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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about dealing with trauma in your auxiliary copilot cognitive function.
In this podcast you’ll find:
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When our upbringing damages our Auxiliary (Co-pilot) cognitive function.
- How our Auxiliary function can be disowned or undermined.
- Why suppression is just one kind of Auxiliary wounding that happens.
- What is happening to our cognitive function mental wiring in childhood?
- Why negative feedback hurts our Auxiliary so much.
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Ways our Auxiliary function gets undermined in childhood.
- The painful downfall of an INTJ’s Extraverted Thinking (Effectiveness) due to unhealthy ENTP and INFJ parents.
- Why Auxiliary function undermining starts loops.
- Antonia (ENTP) recalls the shutdown of her Introverted Thinking (Accuracy) as a child.
- The Introverted Feeling (Authenticity) suppression Joel (ENFP) experienced as a kid.
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Auxiliary function trauma based on type:
- How IxTJs get shut down over and over.
- When ExTPs get told they are bad people.
- Why ExFPs keep hearing their feelings don’t matter.
- How IxFJs face too much disconnection.
- When ENxJs get continually discredited.
- Why INxPs are told they don’t make sense.
- How ESxJs struggle to deal with the past.
- When ISxPs face constant disapproval.
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Ways to heal your Auxiliary.
- Identifying your damage.
- How the H.A.T. model helps.
- Why acceptance makes the difference.
- The power of reframing your Auxiliary function.
- How you can love this part of yourself.
- The empowering exercise to start your healing.
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Moving towards Auxiliary growth:
- Why we are so sensitive with our Auxiliary function.
- What happens when you take your Auxiliary for granted.
- How your Auxiliary function growth is so valuable.
- Should we let our Auxiliary function make mistakes?
- When we stop trying to grow our Auxiliary.
- What growth comes after the Auxiliary?
- Dr. Dario Nardi’s cognitive function growth model (See Episode 0349)
- Why healing your Auxiliary is disruptive…and so worth it.
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18 comments
I really appreciated this episode for laying out so clearly observations that I’ve had running around muddled in my mind. I’m a female ENTP with ISTJ and ISFJ parents, who also grew up primarily with ESFJ, ISFP, and ISTJ friends. In most of my professional life, I’ve worked primarily with NFJs and NFPs.
As a child I came to distrust my Ti co-pilot because if I said something too incisive or curious, it was seen as offensive, obtuse, or purposely mean-spirited. Indeed, sometimes it was purposely mean-spirited, because I would become so frustrated about having no visible “safe” way to express a thought or observation to another person. I still lash out at the people closest to me at times, using Ti in a cruel way, because I just want an outlet for observation and analysis. I get tired of feeling like I have to walk on a desert of everyone else’s eggshells that always take precedence over my need for honest expression. Dramatic, yes, but it’s really how it can feel.
I generally funneled Ti into achievement related to academics. I became a perfectionist in school, and used Ti in analysis for cultural, literary, and linguistics-related classes that I took. I wrote pretty good papers and gave pretty good presentations. But across all that time, I never felt safe using Ti skills in interpersonal relationships or really any context beyond an assignment for a class.
Dissatisfied with my social path in academia, I turned to nonprofit and advocacy type work, using my Ti skills in the areas of education and program development/coordination. Again, this function helped me to do some parts of my job very well; however, I remained terrified about being honest with co-workers about any problems, or about challenging any hierarchies or groupthink situations in organizations.
Everywhere I go, I have the fear that unleashing Ti in non-structured environments (like, outside the context of a term paper) would lead people to see me as a bad person, who is purposely negative, and who nitpicks about things that don’t matter, instead of “getting stuff done” or sucking it up and fitting in with the group.
My “solution” (semi-conscious, usually poorly thought out) has been to flit from place to place, job to job, seeking an imaginary autonomy or space where I will finally be able to let Ti free. But this has left me feeling more and more isolated, and more and more reliant upon tertiary Fe. At this point, I really don’t know how to interact with people in a way where I feel I can authentically share my thoughts. It’s terrible to feel this way—frozen, and ever-reliant upon well-work masks.
As much as I want it to be, using Ti in a healthy way is never going to be a frictionless affair. I have to just take the leap. But indeed, until I listened to this episode, I didn’t consciously associate trauma and freeze response due to social fear with my inability to use Ti in ways outside of achievement or perfectionism.
Ways I’m thankful for Se.
I love being right here right now and not full of worry.
I love being comfortable and confident in my own body.
I love my resilient nature.
I love that I have a quick learning process.
I love seeing the quickest solution to any problem I love seeing the quickest solution to any problem
I love bypassing possibilities to get an answer.
INTJ – male
I believe that when I was younger my Te was probably overvalued by an unhealthy mother (ESTP) and unhealthy stepfather (EN_P). They depended on me to take care of a lot of adult tasks for the family when I was in my teenage years. As I matured, I realized that I had been living with the notion that I was a developed adult at a young age when in reality my copilot was not fully developed at all. It was strong, but in only a few areas.
I do recognize though that terrible feeling of having Te disregarded. It really hurts when its criticized by people who don’t have Te as a dominant function.
Currently, the thing that gives me the most trouble is my inferior function (Se). I have a very hard time being present in the moment and in my body. I struggle with being in groups, public speaking, work meetings, etc. Also really struggle to recognize and correct physical and health problems.
Loved this episode! I had actually been coming to a similar conclusion recently about myself through work I’ve been doing in therapy, although I hadn’t connected it to typology.
As an INFJ who’s been studying typology for almost ten years, I thought I had Fe pretty well developed for awhile. But I was still just using it to put on a social mask and get other people’s approval, rather than actually make the kinds of connections and relationships that I actually needed. It got to the point where even with my partner and my closest friends, I still felt lonely and unseen because I was hiding myself behind the Fe mask so much.
There was definitely a lot of wounding to my Fe throughout my life; in fact, every time I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of it, there’s yet another layer. It was so damaged at one point that it wasn’t until my twenties that I even knew I had natural abilities in relating and connecting with others. However, once I discovered that it was a skill, I jumped too quickly to using it for achievement, but it was fake achievement by other people’s standard of success rather than my own. I also learned how to use it to help other people’s healing, but not to heal myself. Ironically, when I didn’t know I had any Fe skills, I actually made more genuine relationships and expressed myself more authentically (although definitely also more unconsciously).
I really appreciated the part of the podcast that related function development to the HAT model. It’s pretty clear to me now that I need to figure out how to develop Fe in terms of my own healing, and that after that I’ll be able to use it more for genuine achievement. I’d definitely be interested to learn more about how the functions can be developed at the different HAT levels in a future podcast!
Great timing. I’ve been diving into this topic for the last few weeks. I learned to keep my Ne copilot hidden most of the time; it became second nature as it was unacceptable to my family and to many of my friends. I disguise why I’m travelling and what I’m studying, and to some friends it might be said with a laugh – “you know how I’m into some weird stuff” – or to others I’ll refer to workshops I’m going to as being about a sort of “meditation”, because most people have heard of that and it sounds normal. Then there are a few intuitive friends for whom it all is normal, and I can remove the filters when talking to them.