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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
Listened to the podcast for the third time… each time it’s been super-helpful. Over the last few months, one of the helpful things I’ve done to feel less like a total alien is to just google INFJ musicians. Some of my most-listened to musicians happen to be INFJs (and I think Ann Wilson of Heart is one too? Listen to Dreamboat Annie or Little Queen and say she isn’t!), and sort of ‘aligning’ myself with them makes the world feel less icky. Knowing some of the people I admire are of the same type makes things less difficult, at least in some ways.
What I wanted to post about was what you spoke about at the beginning of the podcast, the “woo woo” factor, and in my case how it applies to therapy. During the winter, when I was playing mental hopscotch with my INFJ musician think-fests, and reading a bit more on INFJs and how the intuition thing is something that is part of me, I realized just that: trying to overthink and try to put my round-peg intuitiveness into a square-hole think process is a losing battle. Trying to find all the words to describe all the feels is neigh on impossible. Accepting the intuitiveness, and just going with that is when I’ve soared. When I don’t listen to my intuition, I fall.
In therapy, my therapist is always trying to get me to describe how I ‘feel’, and recently I’m hitting the wall with her. I was married for almost 20 years to an emotionally abusive alcoholic. He did things during our divorce that cost me a lot of $$$ – and I recently confronted him on this. It took me YEARS to get the confidence up enough to do this, and afterward, while the confrontation did not result in him repaying what he’d stolen from me financially, I felt AWESOME. I avoided his red-herring blaming behavior, and stuck to the topic. In my next therapy session, my therapist said, “Maybe it’d be helpful to look at how YOU contributed to the marriage.” WHA?? I was shocked beyond words to hear her say that. When I got home, I went through marriage counseling records, my old posts on a web forum (that I’d luckily printed out), documents from the court-appointed GAL, documents from my lawyer/s, recalled conversations from various professionals working with us during that time, talked with my children about what the therapist said, and came to the conclusion that my therapist just doesn’t understand me. Funny thing is, she administered the original INFJ 120 question test many years ago. One minute she’s telling me I’m this rare intuitive type, the next minute she’s saying that it has no place in therapy. “Look at my role in the marriage?” That’s all I did for all those years. Years of getting services for my children and myself, who were all suffering; years of trying to work on the marriage. So I took what she said VERY seriously: After going over all the documents, I made a timeline of the ‘marital events’. Then I journal-ed on it for days. I looked up codependency, which was brought up many years ago as well (which I feel is more ‘victim-blaming’ – what about the person who is the actual addict?). Dammit, I was struggling, not knowing I was an INFJ during my marriage, OR until I was 40 years old.
After that, I happened to have jury duty, and was a potential juror for a murder case. The judge spoke to each potential juror separately, and asked me if the fact that the victim was pregnant at the time of her death would affect my ability to be impartial. I replied that I’d been pregnant before. He rephrased the question: If my gut was saying one thing, and the facts were saying another thing, would I be able to be impartial. That’s when I instantaneously realized that my gut IS factual for me, and that I cannot ignore it. I answered that I couldn’t separate the two, and he excused me from service. BTW, I could sense that that defendant was guilty; I could tell (and only saw them from the rear) that his lawyer didn’t like the guy at ALL. Guilty verdict came this week.
What I’m trying to get across is that sometimes a person like a therapist, who means well, will totally upset an INFJ and try to make us conform into what we aren’t. Another BTW: for years I thought my husband was undermining me; he told me I was paranoid. I even started to believe I was the crazy one. During the divorce, we had in-home family therapy centered around my youngest child’s acting-out behavior. When my hubs tried to go for custody, making horrible claims about me, I was extremely upset, and spoke about my fears to the social workers. They said the most amazing thing to me: “You don’t think he’ll succeed, do you? We can see right through him, and his alcoholic ‘affect’. We see how he uses the kids to gang up on you so he can undermine you and align them to his side. Let us know who we need to speak to, and we absolutely will.” The scales fell from my eyes in that moment, and I remember it vividly, even 9 years later. That was a gut thing that I’d ignored, and they so succinctly made it truth.
So, maybe the therapist hassling me was the Universe reminding me that I need to revisit the past sometimes, because I go back to what the social worker ladies said to me that day in 2006: That I wasn’t crazy; they witnessed first-hand what he was doing (and he was actually behaving himself for them!! It was much worse behind closed doors, and I didn’t realize THAT until I just typed it.). In other words, I think therapy is over for me.
Thank you so much for this podcast!
I’m a 22 year old girl who just recently discovered that I’m an INFJ (I didn’t even know about these types!)
I’ve felt misunderstood my whole life and been dealing with depression. I couldn’t watch some movies growing up and i couldn’t stand people fighting close to me. I felt physically sick from it. I could always feel other peoples feelings and was highly sensitive. And I always got picked on for it and people told me there was something wrong with me, especially my family. I was forced to distance myself from that part, had to learn how to be a different person. Distant, thinking, extroverted and everything i was not, and I’m so unhappy.
Now i understand that i should’ve just grown and developed my gifts, my sensitivity. Accepted who i was and used it. And I am going to, because thats who i truly am.
I loved the jar concept.
Thank you, I finally feel understood!
Thank you for the suggestion! I hope it helps other INFJs with energy management. :)
A
My INFP wife introduced me to this podcast because upon hearing it she recognized that this was my type. The importance for her was in the fact that my inheritance of this type actually explained my life.
Let me say this from the start: Being this type was tortuous for me. The environment of my upbringing and the interactions of my childhood and teen years were profoundly affected by the differences between myself and others brought on by the disposition into which my abilities placed me.
From the inside, I can report that the tendency to “know” the emotional state and motivations of others resulted in the assumption at an early age that everyone knew the world as I did, also seeing what I saw in interpersonal interactions. As a result of not realizing that I was different and therefore capable of deep observations and insights, by the time of my early 20s I had come to believe that everyone was simply intentionally fabricating a lie and refusing to accept reality. I did not realize that they were not like me. I did not know that the ability to see the underlying patterns were a unique ability of mine. So essentially the world was full of liars deceiving themselves and everyone else.
This was an incredibly powerful impetus and life course changer. I found myself feeling alone in a hostile world of artificial constructs. I was not merely embittered by this experience, but rather fundamentally scarred and transformed. I feel looking back today that the original trajectory and purpose of my life was altered by simply not being aware that my own perspective of social and human systems was not shared by others.
I am sharing this because I want to encourage you to continue in the study and management of the type. I believe that there are possibly thousands of people who need to know, to be informed, about what they are because they, like myself all those years ago, do not realize that they are different. This ignorance not only impacts their own perceptions of self, but also of others. In fact, in my case, it created an illusory veil of negative intent over the collective face of the human realm.
Part 2 of this is that in recent years, I learned to harness the love of data crunching which has always represented a respite from heavy world interaction. And I mean I have literally harnessed a well of energy which had unleashed a set of capabilities which I never knew I had. I have been deeply involved in a research project intended to “unearth” the original trajectory of American Archaeology which I pour hundreds of hours into without even breaking a sweat. I spend 4-5 hours a day compiling reports, data, books-and then another few hours writing, writing, writing. And it feels like relaxation! In fact, before I go to bed, I find myself taking a book with me just to read a few pages to remind myself that “data is still there” so I can go to sleep!!
I enjoyed and appreciated the podcast on INFJs. I myself am an INFJ…female, and I go through all of the things you mentioned.
I wanted to share with you how I personally release the emotions I absorb from others. I am an artist, I have found many INFJs tend to be artistic. That is because it is an expression and or release of emotions. I also write. This is great for my type.
I have also developed the ability to turn off absorbing emotions from people that only cause me pain and are negative and harmful towards me and my gifts.
It has taken me YEARS to be able to do this. I trained myself I should say…that is a painful process in itself.
Just notes from an INFJ continually developing and training oneself.
Hope this helps someone.