and form patterns. Because this isn’t something verifiable, other people just don’t believe them or reject what they radiate.
- INFJs pair Perspectives with Harmony. When a person with the INFJ personality type tries to figure out what to do, the first thing that pops in their mind is, “how do we make sure everybody’s needs are met?” This process is in tuned with unspoken social contracts that we accept.
- INFJs are very sensitive to the emotions of other people that they end up absorbing them.
- The more sensitive they are, the more they have the tendency hiding. The less expressive they get, the more pain they experience.
- It’s difficult for the INFJ personality type to build intimacy with another person.
- INFJs who are developed and growth oriented don’t retreat to coldness. They’ve taken the harmony process in order to understand and create healthy boundaries.
- INFJs are also able to see how things will play out in the future and this is one of the reasons why they are hesitant to build intimacy with other people.
- Because they are so aware of what’s going on with the other person, they end up having one-sided relationships.
- Jesus of Nazareth, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr were probably INFJs.
- INFJs are not in the receiving end in victimization. They have extraordinary capabilities within them.
- If you are an INFJ personality type or know someone who is, here are a few things you need to note:
- You don’t have to absorb other people’s emotions and have it stay there. You need to develop techniques to let it go.
- Words have power and the way you describe yourself will become your reality. Change the way you talk about yourself and think of ways of being a co-creator. Create a reality that’s positive to you. If you change the word use, you can change reality.
- When getting everybody’s needs met, you’re basically part of everybody. Getting your needs met means you take care of yourself. Get sensitive to what those needs are in real time.
- Honor what you need in the moment and be willing to take care of it. This will help you get other’s needs met.
- Continue to look for people who understand you. Allow yourself to be understood and form the relationships you’ve been desiring.
- You can’t change that you’re going to absorb people’s emotions. Manage and learn strategies that will help you figure out a way to let the energy come in and go out.
- Do what you can to see yourself as a person who has positive things to contribute to the world. Focus what you got as gift and not as a burden to others.
Helpful resources for the INFJ personality type:
Developing Your INFJ Personality Type (by Donna Dunning)
The INFJ Personality Type (by Dr. A.J. Drenth)
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304 comments
First off, you both are awesome!! I discovered your podcasts recently and cannot get enough. I love your mission of personal development, and recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the power that holds.
I’m an INFJ and have been into Myers Briggs for a while, but you guys take type assessment to the next level – it’s great! I was a little surprised, however, that the podcast focused so much on INFJs’ pain and on a lot of the struggles that we experience. While I find that to be accurate, my personal experience is that I get a lot of joy from being an INFJ! I think it’s amazing that I can enter a situation and have this ability to understand the social dynamics – whether it be a family setting, a social gathering, or at work. I love when my friends ask me for advice — I can tell why they are feeling the way they are and give them the perspective of other people in their story (even having never ever experienced a similar situation), which also helps them cope with their situation. I love being able to observe people’s behaviors and feel like I know what’s going on. I love giving an informal Myers Briggs assessment to people and telling them about their type. I love planning (small!) parties and thinking about how I can shape the situation so that everybody feels good! And on the flip side of “psychic garbage” is having a text conversation with a friend who is gushing about her partner, picking up on that, and beaming for the rest of the day!
So, I certainly don’t want to minimize a lot of the INFJs struggle that you talked about in this podcast. Every person has different sensitivities and I have really benefited from a stable upbringing and always felt loved, if never totally understood, by my family. It can be hard when people don’t fully understand or appreciate the INFJ gifts, and it is really difficult and important to draw boundaries for ourselves. But at the end of the day, I think that those struggles are only part of the story, and I super love being an INFJ!
Once again, thank you to everybody at Personality Hacker for all your work! I know I really appreciate it and look forward to exploring all the podcasts and materials!
This has been great to hear—yes, it helped me make sense of some of my reactions to situations. Like why I fall back on the facts of my thinking 10-yr-old. I have always felt that logic and rational fact-based thinking was more valued, but I now entertain the idea that my introvert intuitive driver needed a lot of downtime—fourth of five kids, pretty rigid family structure, feelings didn’t get a lot of air time. Also the cold, prickly, “insensitive” comments I made, a way to protect my space.
Family of origin aside, the only thing that doesn’t (yet) resonate with me is picking up others’ emotions. As a middle-aged lady, though, I am for the first time taking care of me first, and gathering excitement and purpose around helping others from a position of well-being because I finally “can,” not “have to.”
I certainly think of myself in a more kindly way. The “understanding social contracts” part called Don Miguel Ruiz’ book The Four Agreements to mind, which initially got me on a healthier footing with my innards! Thank you very much for so much study to help us understand ourselves.
The Doobie Brothers sang, Don’t stop to watch the wheels go ’round. But I do get to learn it , then move in greater harmony; that is a pleasure! Cheers!
Thanks for sharing, Dan! You have a way with words. :)
So, like many of you I’m sure, I’m writing this comment at 2:20AM on a weekday – when else would I be inclined to discover a podcast like this? It appears as if the original authors / moderators are responding less frequently to a podcast over two years old (I don’t blame them in the slightest), so perhaps posting this is more cathartic for me than anything. I find I’m fairly articulate in inspired bursts, so I’m going to try and harness some of that energy now. Perhaps I’m subconsciously taking heed and fulfilling my needs. I don’t mean to ever come across as bragging or self righteous – I’m very much not (I’m stubbornly deferential and unassuming, which I honestly shouldn’t be for my own sake), I’m mostly trying to convey either blatant truth or how I felt about experiences at a more precarious time.
If I come across as overly indulgent, I apologize. I know I will.
As one can already see, I ramble down loose streams of consciousness.
To begin, I was raised by an ESFJ and an ISTP – safe to say, I found it difficult to relate to my parents growing up. To make matters worse, I was also an only child. I believe close, dear friendships (I’m tearing up just thinking about them) through my formative, angsty teen years saved me from potentially harmful paths. That, and My Chemical Romance (I’m now 24). See, I can be kind of funny.
Within these friendships, I definitely served as the Dr Phil of the group (slightly ironic because I’m starting my doctorate in biomedical engineering in the fall – get it, Dr Phil … PhD). Most of my friends would dump their life on me, and I loved it. It was an ego boost and a way to find my unique place amongst my peers. All kids probably want a unique place, but that feeling is heightened when you’re a millennial and a ‘gifted’ only child. But, more altruistically, I also loved helping them understand themselves, and for many, it allowed them to truly cherish me as a friend and as a particularly thoughtful young man, and many of these friendships have remained enduring, even as life as dragged us in separate directions. I mean it, I would take a bullet for many of them. I find that I have many friendships that qualify as ‘it seems like we hung out just last week, but it’s been two years.’ I really, deeply value that type of connectivity and am thankful for the RNG of growing up in such a nurturing environment in the American Midwest.
However, I definitely had my faults that you deftly described. As an only child, I was rather shy in situations involving bravado, brash personalities. I’m also a fairly short man – 5’6 / 5’7. I found that I just knew that often with strangers, or in groups of large personalities/people, I was ignored and not cherished for any substantive quality. I was no longer Dr Phil, and that messed with my harmony of my world view at the time – which, because of Perspectives, is always evolving to make things more confusing for a young man. I was able to usually cope with my dear friends, but when I left for college, my world more or less shattered.
I entered a prestigious university (I was the kid who also slept through high school and got all As) knowing no one – I didn’t have my campus safe space to go to. Because I didn’t want to burden my close friends from high school with long, dramatic, overly philosophical phone calls or Skype sessions, and because I couldn’t relate to my parents at the time (it has since gotten better), I froze. I tried to posture amongst my peers, couldn’t match the often fake bravado necessary for many initial social interactions on a college campus. Also known as Greek Life. Combining this with my parents moving from my childhood home after my first year at college, as well as academics finally challenging me to some extent, I sought solace with a female companion from my home town. She was still in high school (year below) and represented the life I had grown with.
I had never let myself or was given that opportunity to date in high school – as the Dr Phil of my many friends, women, generally, didn’t want to risk losing me as one of their close confidants. Many call it something asinine like ‘the friend zone.’ I now call it mostly being shy and overly protective of emotional order and harmony, since, again, I always had, and still have, this sixth sense about how something will work out, and it usually comes true. It’s hard to say if it’s self-fulfilling prophecy or actual prophecy, probably a little of both.
This girl herself possessed incredible emotional depth that was only matched by her troubled past. To spare the details, as an INFJ, I absorbed all of it. I felt such…unbelievable emotion towards her, I found it very hard to fully let myself become vulnerable on my end because I felt ALL of her end. We never had sex, and I still never have (which isn’t shocking at all knowing how my INFJ brain works, I’m sure many INFJs can relate to intimacy issues). I often would be disparaging and call myself a [pansy] because of it, but I know deeply it’s more complex and troubling than a just lack of courage. Coupling all of this with my aforementioned life changes of moving and starting college, I entered a 3 year period of extreme, debilitating anxiety. I’m starting to tear up thinking about that time in my life. It feels good to get emotional now, as I’ll explain later.
To cope, I escaped to the sciences. To 1s and 0s. To right and wrong. It was beyond cathartic to have that mentioned in the video. Not only did my parents deeply approve, it served as a stabilizer of sorts for my emotional wounds, but as most are aware, engineering at a top university brings its own, concrete challenges. I managed to get by my horrible second year before thriving academically three of my last four semesters, but it came at a cost. I found that this experience was so deeply traumatizing with the girl, with the general life transition, I retreated to that cold place. Whereas before, studying math, biophysics, engineering, etc served as a fulfilling parallel to my unique, intrapersonal and social gifts, I found that I suddenly had nothing to parallel it to. In other words, that cold place stunted my gift. My friendships still possessed depth (mine will never not), but they didn’t bring the same kind of fulfillment, and I knew it was all my fault.
Flash forward several years, and I no longer struggle with such acute anxiety, I learned to slowly manage it before it slowly went away (how cruel the process of undoing emotional wounds can be when they can seemingly happen so instantaneously – though, usually always a cumulative effect). But I found that I lost my gift – not the gift of relating to others…or others not feeling like they can just tell me everything…but the same type of energy to connect with others. I almost now become a turtle in new social situations, especially in aggressive environments like weekend bars or loud parties. I fear I’ll never be able to enjoy those kinds of over the top camaraderie again. My brain just gets too tired now, especially when alcohol is involved. And for me, being tired is the kiss of death. I need a lot of sleep. I think my brain subconsciously associates emotional closeness with that extreme anxiety. Most of my newer friendships are more superficial, though my tried and true still hold firm. I’m now realizing how fortunate that gift of an INFJ truly is – and I’m wishing now to get it back, now knowing the space and lifestyle I need for myself to establish that healthy balance. I think I’m getting there, but I’m just dismayed with how long it has taken.
I guess, to make an unfairly long and obsessively self indulgent story come to some sort of working conclusion, I’m learning how to be intimate again. I’m learning what steps I need to take in the moment to enjoy the moment and allow myself the energy to thrive later. That could mean no more bar hopping or aggressive drinking, which isn’t a bad thing. I’m working at fostering new friendships like how I fostered my emotional recovery – with care and expectation that it’ll take time. I think I’m very much prepared for graduate school in this sense. I’m still struggling with romantic intimacy – something I feel most INFJs can deeply relate with – because I’m not quite sure where to start. I think I just have to push through. I’m not sure what it means in concrete terms, I know it’ll involve putting myself outside of my harmony, my comfort zone, when I’m emotionally available to. No excuses. Though I’m fairly content being alone, I know deep down I want companionship, and I know at some point I’ll actually need it once my dear, close friends get married and start families of their own. If anyone out there ever reads this, you’re not alone, and if you can identify with any of the emotion I tried to convey in my selfish op-ed above, I love you and I understand.
Thank you for bolstering my confidence with this.
I feel stretched thin so often. I find that the people in my world often seek me out to the point that I can’t meet their requests, let alone my own needs and it creates contention. I am going to share this with a few of them.
I have a strong intention of working to rehabilitate survivors of domestic abuse and human trafficking, but the political climate is almost debilitating, I fear for the sanctity of our environment, the social contract of humanity is being violated left and right, and sometimes I enter a space or encounter a person and literally vomit or sob because the energy is so palpable and sometimes so nasty.
Thankfully, I have rare women in my world that are also INFJs (my mom AND my therapist). I see great and misunderstood capacity among us and it’s a gift to feel recognized.
I’m 31 and just learning to have boundaries with the time and energy I’m willing/able to allocate. Your podcast helped to solidify my understanding of the necessity of self-care. Thank you both.