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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about which Myers-Briggs cognitive function is more selfish “Harmony” (Extraverted Feeling) or “Authenticity” (Introverted Feeling).
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Joel defines selfishness as taking more than you should.
- Antonia defines selfishness as making sure you get yours first.
- Extraverted Feeling “Harmony” Fe – All FJs and TPs
- Introverted Feeling “Authenticity” Fi – All FPs and TJs
- Fi is selfish for the individual.
- Fe is selfish for the collective.
- Fe may define selfishness as individuating away from the collective.
- Fi thinks it’s selfish to make everyone assimilate.
- Fe finds it rewarding when someone gets their needs met.
- Fe also takes a hit if someone isn’t getting their needs met.
- Fe uses other people’s emotions to calibrate if everyone’s needs have been met sufficiently.
- To a Fe user, Fi does feel selfish because they are taking more energetic resource than they are allowed.
- Why is it okay to sacrifice inner turmoil over group turmoil?
- Fe allows everybody to have a bad day as long as everyone agrees that they take turns.
- Fi sometimes forgets that other people have struggles too and need a turn in the bitch fest.
- Fi sometimes wants everybody else to focus on their problems and solve them.
- Fe can be a sickly sweet commandant who condescends to others and forces them to do things their way.
- Fi can’t understand why anyone would suppress who they are for the group’s benefit.
- Fe sacrifices themselves every day for the group’s benefit.
- Fe creates a system where everybody gets their time/day to be special. And the rest of us acknowledge when it is our day and when it is not.
- Fi doesn’t understand why they need to assimilate for the benefit of everyone.
- We all have to take the hit on occasion.
- Fe does more emotional labor than the other types, so they notice when things are imbalanced.
- Sometimes we project selfishness on to people who have permitted themselves to do what we haven’t. So, it’s a sort of envy.
- Fe: “I wish I had permission to take for myself.”
- Fe can learn from Fi that they need to acknowledge their needs freely.
- Individuals matter, and they need to acknowledge their needs eventually.
- Fe users can become passive-aggressive, angry, and resentful against the people around them who seem to take, take, take.
- What Fe fails to realize is they are the ones who created the situation.
- It becomes a false virtue for Fe users to sacrifice to others while hiding feelings of anger and resentment.
- Resentment’s root is in envy.
- Fe hates feeling negative emotions about others, so instead of stacking resentment maybe they can learn from the actions of the Fi user.
- “They’re giving themselves permission to have those feelings and be disruptive, and I need to give myself the permission to do the same thing on occasion.”
- Less mature Fe wants us all to buy into the same reality.
- Fe teaches us that even if we can’t find compassion for ourselves, we can still be compassionate to others.
- Fi can feel emotionally cavalier to Fe because Fi assumes everybody can deal with their emotional experience.
- Fe is more gentle with people’s emotions, but they tend to overdo the nurturing and over-protecting.
- Over-protecting is selfish of Fe because they are protecting themselves from having to see someone else in pain.
- Our egos are the manifestation of selfishness.
- So, our way is always going to appear better to us than someone else’s way.
- Selfishness is not the product of a cognitive function.
- Selfishness is the product of the individual.
- All of us are selfish.
- We have thrived as a species because we are selfish and have a will to live and dominate.
- We accuse each other of selfishness but rarely admit it to ourselves.
- Fe has its finger on the pulse of how serving the group helps serve self.
- The more seasoned Fe gets, the more it will bring in Ti and need less input from others.
- It’s common for younger Fe users to conflate harmony with agreement.
- When Fe is caught up in something symbiotic, it wants to share it.
- Fi has to get good at knowing the sweet spot.
- “Most of me is on board, so it’s good.”
- Fe assumes everyone is going to be on board.
- Fe feels good when everybody is experiencing the same emotion.
- Fi wants to make sure it won’t regret doing something that runs contrary to its values.
- Project positive intent on others.
- Fi can learn from Fe and vice versa.
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50 comments
“sweet, sticky voice – we won’t have these problems, will we” :D I adore you guys!
I have ISFJ in my very close family myself, and actually this is a person who I wish I could come with any problem. In time I came to the impression that she feels under attack of my problems and that she may not even knowing how to respond to someone feeling bad.
I am extroverted feeling user myself and I know that we may make a pressure for everyone keeping smiling and not staring conflicts. I think it is the consequence of us keeping our feelings in unconsciousness so we don’t know how to deal with that.
And yes it could be the credit of slice of pizza out there. Is like “yes I will listen to you but next time is me, right”?
And to be honest I see not mature introverted feeling as “selfish”. I usually keep friends who are sharing the pizza and when I see someone concerned to much about themselves who take too much energy from me I am starting to keep myself away. You can call it INFJ door slam if you want:D
I was watching some top TV series recently and I would say that main character is ESFP. I was shocked how this main character from the movie was desperate to keep her marriage happy with destroying other random people love life. I was saying to myself “why she thinks her love life is more important from the other person love life” I wouldn’t do something like that you know.
Very interesting podcast!
[INTJ – Fi 10 year old] I have an anecdote that really sums up a fight between Fe and Fi, although it was an unhealthy level of Fe.
Some years ago, I went to meet some of my boyfriend-at-the-time friends, and they wanted to play a board game, but they decided to turn it unto a drinking game (if you lost during your turn, you had to take a shot). Now the thing was that I don’t drink alcohol, so obviously I wasn’t up for a drinking game. Before starting the game I told them “I can play the game, but I don’t drink so I’ll just pass on taking the shot if I lose, ok?” Now my (ex) bf was SO angry at that, he’s an Fe user and his words were “Everyone’s doing it! Why do you have to go against the group’s decision?”. My reply was " Just because everyone’s doing it, doesn’t mean I have to do it, too. I don’t drink, I’m not changing that for a game".
This argument went on for a couple of minutes until one of his friends interrupted saying that it really didn’t matter, it didn’t really disrupt the game and he thought it was great that I stood up for my own standards instead of doing what everyone wanted to do. That’s when my ex sort of backed off, probably because he saw he was the one disrupting harmony, not me.
Lastly, Joel and Antonia, keep up the great work! I love your podcasts!
We don’t have a “will to dominate”, only certain pathological beings have that, like psychopaths and dictators. Most of us want to be free to live and not have anyone interfering in our life experiences and choices, and live free of others attempting to control us (government, dictators, the central banking cartel, elites, meddling people, corporations).
You need to be clear with your terms:
Self-care and self-honouring and self-nurturing and self-love are beneficial qualities.
Malignant narcissism / psychopathy is totally disregarding the safety and physical, emotional, and mental well-being of others, enjoying doing harm to others (robbing, deceiving, manipulating, humiliating,killing), and using other people as pawns to get what you want, then discarding them.
Wanting harmony at the expense of suppressing your honest expression in the moment is self-betrayal and self-suppression.
Authenticity is more important and self-honouring and self-loving than harmony in most situations. The only exceptions I can think of are: when someone is attempting to exert control over you and keeping something from them prevents them from doing that; job interviews where you are asked nonsensical questions; being confronted by crazy people, violent people, or psychopaths; when someone is going to do you physical harm but calming them eliminates that possibility.
[INFJ] I had an Aha moment listening to this episode. During my training as a psychiatrist, a few of my attendings (supervising physicians) would go way beyond standard of care for their patients, or at least in certain cases (such as giving pts their cell phone number, returning what seemed to me to be frivolous or manipulative calls, etc.). This always twisted me up because I knew it isn’t psychologically feasible and sustainable for me to go above and beyond that way. Partly because it would set a precedent that wouldn’t be reasonable to follow consistently, it didn’t feel fair to me or to patients who didn’t get this special treatment, and mostly because I needed firm boundaries to delineate my self care time else I rapidly devolve into a resentful burnt out wreck.
I realized that most of the attendings who could go out of their way on a case-by-case basis this way were Fi users but this podcast fleshed out something for me. I have just realized that one of the reasons I can’t go out of my way on a case by case basis is that pretty much every moment in life I am actively weighing my needs/preferences against others’ needs/preferences, and unless there is a strongly commonly accepted justification to put mine first, I put others’ preferences first, or put professional or social norms first. Everything from where I stand in a crowded room, to the temperature I keep the office, to which seat I choose in a lecture hall, to whether I speak at a meeting… always weighing whether I should assert my self-interest and how that might inconvenience others.
When it comes to professional boundaries, it is like my “wedding day”. This is where there are professionally defined standards that protect my needs. And when someone asks me to go beyond that standard of care they are taking an extra slice of pizza. They don’t realize it. It is my responsibility to know and communicate the professional limits, but I still feel resentful having to constantly put energy into enforcing these boundaries when other professionals are undermining those standards.
I think that Fi people can more easily go “out of their way” in these situations because they aren’t de-prioritizing their own interests as much moment to moment throughout every day. So when they go out of their way it is on their own terms, because they didn’t go out of their way the rest of the time. They also seem less twisted up when they say no to unreasonable expectations of others.
I am always working on taking in the lesson of Fi to not take on full responsibility for other’s feelings, that they will feel whatever they need to feel and manage it fine in the end if I don’t put as much energy into second-guessing and de-prioritizing myself. Thanks for another great reminder of what the feeling functions have to learn from each other.
The jerk boss scenario a very good analogy. For an Fi user, the external solution of simply correcting the bad behavior seems to skirt the real issue, which would be the attitude that’s causing the behavior, while for an Fe user, the primary problem seems to be the behavior itself.