Podcast - Episode 0274 - Personality Types And Insecurity

20 comments

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  • Cecile
  • May 31, 2019 at 10:25 pm

  I had to listen to this a couple times to properly digest the topic. I’m an ENTJ….though the TJ tends to score almost close to the 50% mark with the ability to waffle FP. I do have a very decision making, assured approach but as I’ve gotten older I realize the limitation of my confidence and the boundaries of my insecurities. When it comes to my active capabilities, how I can tackle problems or solve issues, meet project deadlines, etc, my confidence is for the most part, unwavering. I would have to cycle through all the actions and meet failure after failure before the seeds of doubt creeps in about my competency. Where my insecurities lie is inter-relationship and the trust in its foundations or reliability. Ergo, I trust in my capabilities but the wild card of adding someone else into the equation x feelings or emotions is where I have much insecurities. For some reason, I’ve always had abandonment issues. The first dream I could remember at age 4 was being orphaned. It’s quite inexplicable and comes from no where as my family environment was incredibly stable from the onset. Anyhoo, I am really enjoying diving into your podcast to help understand my insecurities better. Fantastic conversations and thank you!

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  • Justine G
  • May 28, 2019 at 8:04 pm

  I’m glad you’ve mentioned asexuality / aromanticism actually, as I myself have never in practice wanted either a sexual or romantic relationship, I just don’t see it (in my case) as ‘asexual’, I prefer ‘non-sexual’ but without wanting to bother to try to explain to anyone what I mean by that or what the distinction is.

  I think it has lessened my insecurity around needing to be ‘attractive’ in that way, yet at the same time my sense of being an alien, where I feel fundamentally I cannot do something that other people can lean into as a source of belonging and security (forming relationships and families) leaves me scared about being on my own. I tried living on my own and ended up back with my family-of-origin due to my mental health issues exacerbated by living alone. I dread dying in some sort of decaying, rat-infested, painful obscurity. Having trouble making a living hasn’t exactly helped.

  Now I work somewhere that actually helps people and I actually like it and am good at it, but not paid enough hours to leave home for the time being. I will have to leave again sometime, but I dread it even as I crave the independence.

  Obviously this only represents me but I guess I’m illustrating there are potentially many different angles to this.

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  • Linda S
  • May 28, 2019 at 8:01 pm

  Jessica – I feel for you. As an INFP, I too fear things coming at me too fast to be able to process them. And about feeling incompetent. Here’s a Te strength I just read about—fluent verbal communication. I have to laugh at this one. In a recent job interview I was all over the place. One of the male interviewers had an impassive expression/impossible to read. I was trying to connect but getting nowhere. It was a complete disaster. But I did not prepare for it. Lesson learned.

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  • Karen
  • May 28, 2019 at 4:59 am

  Love your podcast, AND I’m glad your conversation got around to the FIRM model because I thought a lot of the early discussion of cognitive functions was….um…excessively intuitive. For instance, I would posit that any person of any type who has had a stroke would have insecurity/concern about health! Let’s not blame Se for that.

  I’m an ESFP and most of my insecurities have been around physical appearance and athleticism, which are Se. But I think those are cultural and family related. I’m almost never insecure about being smart, and Joel’s comment about that resonated with me.

  My personal experience and that of many people I know is that turning 50 helps a lot with insecurity. Your guess about this having to do with being post-reproductive makes sense to me. (But not post-sex drive, thankfully!) To my earlier point, I am much more comfortable with my physical self now (I’m 55) than ever in my life.

  So anyway, I really enjoy your podcasts but maybe this one pushed my limits on intuitive conversation. ?

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  • Danielle
  • May 27, 2019 at 9:29 pm

  Referring to the idea of people in older generations feeling more secure as they have aged, I do think there is a lot of variance depending on personality and individual life circumstances. Insecurity, for instance, can be derived from trauma in a sense. Although I don’t know the whole story, my paternal grandmother (born 1929) comes across as having had a lifetime of insecurity. But from what I know of her background, it’s due to a lot of issues in her childhood she clearly never properly came to terms with. She was an illegitimate child and was shuffled around between numerous relatives from a young age because her mother was in an insane asylum from at least 1940 to the end of her life.

  Separating individual circumstances, I could see a greater sense of confidence in older generations arising from the events that were unfolding around them. In the US at least, we see World War II as this clash between good and evil. Americans still to this day can unquestionably think “We were the good guys” in regards to World War II. Americans have never since been in such a position that resulted in such a worldview. I think there’s a great deal of security in knowing that as a collective your group is moving in the “right” direction and has a clearly defined ideal of what is right.

  From about the 1960s onwards, this concept of an absolute “right” as a society has grown weaker to the point where it seems to have all but disintegrated. There are still remnants of this thinking, a lot of times you’ll see it in religious and political groups, but there has been an explosion of drastically different world views and lifestyles, or at least there visibility to the public. Some personality types are going to feel more comfortable in this sort of context, as an Ne dom I love diversity because of all the different options, but it can cause insecurity for all because there’s not just one “right” path anymore.

  There’s an interesting paradox here too where older generations might start to feel insecure themselves in this sort of environment because the foundation of what they knew has been shaken, whereas younger people might be more accustomed to it.

  That said, as much as I find strength in the idea of there not being on absolute right, this absolutely creates insecurity for a lot of other people.

  This happens on a macro-level scale, but it can very much happen on an individual basis too. When I came of age, there was this outburst of social strife and a culture war. This caused me to have to re-evaluate what I had been raised to believe was the “correct” way. I ended up maintaining some parts and flat out rejecting other parts. This has sort of been a build-up for me that started when I was about 12 or 13 and first started to really make strides in branching out of the socially conservative environment I was raised to believe was the ideal. Overall, I’ve become a more confident person because of this. And I’d argue that, as an ENFP, my mind was more wired towards the progression it took than some other types might be. But I could see the same thing creating a lot of turmoil and insecurity for someone else. Hope this makes sense.

  As to Joel’s comment about insecurity being related to sexual attraction and reproduction, it makes a lot of sense from a purely biological standpoint. And because being rejected by someone you want to have a relationship with is painful, it’s only natural for fear and insecurity to arise when that potential comes up. Growing up, I remember my mom telling me that pretty girls such as myself intimidate boys. I see it in a bit wider of terms where people are intimidated by or insecure around people they are interested in because rejection is so painful.

  However, I think it’s important to note that this isn’t the only root cause of insecurity. If it were, then aromantic asexuals such as myself would be completely secure. And while I’m more confident than I’ve ever been, I definitely still have insecurity despite the fact that I do not experience sexual or romantic attraction. Albeit, this isn’t a very common experience. Asexuals themselves are rare, let alone aromantic ones.

  Then again, asexuality can be seen as a bit on an anomaly by others. And I totally understand that. After all, I figure that other people must think of asexuality similarly to how I view sexual attraction—a foreign concept that I understand from an outsider’s perspective but have no personal knowledge of. It’s rather hard to articulate.