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In this episode Joel and Antonia dive deep into the needs and desires of the INFP personality type.
In this podcast on INFP Personality Type you’ll find:
- Why are INFPs misunderstood?
- The cognitive function is a mental process that helps you learn information or make decisions.
- The 4 letter code tells you how your brain is wired. It’s like an entrance on how you learn processes.
- Authenticity – Is a way that you (as an INFP) make your decisions which is more inclined what resonates with you the most as a person.
- INFPs understand emotions on a whole different level.
- Questions to ethics become very intriguing to INFPs. For example: “what determines an ethical or moral action?”
- Authenticity is very in touch with the subjective human experience.
- Authenticity is where we humans find conscience. Because that’s when we ask, “how do we honor people’s individuality?”
- Oftentimes, INFPs become masters of human experience in general.
- The ability to determine that something resonates is a maturity of the Authenticity process. As it matures, it understands that not everything they experience is the same as everyone.
- Do INFPs truly want to be understood?
- Nobody could be 100% understand them apart from themselves.
- INFPs feel being marginalized and dismissed way more than being misunderstood.
- INFPs seek validation.
- We want to acknowledge that they have a specific type of pain based from their personality type.
- Authenticity type should be balanced with Exploration. Exploration (the co-pilot function) is about advanced pattern recognition in the outside world – thinking behind the curtain.
- If you want more description or definition, check out our episode “Introverted Intuition VS Extraverted Intuition”.
- Your superpowers are developed when you learn to master your co-pilot.
- Art is one of the places where INFPs thrive.
- Art is a communication of feeling and INFPs simply flourish in this context. They create art that’s impactful.
- For INFPs, they tend to recall how they felt/reacted in the past.
- They have the ability to mirror emotions. They don’t need to mirror emotions in real time. For example, the can look at an art piece and mirror the emotion to themselves.
- Authenticity people tend to recall how they feel/how they imagined they would feel and then instantly replicating the emotion inside them.
- The emotional language can be transferred in long extensive periods of time.
- In order to be authentic, you need to have a mature and vast understanding of how the world works.
- Intent: The Darker aspect of Authenticity. INFPs tend to try to give a reason that’s combated with logic.
- INFPs tend to defend their intent, because they see a wide array of positive and negative intent. They understand how people can easily go and slip into bad intent.
- Healthy INFPs view everything has positive intent.
- Being able to understand that darkness is universal and part of the human experience will help you accept yourself.
- How to go about making a living as an INFP?
- Getting something done can sometimes be very challenging for INFPs.
- INFPs have the desire to make an impact and be an inspirational leader. Oftentimes, they will disregard the passion they have. Passion is extremely important.
- Authenticity people can have the tendency to marginalize people. Make sure you do what you’re passionate with. Check in with yourself what you really want.
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215 comments
Reaction to a part of your podcast. My native language is not English, so I can’t be as precise and subtle as I want to be.
In my experience punishment is not because of comparison with others. Judging, punishing what you see when you see parts of your dark side (and k n o w i n g this is only the top of the iceberg) is obvious. Feels obvious. How can I not judge and punish myself. There are dragons standing before me, I have to fight.
This was in the past. I could not call them dragons because dragons are too beautiful. I certainly could not call myself a dragonfighter, that’s far too heroic and vain.
In hindsight I allow metaphors like dragons and dragonfighters. To occassionally explain myself to someone else.
Instead of punishment I now give myself the credit that I didn’t flee.
Nowadays I don’t encounter dragons like in the past, maybe I’m getting more blind to them, more likely I’m beyond fighting. That is accepting.
I did three different tests recently, they all conclude I’m an INFP.
Thanks for the podcast :-)
To give feedback about feeling misunderstood I don’t think it’s a problem of being marginalized or dismissed. Although I’ve felt the pain that comes from having my feelings marginalized or dismissed it’s not the same feeling as that of misunderstanding. I think you do hit it right on the head though. You discuss how INFPs understand that no one could possibly understand them because no one could possibly have the same feeling an INFP as an individual has. However from this arises an understanding that no one ever in the world can understand anyone else completely because feelings rise from experiences and perspectives and while the human experience is universal, paradoxically, everyone is unique because the way they have experienced the world is unique. So the feeling of misunderstanding, for myself at least, does not stem from me believing I feel deeper than others or that I lack the language to do so, rather I feel misunderstood because I have come to an understanding of the world where complete understanding is impossible. It’s not that I feel misunderstood, but that to be completely understood is impossible. And ironically when I feel the most misunderstood is when someone believes they understand my feelings completely and they are confidently incorrect about how I feel or what’s going on in my head. To understand someone (including yourself) to any degree takes time, patience, and an understanding of how incredibly deep the human soul or being or heart or mind is. Of course I can’t speak for all people of my type, but I hope that this gives language to that feeling of misunderstanding we express, because I don’t think it’s the same feeling of misunderstanding experienced by INJs. It’s a different feeling for which we lack a word, it’s certainly not the rejection of dismissal or powerlessness of being marginalized. There is an aspect of frustration to it which is why I think we say we are misunderstood.
The description of the pattern recognition and mirroring is spot on, and was a very “a-ha” moment for me. I never would have described it that way, but once I heard it, I knew it was very, very accurate. Thanks for taking the time to put language to my very hard-to-describe experience.
It may be to your suprise that I feel this way, but to some extent, I agree with you (and I’m an 18 yr old INFP, 4w5).
For a very long time i’ve felt misunderstood, and have found it difficult to open up to people. As a result, I’ve had very few friends, and even less amongst those few that I felt I could truly connect with. I for the most part chalked it up to my nature and my personality. I figured I was not palatable to most people.
And then I joined university. An entire year past, and at the end of it, I only had about one friend. For a long time I lamented that it was because I was, as I thought, misunderstood, and that the chief offender for these misunderstandings were the people I’d tried communicating with. They had failed to misunderstand me, I thought; I’d tried my best.
But had I really?
I thought about it for a while and realised that maybe I hadn’t tried my best. For so long I’d felt misunderstood, yes, but I’d never thought to try and ‘make myself more understandable’. I’d never thought to take chief responsiblity over the problem. After all, was it not affecting me most? Was I not the one suffering? INFP’s are infamous for being hard to get to know, for being, as you said, not very transparent. There was a stubborn part of me that thought that I shouldn’t have to change who I am to please or reach others: that they should like me as I am. But I realised that it was unrealistic, in part because my difficulty in being direct and transparent is not who I am in entirety (if anything, it is a hindrance to who I really am) but also because for the few people who would relate to and understand where I was coming from, it would be worth it. Yes maybe I would try and engage with ten or fifeteen who simply wouldn’t understand or care to (because it had happened in the past and would doubtless happen in the future), but what of the two who would? How would I meet them if I were locked up in my room, or avoiding any social interaction for fear of failure? If i wanted people to see me for who I was, I had to take the first step and show them, in my own way (since I will never be the bubbly vivacious extrovert), exactly who that was. I had to make myself more available, and approachable and less unfathomable (as I know I can appear). I do think believing that we are fundamentally misunderstood can be a self-fulfilling prophecy because if we believe it, why try? And if we believe it and do not try, why would someone who had perhaps thought about coming up to us do so if we looked so distant and aloof? INFP’s, especially young ones (like myself) find it difficult to try or do or act in general, especially in ways that will make them uncomfortable (inferior Te). So what better way to avoid acting/doing than to shoot myself in the foot by mentally denying anyone the chance to understand me? In doing so, I would placate the part of me that wanted to be vastly different from anyone else. I am quite different, there’s no denying that, whether or not I want to (though I don’t posit that that makes me better) but making my self so much more excessively unique in my head would make the rejection of my failed efforts less painful. It would then not be that I had failed: It would be that they couldn’t have done it to begin with.
That said, I do think that you were in some ways unfair in your assesements of INFP’s (or perhaps fair according to your experience. I don’t know). You seem to have had quite a bit of negatiev experience with an INFP, and have thus taken to projecting these observations over a large quantity of them. You seem to have in part made it appear almost as if INFP’s make no effort at all to try to reach people, to connect. Maybe very unhealthy ones do. But I doubt that many of us have not tried to reach out to people. Since INFP’s feelings are so internal and so personal, it can be difficult for them to explain where they are coming from to others, and it is by no means natural for them to be direct with their feelings. Of course moving away from what is easy and natural is part of growth in everyone, but all in all, you don’t seem to acknowledge that there is an effort and that., above all else, the effort is needed because it is-you guessed it-difficult. Yes, everyone has something that they struggle with-I don’t for a minute deny that, and I don’t even deny the fact that the immature INFP’s tendency to exaggerate or magnify their own pain is present (though, I do agree with INFP girl in saying that, while an INFP’s pain is by no means more, it is felt more, just because our first function is a feeling function and it is what we process information through first- that does not make our life harder of course, since all other types have weaknesses that encumber them where INFP’s are not weighed down). It is however the effort that counts-and while it might be very frustrating to you to see an INFP be indirect and inaccesible and almost self-indulgently so at times, you have to understand that what seems so inherently effortless and rational to you isn’t that way for us. I understand cognitively that being direct and not hiding my feelings is beneficial-of course I do!-and if I had it my way, I would immediately stop being indirect, and explain all my feelings perfectly and directly and mean in everyway what I say. But that’s not how growth works. It’s slow and painful and knowing what to do is about 20% of it. The 80% is applying that knowledge. Do INFP’s have a responsibility to try and solve their own problem of not being understood as much as it is within their power to do so? A thousand times yes. Is knowing that they have this responsilbility and knowing how to fix things (in part) solve the entire problem? Not at all. The problem becomes solved when the work is done-and the work takes time.
I just want to add something I regularly observe from my INFP mother and her friends – and what is a more destructive part of their personality, the negative side of wanting to make others feel good: The more unhealthy friends of an INFP become addicted, and many of them very quickly. And the INFP then eats himself/herself up trying to help these people. I am more or less immune to that – I appreciate it, but I can live without it – but her closest friend at the moment needs to be called every day and spoken to for half an hour – something what didn’t started that way and is burdening the INFP now. So be aware of the corrosive loop this addiction can initiate.