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[mbti-notes]

hi i live in an ethnically divided country and in the process of growing up i too eventually became prejudiced towards other gruops because thats what we were taught that they are responsible for ruining the country etc but as i grow up ive tried to reduce this prejudice by first holding back judgements during conflict and hearing ppl out-not easy i was wondering if you have any other ways to help me tone down some of the prejudicial feelings i have thanks

Combating prejudice is deeply related to personal growth, so it's worth going into detail about it. Prejudice is a complicated topic because it needs to be understood from many different angles. It is a psychologically sensitive topic because of the moral injury and intergenerational trauma it causes. It is a politically controversial topic because there is a lot of disagreement about the best methods of remedying it.

Academically, this field of study is relatively new, so a lot of the research is still in early stages. It is a sad fact that academia has always been dominated by the perpetrators of prejudice, so the topic was not taken seriously until civil rights became a more prominent issue in society. In countries where civil rights haven't mattered or were continually suppressed, prejudice is considered just another form of suffering that people must endure.

WHAT IS PREJUDICE?

The literal meaning of prejudice comes from "pre-judge", to make a judgment without proper logical reasoning and/or before possessing necessary and sufficient evidence (of truth). If you can set aside the moral aspect of prejudice for a moment (whether it's good or bad), the foundation of pre-judgment is actually a cognitive issue, pertaining to how humans think, and the many ways in which their thought process can be flawed. Sometimes it helps to think of prejudice in cognitive rather than moral terms because it can reduce blaming and shaming, which allows for more productive discussion.

As humans evolved, they were often faced with dangerous situations in which they had to make timely decisions without opportunity to gather sufficient information. As a result, pre-judgment got built into the human brain as a survival tool. Pre-judgment relies on "fuzzy" sources of information that are immediately available, such as memories, emotions, and intuitions. The brain automatically uses past experience to formulate "general rules of thumb", which is an unrefined method of organizing and categorizing information. These generalizations can then be used to make quick intuitive leaps and connections when navigating new situations. The word "automatic" is important because most of this information processing takes place instantly, below conscious awareness.

The great speed at which pre-judgment occurs means that certain things must be sacrificed, such as mindfulness, precision, accuracy, and most importantly, the bigger picture, since the past experience of one individual is an extremely limited pool of information. The flaws of this "lower" level information processing are presumably why human beings also had to evolve the so-called "higher" brain that is used for logical reasoning and conscious deliberation.

In other words, humans essentially have two different brains (which have been given various names throughout the history of psychology). Problems arise when the two brains diverge or disagree. The bad news is that it's impossible to stop your "lower" brain from pre-judging because it's a critical brain function. The good news is that it's quite possible to use your "higher" brain to counteract the mistakes and negative effects of pre-judgment. This is a process that may involve several steps:

STEP 1: NURTURE SELF-AWARENESS

The first step is to develop enough self-awareness to realize that there's a lot more going on in your mind than you realize. The reason I go on and on about self-awareness is that you can't address an issue until you become aware of it. Many people aren't aware of their beliefs and values and just take them for granted. To increase self-awareness, reflect on your beliefs and values in more detail. It might help to write them down.

beliefs: what you take as true/untrue about the world

values: how you assign importance, significance, or worth

The fact of the matter is that people pick up their beliefs and values quite passively from their environment. Knowing this can make you more understanding of people when they hold problematic beliefs because it's likely that they haven't had enough opportunity to examine them properly. We all grow up internalizing someone else's beliefs and values. Yet many people treat their beliefs and values as their personal "identity" and are unwilling to let them go even when the beliefs are proven false or the values proven misguided.

In your case, your culture has taught you racist beliefs and values, e.g., that people of a certain ethnicity are bad, inferior, not to be trusted, best eliminated, etc. As a child, you accepted these beliefs and values because i) you didn't know any better, and ii) holding them made it easier for you to fit in. It feels good to fit in. A culture survives and thrives when its members continually validate each other, even when the beliefs/values being validated are problematic.

In adulthood, you can hide behind excuses and continue to uncritically conform with your culture, or you can reflect critically on your culture and actively choose the kind of person you want to be. Do you want these unexamined beliefs and values to define you? Do you want to let these unexamined beliefs and values make you a protector of a prejudiced society and a perpetrator of discrimination? If not, what kind of society do you hope to live in, and what kinds of beliefs and values must you hold in order to help bring that better society into being?

Shining more light on the underlying beliefs and values that underpin your behavior creates an opportunity to change them for the better. There are many things you don't have the power to control in society, but the one thing that is always within your power to improve is yourself.

STEP 2: FACE UP TO YOUR PREJUDICE

The second step is to admit that you pre-judge and acknowledge any problems it has caused. A problem won't get solved by dancing around it. To confront a problem head on means you must see the FULL extent of it. Once again, it might help to lay it all out in writing, for example:

Write down all the times you felt awkward, clueless, or helpless around someone different from you, and explain why.

Write down all the instances where pre-judgment led you to misunderstand, misjudge, or mistreat someone, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Write down all the times you got criticized or suffered negative consequences related to pre-judgment.

Write down what you really thought about the people you've met of that ethnicity, even if it makes you feel ashamed, especially if it makes you feel ashamed. Shame is an indicator that something about your thinking/behavior is morally wrong, so learn to pay attention to shame and you'll discover opportunities to improve.

Were there better ways to approach those situations? It's hard to change negative behavior when you have no positive behavior to replace it with. Generally speaking, a great way to learn and improve in social situations is to be more curious and take more time to listen, rather than make assumptions and trip over your own false beliefs.

STEP 3: IMPROVE YOUR THINKING SKILLS

The third step is to develop better use of your "higher" intellect and its ability to reason, i.e., improve your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking basically means properly vetting your beliefs and values. There are several criteria you ought to use:

Truth: Is your belief really true? Is it based on fact? Human beings are prone to confirmation bias, so did you gather all of the available evidence and give fair consideration to the counterevidence? If you don't know enough to judge truth for yourself, have you consulted with a wide range of experts on the matter? Experts are the people who have already done sufficient formal learning and study. While their word shouldn't be taken as gospel, they are a good source of credible information that ought to be taken into consideration.

Rationality: Is your belief/value reasonable? Can you explain how you came to hold the belief/value? Can you provide a convincing logical argument to prove your belief or justify your value to others? If you don't know enough to judge the quality of information on your own, has your belief/value undergone adequate critique and rebuttal from those who know more? When used appropriately, discussion and debate with others can help you refine your ideas toward greater precision and accuracy.

Coherence: Do you express and apply your beliefs/values consistently in every situation? Do any of your beliefs/values contradict each other? Have you ever detected or been accused of hypocritical behavior? When your beliefs, values, and behaviors don't align or fit with each other, it causes an uncomfortable mental state called cognitive dissonance. It's a sign that there's a problem in your thought process, which you should use as an opportunity to straighten your mind out.

Racial/ethnic prejudice is a form of faulty thinking because it is based on stereotyping. A stereotype is an over-generalization about an entire category/group. For example, Americans are often stereotyped as loud, Canadians as polite, French as snobby, British as uptight, etc.

Stereotypes are difficult to eradicate for two reasons. First, stereotypes are a form of lazy thinking, and laziness often wins out when mental energy is limited. Since they are a form of pre-judgment, stereotypes are a quick and easy way to make sense of the world: Thinking along very general categories bypasses the need to think about all the little details of each individual member of the category. Stereotypes are also lazy in that they do not properly distinguish between race, ethnicity, and culture. How a person looks (biology), where they are from (geography), what group they identify with (culture), and how they behave (psychology) are separate issues, are they not? Yet, stereotypes do not recognize such nuances.

Second, stereotypes are easy to defend because they contain a tiny but heavily distorted grain of truth. Culture is real, and people who grow up in the same culture are more likely to adopt similar attitudes and behaviors. It is true that Americans tend to value extraverted behaviors like assertiveness and outspokenness. Cultural trends make it very easy to find an example of a loud American or a polite Canadian. Humans only require one or two examples and their brain will see a "pattern" and start making generalizations. Generalizations eventually evolve into stereotypes once enough people start believing they are true.

Many people try to debunk stereotypes by calling them false, but that's not quite the right approach. The more important problem with stereotypes is that they are only a very small piece of the picture that has been blown out of proportion and treated as the whole picture. A stereotype is an oversimplification. To debunk an oversimplification is different than just calling out falsity. If the problem is that people aren't taking enough information into consideration, then the solution should be to make them take the fuller picture into account. This can be done in two ways:

i. Seek Counter-evidence: For instance, for every loud American you meet in the US, you will find a quiet one that didn't draw your attention. If you actually did this, the number of loud Americans would immediately drop to ~50%. It's much harder to justify stereotyping when you realize that the number of people who fit the stereotype isn't anywhere near 100% or even a majority. This is why an effective way to increase racial and ethnic harmony is to encourage more mixing and mingling between groups. When you're constantly encountering evidence that goes against the stereotype, over and over again, stereotypes will cease to have any meaning.

ii. Respect Individuality: Recognize that not everyone subscribes equally or in the same way to the culture in which they were brought up. Go to a collectivist culture and you'll find plenty of rebellious people. Go to a traditional culture and you'll find plenty of open-minded people. There are plenty of people who suffer because they don't fit in well with their culture. When you stereotype, you are basically saying that every person is just a mindless or unthinking product of their culture. Is it fair to dismiss people in this way, before you've even known a single fact about their personal experience and background? Another reason why mixing and mingling between groups promotes racial and ethnic harmony is because normal everyday interactions force you to connect with each individual's humanity and you can't help but be more empathetic as a result.

Do you hope to be an intelligent person? An important aspect of growing as a person is to develop your intellectual capabilities because they are necessary for having good judgment. Is it possible to make consistently good decisions in life when your mind is riddled with wrong ideas and bad thinking habits such as overgeneralizing and oversimplifying?

STEP 4: UNDERSTAND YOUR PLACE IN HISTORY

The fourth step is to have a better understanding of history and how you fit into the historical context of racial/ethnic divides. People may be born to pre-judge but they aren't born with prejudiced beliefs. Beliefs are learned and passed down from one generation to the next. Prejudice isn't just a problem of one person's faulty cognition, it is also a social and political problem, where faulty beliefs and values build a society that treats people unfairly.

In many places, people of different ethnic groups often claim their own spaces. If too many people from another ethnicity start to move in, conflicts arise. The usual responses to this "invasion" are fight or flight. Fighting involves actively rejecting them, kicking them out, killing them, or passing laws to keep them from power. Flight usually involves moving to a new space once it becomes obvious that the old space is unrecoverable. Either way, the two groups remain separate, which means there are no opportunities to mix and mingle and improve relations.

As long as two groups cannot tolerate and accept each other, conflicts will persist. And some ethnic conflicts have persisted for centuries and even produced wars, haven't they? Whether you like it or not, you come into the world as a part of history. What role have your ancestors and family played in the conflict? What do people see when they look at you, and how does that affect your relations with them? Do you want to mindlessly perpetuate the conflict so that your kids and descendants must suffer forever, or do you hope for something better? What will your legacy be in this history? Can the prejudice end with you?

STEP 5: RAISE THE BAR ON YOUR PEOPLE SKILLS

The fifth step is to hold yourself to higher standards when socializing, communicating, and interacting with others. You have to improve your people skills so that you get the most out of every interaction, rather than doing things that poison or shut down meaningful interaction. You have to be more mindful about how you come across to people. I have already recommended books on the resources page about how to socialize and communicate better.

It is a simple matter to preach tolerance and acceptance, but it is quite another matter to actually try and implement it. The fact of the matter is there are certain values that cannot be reconciled. For example, if you believe that men and women should be equal under the law, how are you going to reconcile with a culture that believes they are fundamentally unequal and should be treated unequally? It seems impossible.

This is where it's especially important to combat stereotypes through real human interaction. Stereotypes are only easy to maintain because they are abstract in your mind. When you merely think about people who are different from you, you don't think of them as real individuals, but as an abstract category or a single superficial characteristic. This must change, and an effective way is to purposely surround yourself with more people who are different from you. I often advocate this kind of exposure to foster understanding between different personality types, and the same principle applies to other human differences as well, including racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and physical differences.

If you are a member of the dominant group in society, you have never really experienced what it's like to be in the minority, and it is an experience you ought to expose yourself to, in order to truly understand the world beyond your own limited experience. The dominant group always holds the freedom to determine their own identity, whereas the minority group never feels free from majority judgment of them. Have you ever experienced such existential constraint and do you understand what negative effects it has on human psychology? Reflect more deeply on how people are bound by social, economic, and political constraints and you might find more sophisticated explanations for the "negative" behavior you observe in people.

In real human interaction, you can better connect with people as individuals, you have far more exposure to the positive side of their culture, you'll have a more nuanced understanding of what really motivates them, and you'll have more opportunity to communicate your way through differences. When two people only see each other as abstractions, stereotypes can easily be proven true, which only hardens prejudiced beliefs. But when you learn how to communicate with empathy, person to person, heart to heart, stereotypes more easily fall away, and people are more likely to soften their stance and be open to finding common ground.

Yes, there are some extreme people you will never be able to see eye-to-eye with, but you have to realize those people are in the minority. The majority of people aren't extreme and don't want conflict. Until you can do away with your abstractions and connect with people on a more human level, you'll just continue dismissing everyone you've lumped into the crude category of "bad" and consider them irredeemable, thus never discovering the majority of moderate people who are open to communication, compromise, and change. If you hope to have an influence on others, it is only fair that you open yourself up to being influenced by them. This is a very difficult but worthy endeavor if two people who would otherwise be enemies finally find some form of mutual understanding or peaceful coexistence.

Counteracting the tendency to pre-judge is hard work, even painful work, which is why many people resist or don't bother. However, if you can take on this challenge of changing your thinking and improving your people skills, you'll be opening the door to tremendous growth. You'll have a much deeper understanding of yourself, others, and the society you live in. And there are many rewards to be reaped from possessing such wisdom.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hi, I hope you are doing well. I have a question about Detachment.

(1) I’ve since gone through college and therapy. I love my therapist and feel like I don’t need her but shared a lot in common. I felt understood and she said I actually have an incredible amount of empathy. I don’t know if it’s useful. I’m an INFP, most likely. Im also asd, ocd, and potentially adhd.

I’ll miss her insights and the therapeutic relationship. It was detached but felt like mutual care without her breaking down all the time or anything when I said something sad. I wanted to understand the whole time, how was she so stoic yet so empathetic, compassionate, and insightful. It made me think of how brenee brown says shes always alone. We all are technically. But I want to keep in touch with this person. She said to keep her posted on my life updates. I understand what the therapeutic relationship meant but I want to see what she does for 2 seconds. I worry therapists are often lonely from having this perspective and I worried she’s an infj like my sister.

I want to be a therapist now, because I’m so interested in growing, helping, learning, and being like her. I wanted to be a farmer for a bit, because I had a mentor. And i know who I am now, and have tools and universal truths. And im easier on myself. But I deeply want to understand her. Is that ego?

(2) i read that INFJs are detached due to intuition at the front while INFPs are attached. Am I mistaken? Sometimes I’ll feel guilt over how a person wants to get to know me or if I’m seeming cold or stressed. But I don’t like everyone. I attach my feelings to people who are in my business or rude/annoying, instead of seeing it as their thing. People get to me.

(3) I can’t articulate it well, but if everyone is an individual with seperate values and needs, it’s unethical to feel attached to anyone. But there are rules like working, and contributing. So it’s like helping out of principle. I don’t fully understand because I can get friends and meet my other needs without wanting to bother my therapist. I still love her though. She played a big part in my life. I felt spiritually connected but could be projecting. It’s just I don’t feel a seperation. I felt merged, then seperated. I’m autistic and stuff, but I care lots. I just wonder if she sees the world like my sister whos an infj. I hope I can see their perspective because I want to feel detached if it’s reality.

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(1) I wouldn't call it ego. It sounds like you want to be friends with her because you feel a connection? Nothing wrong with that. Whatever professional relationship you have with someone, it is possible to make it into a personal one if you happen to click with them.

A relationship issue NFPs often run into is not defining their relationships well. This can be a problem because boundaries remain incredibly fuzzy, which makes it easy to inadvertently overstep them and cause messy and unpredictable interactions. If you want to have a proper relationship with someone, whether platonic or romantic, you both have to agree to what the relationship ought to be and set realistic boundaries that reflect the kind of relationship it is.

You haven't done this with her, so the relationship seems to exist in a gray area, a sort of limbo. If you want more from this relationship rather than just the occasional update, then you have to be more assertive in expressing your needs/wants and seeing whether she's willing to reciprocate in kind.

(2) You are mistaken because you are oversimplifying and perhaps stereotyping. Do people not use more than one function, and do individuals not express their functions in their own unique way?

INFJs might be detached until they care deeply through Fe, and they are capable of caring about many things at once. INFJs with healthy and mature Fe do not suffer from loneliness. INFPs might be quite oblivious until they get attached through Fi. Functions don't operate in a vacuum; context and circumstances matter as well.

I'm always warning people NOT to view each other as stereotypes, as it constitutes a misinterpretation and misapplication of type theory. If learning about personality type causes you to think of people in more simple rather than more complex terms, then something is awry.

Don't play guessing games unless you actually want to create misunderstanding and conflict. Speculation easily leads to assuming that you know what's in someone's heart/mind when you really have no clue. The best way to know the truth of someone is through clear and authentic communication with them.

(3) I'm not sure I understand this point you're making. I think your concept of "individuality" is flawed because you seem to hold contradictory beliefs. On one hand, you say every individual is unique. On the other hand, you seem to think that people are basically interchangeable to you because you can get your needs met from anyone. Which is it? Are people unique or not?

You also seem to imply that human beings are islands and that no real ethical connection can form between them, which is false. Humans evolved to be social creatures and we all have the same set of universal needs. We have more in common with each other than not, though people often forget this fact because they are too easily distracted by the differences. Commonality is one important way people bond with each other and form meaningful relationships.

Individuality comes into the picture when different people rank and express their needs differently and want to use different ways to satisfy their needs. Why do you think you get along better with some people more than others? You can be an individual but still share much in common with certain people if the both of you happen to rank your needs in a similar way and have a similar worldview.

There is something you're getting from her that you can't get from others because it is unique to her. That is why you feel the desire to get closer to her specifically. You can be a unique individual and still experience kinship with someone who shares a lot in common with you. Individuality and communion can both exist at the same time. Beware of either/or thinking and the way it limits your view of the world (it is something that those on the spectrum often struggle with).

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hi mbti-notes, I am a INFJ in their late twenties. My purpose for this inquiry is to better understand, on a mbti-function level, why I am feeling emotionally overwhelmed and burnt out.

For additional context: I am currently in a graduate program that I detest—to the point where I’ve had to keep myself from crying at my desk in public. Usually, when I’m dealing with something arduous I can engage in some sort of Ni-led vision of what I want in the future to encourage myself to keep going. But lately I’ve just been so tired of trying to ‘inspire’ myself to keep moving.

On top of this, I feel like I can’t express my disdain for my work life to friends because they either work in the same field (and they enjoy it) or they are going through other issues of their own. In general, I find that people are (reasonably) concerned with their own sources of stress, and I don’t want to bother them about it again unless its serious.

Additionally, I have found it hard to meaningfully engage with such people about their own life. Instead of being attentive and curious about others’ lives, I now feel like I’m always thinking of my own problems. Is this because I am over-exerting myself (Fe) and not reflecting enough (Ni)? If it is a lack of Ni, then why do I feel so tired of trying to work with Ni (please see ’inspiring myself’ sentence earlier in my post)? Thank you so much for reading and considering my long entry—I really appreciate it.

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There are several factors that can contribute to burnout, so the solution will depend on which factors are most influential in your case. You'll have to reflect on it yourself and tailor the right solution. Possible factors include:

1) You are in poor physical health. Your body can only operate at peak efficiency if you eat well, sleep well, get enough exercise, and moderate stress. If you lack energy due to poor physical health, then you need to develop better physical habits.

2) You are expending more energy than you are generating. Ns often need to be reminded that physical and mental energy are finite resources. There is a limit to how much your mind and body can do every day. Everyone needs rest, relaxation, and recuperation time. This is especially the case for introverts. If your workload is too heavy, find a way to reduce it and/or schedule better. Proper work-life balance is necessary for making sure that you take enough time for yourself to recharge.

3) You are taking on too much. Are your work roles and responsibilities clearly articulated? Are you taking on tasks that don't belong to you or should be done by someone else? It's not uncommon for Js to be controlling and Ns to fear missing out, which means they end up doing more work than they should. If this is the case, you need to learn to manage your workload better by prioritizing, deferring, or delegating tasks more appropriately.

4) You are in a disadvantaged position and don't experience all the advantages of your peers. This can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, you might be experiencing overt or covert exclusion because of being a minority and not fitting in (due to class, race, gender, etc). Another example is that you have lower professional status than others, which you might be able to change through hard work and getting promoted to a higher position. Another example is that you haven't done enough to build professional relationships and aren't reaping those social rewards.

5) Your workplace is toxic. A workplace is experienced as unhealthy when you have unsupportive authority figures to contend with, overly competitive or undermining peers to watch out for, and/or unfair practices that don't reward people based on merit. When the social environment is toxic, you can try to improve the situation, or you can leave if you don't have the power to change anything. When leaving is not an option, try to limit engagement and increase positive engagement elsewhere in your life. The more time you spend in a toxic social environment, the more energy it will drain from you until you have no motivation at all.

6) You lack a healthy support system. You seem to downplay or ignore your own needs, which is a common INFJ issue. Yes, you should be professional when dealing with peers/colleagues in a workplace, so it's understandable that you don't want to be constantly discussing your personal issues with them. However, this raises the important question of why you don't have family or friends outside of school/work to lean on and get support from. It sounds like you're not doing enough to build a community for yourself, which leads to isolation and alienation, and eventually, depression that saps away your energy. Neglecting emotional and social needs means you're not taking care of your mental health and well-being. When you don't take care of yourself, you won't be able to attend to others.

7) You lack control and/or confidence. When people don't feel in control or don't feel confident enough to tackle their challenges, they're more likely to waste energy in feeling anxious, preoccupied, distracted, fixated on trivial matters, etc. If this is the case, you may need to be more assertive in: expressing your needs/wants and fulfilling them; organizing your environment to better suit you; clarifying your goals/aspirations; seeking help for improving knowledge and skills that would help you feel more self-confident.

8) You focus too much on the negative and discount the positives. Why is it that two people can work in the same environment but experience it completely differently? Part of it is due to perception. You don't like the work you're doing, so you are full of negative feelings and emotions that then cast everything in a negative light. If this is the case, you need to make more of an effort to recover the positive aspects of the situation. Looking on the bright side involves seeking out and realizing positive possibilities/potential, which should be easy enough with healthy Ni. Positives exist in the present, and you can create them in the decisions you make today. If you're always waiting for happiness to appear in a distant future, chances are, it's not real.

9) Your work doesn't seem to matter or get rewarded. Does this career align with your identity and values? It's hard to feel motivated when you don't believe in your work or others don't recognize your work. Does your work matter? Are there ways your work matters that you're not seeing and appreciating? If others aren't appreciating your work, have you done enough to show it off and keep people informed of your activities?

10) You are on the wrong life path. If you truly believe your work doesn't matter or isn't the right fit for you, why are you still doing it? Why aren't you listening to your own heart? This would constitute going against Ni, which is self-sabotaging. It sounds like you're using Ni-Ti to rationalize. Lying to yourself is only going to make you more and more miserable every time reality slaps you and debunks the lie. While it's true that it's not always easy to change paths, is it really harder than staying on the wrong path forever? I'm not telling you what to do but simply raising the possibility that you haven't done a proper reckoning of the path you've chosen and compared it objectively to the alternative paths that might be better suited to you. Remember that it's not foolish to make a mistake because mistakes are necessary for learning and growth. What's foolish is to deny a mistake and keep suffering from it for the rest of your life.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hello mbti-notes. Sometimes I (INFJ) come across people, both kids and grown-ups, who insult my appearance and try to humiliate me in front of other people, and I don't know how to handle the situation besides keeping a stone face and keeping it together until it ends and I find an isolated place to let the tears fall out.

I'm still greatly affected by this despite being already past my teenage years. As I said, I don't know how to effectively react. One of the ways frequently suggested is to pretend it doesn't affect me, but it does affect me so I would just be lying to them and myself and in turn feel even worse for not expressing my real emotions, but at the same time these type of people are shallow, and it would be pointless and counterproductive for me to express my real feelings without them dismissing me or taking advantage of my weak spots again.

When I don't react properly and don't say anything to stand up for myself, I start to feel even worse about myself for allowing them to disrespect me, but I am also at loss on how I should deal or react in this type of situation. I don't know how to properly deal with people like this, what to say to them, how to stand up for myself and not allow myself to be humiliated in front of everyone.

When it comes to any other topic, I know how to call people out, but when it comes to my appearance I just freeze, my mind goes blank and I don't know what to say, especially when I am dealing with middle school kids. As I said, if I play it cool, I feel even worse because they just reopened a scar inside me and I don't know how to stop the bleeding.

I tried to address my core thoughts and beliefs on beauty and disprove them, and while I dismantled my automatic toxic beliefs, it still doesn't fundamentally work, the pain I carry inside still doesn't go away, it still doesn't heal and I still feel offended and degraded, so I'm at loss on what to do now.

Getting support from my family is not an option. Getting support from my friends didn't work. I was bullied for my appearance in middle school, and after that I refused to even think or confront the issue, I currently want to confront it and heal from it but I don't know how or what exactly am I supposed to do to heal the hurt and stop getting hurt over the same thing over and over again. It's not feasible for me to have a mental breakdown every time this happens.

Right now my ultimate goal is to obtain a high self-esteem, so I need to find a way to deal with this issue. I want to stop getting hurt when people insult my looks, learn how to effectively respond when it happens, make it clear that I will not take disrespect and learn how to make people back down and respect me.

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I'm sorry to hear that you've had to experience such terrible bullying. Disproving core thoughts and beliefs is very important but isn't likely to be enough in your case for two reasons:

Like it or not, feelings matter a lot to you as a Feeler, so until the negative feelings get sorted, the problem will persist. And only dealing with the thinking side but not the feeling side runs the risk of triggering self-sabotaging Ni-Ti loop patterns. You've basically only implemented half the solution, so the results will suffer accordingly. (Although, I do doubt how successful you were with the core thoughts and beliefs as well, which I will address later.)

Bullying is a recognized form of trauma. When you're living with significant past trauma that hasn't been properly addressed and resolved, then the problem goes far deeper than core thoughts and beliefs. You haven't gotten to the heart of the matter yet.

Bringing up your teen years is important because those are formative experiences, and negative formative experiences often lie at the root of adult self-esteem issues. Adolescence is a critical time for learning good social skills. Because teenagers are only in the early stages of learning, the way they think about socializing tends to be overly simplistic.

For example, to the average teenager, successful socializing is defined simply as "fitting in", and they jump to the conclusion that the easiest way is to be like everyone else or get approval from those with status and power. This is why social contagion (the spread of attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors through the members of a group) tends to be much worse among teenagers. When they see someone else get social validation, they rush to do the same thing in order to obtain the same reward.

However, the fact of the matter is that each one of us is an individual, and there is a limit as to how far an individual can conform. If a teenager is unlucky and simply does not share many things in common with their immediate peers, they won't be able to "be like everyone else" no matter how hard they try. Worse, their attempts to fit in or obtain approval can be transparent and make them come off as pathetic and unlikable.

Not being able to find acceptance in adolescence means the goal of that stage of development remains unfulfilled, which can have a negative effect on ego development. Basically, it can keep a person stuck in the adolescent mindset into adulthood. The more they were denied social acceptance, the more desperately they may crave validation. This is one reason why some people crazily chase affirmation, attention, affection, praise, or social status, as though trying to fill a bottomless void. Or, if they believe it impossible to obtain acceptance for whatever reason, they might develop antisocial tendencies and live in deep denial of their social needs.

Conformity is an unsophisticated socializing strategy. It's the strategy people use when they live under a dictatorship because they don't want to stand out and get their head chopped off. Now, some might say that middle and high school life is very similar to living under a dictatorship, which is fair. Teenagers can be quite harsh in ridiculing and bullying each other into conformity. However, you're not a teenager anymore. As an adult, you have more intellectual capacity for nuanced thought, you have more freedom to get away from toxic people, and you have more resources at your disposal for learning healthier methods of socializing.

Conformity is ultimately a shortsighted strategy that produces negative long term consequences. Any time you desire or attempt to be like someone else, you are denying your individuality, which means you are actively stopping the individuation process. Individuation is a core concept in analytical psychology and considered the main goal of every human being. It is the process through which you bring together all the fragmented parts of yourself to become a whole person. Going against the main goal of life prevents you from living a fulfilling and meaningful life.

Individuation requires you to become more aware of how you define your identity. If you hope to become an adult in mind, not only in body, then at some point you have to be willing to expand your sense of self beyond the narrow confines of your early socialization. Whatever it was your parents/caregivers hoped you could be, whatever it was your peers pressured you into being, whatever it was society convinced you was desirable... these concepts are very limiting, and they do not come close to encompassing the entirety of who you are. Unfortunately, many people never realize this.

The fact that these insults keep shaking you so badly suggests that you are still confined by the images, standards, and expectations of your early socialization. Unconsciously, you still buy into them, you still hope to "fit in" with them, and you still wish to reap the social rewards of living up to them, even when, consciously, you claim otherwise. As a result, you are instantly transported back to adolescence every time you are insulted. In psychology, this is called regression. It's like you are that same person, experiencing the same hurtful rejection. That teenager is still alive and well in you, and you haven't learned what to do with them yet, which is why you have no response available.

Generally speaking, criticism hurts the most when a part of you, deep down, believes it is true or fears that it could be true. That teenager inside you still believes what they were told, so the criticism activates a deep sense of shame or self-loathing. To what extent do you believe it's true that you are indeed physically "ugly"? Are you ashamed of how you look? On what basis do you make judgments about physical attractiveness? Are you using standards of your own making (as a true individual), or are you using standards that were imposed upon you (by your tormentors)? If you have truly "disproved your core thoughts and beliefs" on the matter, then you wouldn't be using any of the standards of the shallow people who insult you. Can you honestly say that is the case?

In psychoanalytic theory, one reason people keep re-experiencing and perhaps even re-inviting similar traumatic experiences over and over throughout life is because they are unconsciously seeking resolution, to obtain closure or to get compensation for what was damaged or lost in the past. Your teenage hurt is still screaming for redress. What got damaged and lost in those experiences? Your self-worth. You say your ultimate goal should be to have high self-esteem, which isn't wrong. But it isn't the root of the problem. To be more precise, it is your self-worth that is being attacked, and then your immature reaction leads you to think poorly of yourself and have low self-esteem.

Self-worth is defined as the degree to which you believe yourself "good enough" and deserving of love. You were basically told, again and again, that you are not worthy of love because of being "ugly", until you believed it. As long as you continue to believe it, the insults will cut you deeply. If your self-worth was damaged or lost during those early experiences and that pain keeps recurring, what needs to change? You need to recover your self-worth. You need to build a self-worth strong enough to withstand the world.

Since self-worth gets tied to social acceptance in adolescence, many people mistakenly believe that self-worth comes from the outside, from the judgments of others. That's not the case. Self-worth is firstly about how YOU judge yourself. Secondly, it is about how to put the judgments of others in the right perspective.

To the first point, reflect on what makes a person worthy of love. Until you can arrive at the right answer for yourself as a true individual, you have no real choice but to default to the ideas you've internalized from others earlier in life. Disproving toxic ideas isn't enough as long as you don't replace them with the right ideas, ideas that you can proudly stand up for.

Healthy self-worth involves:

having a truthful understanding of yourself

being accepting of and compassionate toward the humanity of yourself and others

making good use of your gifts, talents, and abilities

doing things in the world that matter or make a positive difference

When you build self-worth properly, from the inside out, and you fully understand your own worth, who can take that away from you? How could you not feel good about yourself? How could you not feel deserving of love?

At that point, you would understand that the best response to outer negativity is expressing your inner positivity:

With a truthful understanding of yourself, you would be the first to acknowledge your flaws and weakness.

With genuine acceptance and compassion, you could show yourself empathy when others don't, and you could have empathy for whatever was damaging them enough to lash out at you.

By realizing more of your potential, you'll see much more of your positive qualities and your innate power.

By being a good contributor in social situations, you'd be the one to influence others rather than the other way around.

This is what it means to "rise above". People with healthy self-worth don't take things too seriously because they don't perceive every negative thing as a personal attack. They tend to have a good sense of humor, even about themselves. And this easygoing manner can be contagious and encourage others to ease up as well. Imagine what could happen if you were able to meet hostility with such inner strength? Imagine what might happen if you were able to respond to your hurt teenage self with such maturity?

To the second point, reflect on what really motivates people. Fe overindulgence is a pitfall of INFJ development. One common symptom is lack of healthy boundaries. There are two aspects to consider:

- Unexamined desire for affirmation: When you indiscriminately seek "union" with every person you encounter due to Fe overindulgence, what happens? You expect everyone to care for you, you feel pressured to conform to everyone's ideas about you, and you make yourself open to everyone's influence, positive and negative. Is it a good idea to walk around with the underlying expectation that everyone should be good and kind to you? It's not a crime to want love, but you're setting yourself up for disappointment and heartache by seeking love from the wrong people. The smarter way to use Fe is to actively surround yourself with loving people and only pay attention to them, rather than just hoping for the best or waiting around passively for love to appear.

- Unable to separate self from others: What other people think, feel, say, and do is their business; it may or may not have anything to do with you. Until you can learn to "mind your own business", you'll keep getting tangled up in other people's drama. What kind of person goes around insulting others without provocation? A hurt person. An insecure person. A narcissistic person trying to make you bend to their idea of what you should be. These psychological issues are none of your business, so you are under no obligation to attend to them. Don't take on other people's problems as your own. Once you understand that no one is entitled to an answer, agreement, affirmation, or attention from you, you'll no longer take their bait. Having good boundaries means you are assertive in preserving your well-being and honoring your needs. Perhaps you should look into assertiveness training. It is sometimes included in therapy for people who have difficulty setting boundaries.

To recover self-worth isn't easy but it's doable as long as you're willing to put in the self-work. What I've written above should be enough to get you started on the journey. To the final point, you ask me what the best response is in these situations. It depends. Every social situation is unique, so it's important to consider the context. Before I can answer, you'll have to answer this first: Why do you need to respond at all? If what you're really wanting to do is prove that you're "good enough", then you're falling into a trap of depending on others to define your self-worth.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hi mbti notes, I’m an entj that wrote to you a long while ago about feeling trapped with intimacy. I’ve done a lot of work on myself since then partly with the help of your reflective questions in your answer. I’ve run into another issue I’d like to ask about.

In an attempt to learn more about myself I’ve been trying to identify traits in people I really enjoy being around and that are important to me in friendships and relationship but am finding my responses confusing.

An example being a friend I met recently who is very honest and straightforward with their thoughts and feelings, no games, which is something I know I don’t like. I really liked their energy so I followed that interest and got to know them but started seeing those same traits I initially liked as childish the more I learned. They would take unexamined contradictory moral stances or just in general not want to explore their thoughts. While they were honest they also seemed to have no room for self doubt.

I don’t understand how I could both really like and then be so turned off by the same things as I got more exposure to it. Perhaps I’m making the problem too broad and it just was a bad match, but it signals to me that I still have a lot more I don’t understand about what my interests really are. Thank you for any thoughts you have if you reply

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I applaud your efforts to improve yourself. You are correct in saying that there's a lot more you don't understand about what your interests are and the role they play in how you relate to others. You seem to be describing a common phenomenon known as projection (you can read previous posts about it).

Review the third paragraph you wrote above. Do you know that the way you describe your friend is precisely how a lot of people describe Te doms? The positive aspects you liked are characteristic of dominant Te and the negative aspects you disliked are characteristic of inferior Fi. It's not a coincidence that this happened.

Jung said: "Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face." When you are prone to projection, you don't see the world as it is but as you are. As such, your judgments don't reveal any objective truth but a subjective distortion.

For example, as you first explore what you like, it's natural to gravitate toward "like-minded" people. Why? They reflect back to you your own positive qualities, and the validation feels good. However, people who are like you will also possess similar negative qualities as you. When those negative qualities start to bother you, it's because they hit too close to home. Seeing those negative qualities in someone else starts to make you more aware of negative things in yourself that you are not yet ready to confront. Invalidation doesn't feel good. To put it in crude terms, you were basically falling in love with a version of yourself and then fell out of love as soon as your flaws were revealed.

Everyone wants to see themselves in a positive light, so it can be painful to face up to one's own negative side. People at low levels of ego development don't yet have a strong and healthy ego (which is most people). One way to compensate for a fragile ego is to form an unrealistic self-image that serves to hide the negative aspects of oneself. However, since reality keeps threatening to intrude upon and even shatter an unrealistic self-image, people need some way to maintain that false image in the face of threats. This is achieved through a variety of defense mechanisms (see the dedicated article).

Projection is a defense mechanism. Projecting your darker aspects onto another person means you don't have to look at them in yourself. It's a way of deflecting painful truths. Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously, so it's not a "choice" you make per se but something you get in the habit of doing because it feels better than the alternative of facing the truth.

One reason defense mechanisms are considered unhealthy is because they keep your self-awareness low, too low, to the point of interfering with personal growth. According to psychoanalytic theory, even when you have a genuine conscious motivation to improve yourself, your personal growth will be quite slow as long as the full truth about you remains repressed and hidden in the unconscious, masked by a complicated network of defense mechanisms.

While it might sound like projection is a "bad" thing because it's unhealthy, if you can admit that you're projecting, it's actually an opportunity to know yourself better, to see your own darker side and address it properly rather than keeping it repressed. You can spot projection whenever you're being judgmental and there is a distinct recurring pattern in how you judge people. You can also spot projection by stepping back and considering whether your judgments are truly fair and objective.

Being able to spot projection gives you a chance to turn your attention around onto yourself, to reflect on why exactly those particular qualities bother you so much. Do you possess those same qualities? If so, acknowledging the truth grants you a chance to change for the better. If not, would having those qualities make you feel deeply ashamed or lead you to hate yourself? Exposing repressed shame or self-loathing is necessary for correcting a distorted self-image.

Caveat: The truth has the potential to hurt. Digging into defense mechanisms is a risky thing to do depending on whether they are being used to mask some deep-seated pain and suffering. If you suspect that this process of self-examination could be very destabilizing, it's best to work with a therapist to increase your self-awareness in a gradual and safe manner.

[mbti-notes]

Hi i'm an INFP i wanted to ask how you deal with things getting real as you age i'm 28 and after a period of Ne indulgence I think Si is slowly coming out poking at every impractical ambition i had and saying yeah this isnt really gonna happen but sometimes it's kinda discouraging kinda scary how do you deal with the lower functions and the lessons they have to teach you esp when the lessons can be discouraging .Thanks

I want to highlight this line: "yeah this isnt really gonna happen". This is not Si. This is speculation about the future. Speculation isn't real. Si only deals in the real: what has happened or is happening. Thus, Si isn't the problem. The problem arises afterward, in how you choose to interpret the facts and extrapolate about the future.

As soon as Si hits you with facts that Fi doesn't like, do you automatically imagine negative possibilities and believe the future is doomed? Leaping straight from "what is" into "what will be" is a bad cognitive habit that makes you prone to committing a logical error called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It basically means you mistakenly treat something abstract as concretely real.

An important aspect of N development is learning how to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Whatever you imagine/envision is possible isn't real until it actually happens. However, when people treat their imaginings/visions as real, they tend to get themselves stuck, stuck in delusion or stuck in pessimism. Overindulging Ne usually involves the former, while Si loop usually involves the latter. You seem to be referring to the threat of Si loop. The Si loop way of thinking doesn't only commit logical errors, it can have a very negative effect on your well-being, because pessimism is a quick killer of motivation. Can one live well without motivation?

There is no such thing as perfection. Any big goal worth pursuing in life is going to bring challenges, obstacles, problems, etc, along the way. Life is a winding and bumpy ride. Si makes you keenly aware of the bumps, but it doesn't tell you what they mean. For that, you have to use big-picture thinking via Ne, to consider ALL of the possible futures that could come into being (as opposed to defaulting to the worst possible outcomes).

Yes, there are times when a goal is impractical because the challenges are insurmountable. At that point, it's necessary to open up your mind to new and exciting alternative paths, which Ne should help you with. However, more often than not, challenges aren't that big. Many of the challenges we face in life serve the purpose of spurring personal growth. For example:

A challenge may highlight a mistake you've made, which gives you a chance to correct it and learn from it.

A challenge may inform you that you've taken a wrong turn somewhere and need to get back on track.

A challenge may slow you down because you're moving too fast for your own good.

A challenge may stop you in your tracks because you've forgotten something important and need to be reminded of it.

A challenge may force you to make a detour because taking that extra step is going to enrich your appreciation of the achievement.

A challenge may compel you to learn new knowledge and skills, to "level up" and be better prepared for the next stages.

Though they can be painful to handle, these kinds of obstacles are good for you, in the bigger picture, and they don't ultimately stop you from achieving something meaningful. But can you see that? Looping INFPs haven't learned this level of nuance. When they interpret the meaning of things, they often trap themselves in oversimplified terms, like the either/or dichotomy of failure/success. This means they often spend life vacillating wildly from one extreme to another, unable to work with the facts of life in a reasonable and balanced manner, e.g., swinging between delusion and pessimism.

Whenever Si reveals something you don't like, how are you going to respond to it? Disliking something doesn't necessarily make it objectively bad. (Treating subjective feelings as objective reality is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.) Whether a challenge, obstacle, or problem is seriously life-altering cannot be determined based on feelings alone. You must take the bigger picture into consideration with Ne and use Si to gather information about which possibilities are most plausible. In other words, it is necessary to use your perceiving functions better in order to prevent your judging functions from making grave errors.

Thus, the answer to your question isn't really about Si or Te lower functions. It is mainly about Ne and whether you're using it correctly to: i) put Fi in the right perspective, ii) avoid Fi-Si loop, iii) properly consider every possibility and avoid jumping to the wrong conclusions.

[mbti-notes]

INTJ here. For almost three years, I've been having a serious crush on an ENFP friend. I haven't made a move yet. After not having seen each other for a few months, I've started questioning if I truly should pursue a possible relationship with someone who doesn't make any effort of that kind towards me, i.e. doesn't seem interested (yet), even if they're such an awesome human being and spending time with them makes me feel absolutely wonderful etc etc. I think I will have a pretty good chance with them in a few years due to age gap stuff then being resolved and I don't want to fully give up hope, so what can I do to stop overthinking in the present moment? Is this just another imbalance/underdevelopment issue?

It's difficult to respond when you haven't provided enough detail for me to understand the situation fully.

(1) Are you saying you can't be together now because of an age gap, meaning one of you is underage and the other an adult (so it would be illegal)?

(2) What do you mean by "overthinking"? Describe in detail. Do you mean your thinking goes around in circles with no benefits, conclusions, or insights? The psychological term is rumination, read the dedicated article about it.

People ruminate when they are unable to process and resolve negative feelings and emotions. "Not wanting to give up hope" comes at a cost to your emotional life. If you're willing to pay the price, then gracefully accept that you're going to be bothered by this situation until it gets resolved. If you're not willing to pay the price, move on to other open doors rather than fixating on the closed ones.

For INTJs, stopping rumination is linked to auxiliary Te development: i) Stop dwelling in fantasy. ii) Make a firm decision based on the facts, draft a plan forward, and stick to it.

[mbti-notes]

Hi, this will sound strange but can the inferior function leak into consciousness when one is dreaming ? I'm an INFP and usually see Te-doms as being loud rushed and so on but I had this dream where I was behaving more or less like one and in the dream my actions while under the influence of Te made sense I was like hell yeah it makes sense as to why Te-doms are always on top of things always solving problems and such that when I woke up their actions made a lot of sense. Thank you.

Do you know who Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are? Freud is widely considered the founding father of psychology, and Jung was his mentee. The two of them developed the first rigorous methods of dream analysis that are still used by some therapists today. Freud wrote the first authoritative treatise about dreams called The Interpretation of Dreams. In it, he famously said:

"The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."

Freud made a distinction between manifest and latent content of dreams. The manifest content is the literal images of the dream, while the latent content is the symbolic meaning of the images. Dreams have symbolic meaning because they are actually expressions of unconscious activities.

Unconscious activities deal with darker instincts, thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, and ideas that are too psychologically disturbing to confront when awake. Though unconscious, these activities still have a negative influence in waking life, so it is important to become more conscious of them in order to mitigate those negative effects. This is easier said than done because the conscious mind seeks to avoid disturbance at all costs.

Enter dreams. Dreams occur in a mental space between the unconscious and consciousness, so they are the perfect vehicle for transmitting messages. Since the content of unconscious activities can be disturbing, dreams disguise the content in symbols in order to make it more palatable and easier to confront and accept. The process of interpreting the symbols in dreams allows people to arrive at deeper truths about themselves.

Freud understood dreams as a form of wish fulfillment. He postulated that human beings had a great many desires, but those desires often conflicted with each other or were deemed unacceptable by society. Thus, dark and taboo desires had to be repressed and kept unconscious.

However, repressed desires don't just disappear and they might even become stronger the harder they are repressed, to the point of creating anxiety or neurosis in waking life. The pent up energy from repressed desires has to go somewhere, so it eventually influences dreaming. Playing out dark/taboo desires through the events and stories of dreams is a safer way of handling them. Freud believed that dream interpretation was a good way of getting to the bottom of what was actually troubling people.

Eventually, Jung broke with Freud because he believed that Freud's ideas were too narrow in scope. Freud was famously focused on understanding repressed sexual desires and fixations (because of his own repressed desires and the fact that many of his clients were female and had suffered some form of sexual abuse in early life), but Jung believed that there was much more to mental life than sex and taboos. He developed dream analysis in a somewhat different direction. While he generally agreed that dreams were about wish fulfillment, he was able to paint a much broader picture of what a "wish" could be.

Dreams might provide some clues about the current state of your life, e.g., whether you are generally happy, sad, anxious, yearning, etc. In the hustle and bustle of daily life, people often neglect their own well-being, so dreams provide an opportunity to check in with oneself.

Dreams might provide insight into a challenge or problem you're facing. Ever heard the phrase "sleep on it"? When you're dreaming, the brain's executive functioning is switched off, which allows your mental processes to operate more freely and thus more creatively. Dreams can explore, connect, and synthesize information for you, which might help you come up with better solutions. This fits with current neurological dream research that indicates the brain uses sleep to clean up and consolidate information.

Dreams might provide wisdom by connecting you to a larger pool of knowledge you didn't know you possessed. Jung was an exceptionally well-read person. He studied the stories, myths, and religious practices of many different cultures, western and eastern, and was astounded to find common recurring patterns, which he distilled into a concept called archetypes. Dreams are often full of archetypal images. This led him to postulate the existence of the collective unconscious, a storehouse of information that is genetically transmitted to every member of a species. Ancient archetypal patterns lend dreams a narrative structure that makes it easier to decipher their meaning.

Dreams might signal a need for compensation or aspiration. As I've explained in the study guides, normal personality development is "uneven". This creates an underlying sense of lack or missing something, which opens a door to developing your potential.

In the process of healthy personality development, certain functions must be given more power and control. However, the side effect of this is that their opposite functions get repressed and left to exist in an infantile state, operating more unconsciously. When the imbalance between opposing functions becomes too extreme, the pent up energy of repressed functions can influence us in unpredictable ways. One way is through inferior grip, which is an unconscious and desperate attempt to right the imbalance. Another way is through dreams, fantasy, and wish fulfillment.

Your dream might be related to people or someone you've recently met that you feel drawn to because of their Te strengths. Or your dream might signal "type envy", which is negative, because it implies low self-esteem, deep-seated self-hatred, or a dark desire to destroy your true self and become something false (a manifestation of Te grip). Or your dream might indicate compensation for personality flaws, which could be positive if it led to change and improvement. Or your dream might indicate an aspiration to realize more of your potential, in terms of being more ambitious or striving for more challenging goals, which could be positive or negative depending on how you approach it.

While someone trained in dream analysis can help you interpret your dreams, at the end of the day, only you can confirm the underlying truth of those interpretations by taking the bigger picture of your life into account. Nobody can access your full experience except you. Examine the notable thoughts/feelings you've had about Te and the encounters you've had with Te in waking life. How do the images and emotions in your dream connect to those experiences? Because dreams often seem random at first, it helps to contextualize them by connecting them to waking life or reflecting on what aspects of waking life are provoking you to focus on Te. With added context, it's easier to discover the most truthful interpretation.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hello, first of all, thank you for putting in so much time (years even) to helping people and sharing your insights. It’s really thoughtful of you and I feel happy that there is someone out there I can write to, you can give thoughtful advice.

Here’s my question: I am INFJ. What do you do when you have Ni fatigue? I ask this because I’ve noticed that my Ni requires a lot of brain power to work through and think through things. When I truly use Ni, I can sieve through things and get some pretty useful insights. But honestly, I can’t do it 24/7. And Ni being the dominant function, would mean that it would “default” to the lower functions which are not as developed when my brain is tired. That’s when problems lurk because my brain is telling me that I need my me time, but my Fe now starts to tell me that I am not interacting with the people around me and they are going to find me boring etc.

Usually this is not a problem when I have Ni around to assess the situation, but my brain is tired of analysing that I just don’t. Maybe this is not supposed to happen, maybe I am overusing Ni? I usually spend most of my waking hours analysing with Ni, which could definitely be the problem. So, maybe there should be a boundary to using Ni only at certain times of the day or situations, just like setting boundaries when listening to people so you don’t get too emotionally fatigued? If so, what how would it be like?

Contradictory to my own conclusion about setting a boundary for Ni, I would find it odd for the dominant function to not be present when it is needed just because the situation is not a priority or because it is too brain intensive to spare for thinking. Anyway, I would like to hear your thoughts on how you manage Ni “fatigue” or if you actually don’t and I’m missing something…. Thank you :)

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You're missing something...

1) It seems your knowledge of the functions is still lacking because you have not properly distinguished between Ni and Ti. The words I have highlighted indicate a judging function being used, not a perceiving function. Thus, the fatigue likely stems from using a lower function too much, which requires a lot of mental energy.

2) Your "analyzing" sounds like it might border on unproductive. I say "might" because you haven't given examples or specified what you're analyzing and why. Using Ni+Ti can easily veer into Ni-Ti loop. Remember that people often don't realize they're in tertiary loop because it is a manifestation of unconscious activity. Can you tell the difference between "thinking" and "overthinking"? If you can't, it's a problem. Overthinking is maladaptive because it stops you from living life smoothly, such as simply: being who you are, going with the flow, doing what needs to be done, doing what you want to do, etc.

3) Using functions optimally involves having the self-awareness to understand why you're using the function. Related to point #2, what is the purpose of all that "analyzing"? Do you feel as though you must do it? Can you stop doing it and still be perfectly fine? If not, there's something awry. Are you actually describing an unhealthy defensiveness or compulsion?

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: hello mbti-notes. very glad to see you still active. you have helped me through a rough patch and continue to support people becoming a better version of themselves :)

On this topic, I wanted to ask a question. I am an ENFP, mainly confirmed by you, and throughout the years it has proven to be my correct and true type. I've noticed though that stirring from long-ignored mental issues and a bad childhood, my personality has very conflicting aspects. I have been officially diagnosed with anxiety, depression and some other miscellaneous conditions.

Despite being an ENFP, I seem to be in a constant loop with very frequent neurotic Si dips. As a child I would present a very clear, positive version of my type, but as the years went by, my issues went brushed under the rug and have since caused this wreck of a person. Even though Ne should be my most "comfortable" function, I find that it's extremely hard for me to "accept" the way that it wants me to live my life, my deepest desires, and I keep holding myself back.

My anxiety has caused me to become closed off to any opportunity, and even when I consider it, I brush it off as too 'scary' to do - try a new hobby, meet new people, go places alone and experience life. It has made me doubt my type over and over again, but there is truly no other type that fits better, it's just that I continue to deny how my brain sees life, only exhibiting the more negative parts of it.

I was wondering how I could deal with these conditions when a part of me finds it so hard to let go - like it has been so long that now it's forever a part of me. My truest self has these desires to let go, but my body is physically stopping me, somehow forcing myself to ignore what truly makes me - me. Thanks a lot in advance.

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You'll notice that there is a disclaimer at the beginning of the Type Dev Guide. I have to put it there for the people who are drawn to my blog for self-improvement but unfortunately are not yet psychologically ready for function development. Ideally, function development helps you identify the missing or weak aspects of your personality so that you can realize more of your positive potential. However, when you have extraneous mental health issues that remain unaddressed or unresolved, you are not in the right frame of mind to realize more of your potential. Mental health issues make people more likely to take advice in the wrong way because their thinking is too distorted. The risk of self-help is that, without expert supervision and guidance, it's very easy to misinterpret and misapply ideas. I've seen it too often.

It's like the difference between trying to decorate a house in disrepair versus trying to decorate a house that's on fire. Decoration and repair can go hand-in-hand. But a fire? A fire has to be the number one priority, doesn't it? The danger in attempting function development while the house is still on fire is that you might inadvertently be throwing even more fuel on it. Your "fire" is the anxiety. While the process of becoming more aware of your functions might give you better insight into anxiety and how it operates in your mind (you've described it quite well), it won't cure the anxiety. Under the cloud of anxiety, trying to develop better use of your functions could potentially make your anxiety worse because, as you fail with Ne again and again, your self-esteem gets hit again and again. Negative past experiences are a major contributing factor to anxiety.

Anxiety is a natural and healthy emotion that serves to protect you from threat or harm. However, anxiety becomes maladaptive when it is irrational: 1) you feel anxious even when there is no objective threat or possibility of significant harm, and/or 2) the level of your anxiety is quite disproportional to the threat/harm that you might encounter.

Anxiety disorder means there's something deeper going on, there's something out of whack that's producing too much anxiety. It could be: a neurological imbalance, poor physical health, extremely low self-confidence, cognitive distortions, fear of failure, negative past experiences, living in a hostile environment, socioeconomic struggles, etc. Whatever the root causes are, you have to address them properly. When anxiety becomes severe enough to interfere with living, it's a good idea to get professional help. You say you've been "officially diagnosed", so does that mean you're currently in therapy? If so, is it helping with anxiety or helping you improve your emotional intelligence? Is the method of therapy well-suited to the problems you're trying to solve? Once you learn how to manage anxiety better, you'll find that function development goes much more smoothly.

Generally speaking, to manage anxiety better, it's a good idea to start with very small steps that only stretch your comfort zone a little. Also, break big goals down into many small steps. As you take small steps successfully, your confidence gradually increases, and you'll eventually feel better about taking bigger and bigger steps. Ns often suffer from unrealistic expectations. Remember that taking small and incremental steps is the best way of making consistent progress over the long term.

[mbti-notes]

Hello. I'm an INFP girl and I've always had problems with my INTP mom. She's always been emotionally absent and distant and that has always bothered me. We don't understand each other at all, for example I'm trying to tell her my problems and she just wants me to look for a solution, which makes me feel worse and very lonely. Other times I have cried a lot and she just stares at me like a robot, or sometimes she even explodes and acts like a 3 year old throwing and angry tantrum. Why is she like that? Yes, I know she has inferior Fe, but her behavior is very offputting to me and her cold stare triggers me. Is it possible for INTPs to give you emotional support or that would be to bizarre and illogical for them? I crave for her emotional support but I don't know if she can give me that. She has never been there for me in ways that truly matter, it's like she lives in another universe detached from everything.

I have discussed before that parent-child relationships are the most complicated and difficult relationships to sort out. What factors make them complex? Communication issues, role issues, behavioral issues, dependence issues, power differential issues, moral issues, personality issues, adjustment issues, developmental issues, projection issues… to name a few.

You didn't mention your age, so how old are you? Age is important because it will directly affect your ability to comprehend the above issues. It sounds like you are full of blame and anger, which is counterproductive, as it leads you to mischaracterize and misunderstand your mom. Are you able to step back from your personal feelings and get a more objective view of the situation?

Generally speaking, the younger you are, the less time and opportunity you have had for healthy ego development, and the more likely you are to be dependent on others to fulfill your needs. Adolescence (12-18) is the time when people should be gradually learning independence and self-sufficiency in getting their needs met. Young adulthood (18-25) is the time when people should be letting go of the last vestiges of dependence on parents/caregivers. However, in reality, ego development doesn't always proceed in an ideal manner. There are many factors that can slow or impede an individual's development.

One factor is personality. It is not uncommon for Fs to be slower than Ts at becoming independent. Due to having a higher F function, they tend to have a higher need for emotional and moral support from others (and then falter without it). Due to having a lower T function, they may experience more difficulty analyzing and solving problems on their own (and then repeat mistakes). This is not to say that they are doomed to struggle with independence; it is only to say that they may be late bloomers when compared to Ts.

However, before you go lamenting the fact that you are F, remember that all types are equal, in that they all have their fair share of burdens to carry. Due to having a higher T function, Ts tend to have a greater need for independence and freedom from emotional burdens. Due to having a lower F function, they may experience more difficulty learning how to recognize emotional needs and fulfilling them, both in themselves and others. This is not to say that they are doomed to struggle with emotional fulfillment; it is only to say that they may be late bloomers when compared to Fs.

Is it not reasonable for people to get frustrated when they struggle with learning something that they have less aptitude for? It's important to recognize that you are both struggling in the same way, just with opposing aspects of personality development. And this internal struggle will inevitably reveal itself externally, in the relationship, every time you press on each other's sore spots. You are confused about why your mom can't offer more emotional support? From her perspective, she is just as confused about why you can't be more independent and self-sufficient, which she likely was at your age. You blame her, which implies you think she is in the wrong and you are right, but is that really true? This brings us to the next point…

Another major factor that impedes ego development is persistent egocentrism. Egocentrism means that one's vision does not extend beyond oneself and, as a consequence, one treats other people merely as objects to satisfy one's own needs rather than as unique subjects in their own right. While all people are naturally egocentric to a certain extent because of the basic need for physical survival, persistent egocentrism is maladaptive because it blocks empathy development and healthy relationship formation. In extreme cases, persistent egocentrism can morph into destructive narcissism.

Generally speaking, children start off very egocentric because their world is very small and their needs are very immediate. But as one gets older and more independent, one gains more and more experience of the world that should gradually broaden one's perspective. As such, one's concerns ought to eventually expand beyond oneself into the external world at large. However, this progression doesn't always go accordingly for a variety of reasons.

One big reason is growing up in an unsupportive environment. When children don't have their physical and/or psychological needs adequately met by caregivers, they, quite reasonably, become very preoccupied with their unmet needs. This can manifest as overdependence or "craving" (desperately seeking fulfillment from others), anxiety (always fearing that one's needs will never be met), withdrawal (resigning oneself to always having unmet needs), aggression or hostility (always blaming others for one's problems).

No matter how it manifests, the key point is that the child remains persistently egocentric into adulthood, excessively preoccupied with their unmet needs. Most importantly, since they didn't learn the right lessons about how to get their needs met in childhood, they develop unhealthy patterns of seeking satisfaction in all the wrong ways in adulthood.

A rational person would understand that it is illogical and futile to seek emotional support from a person who is incapable of providing it, not unlike trying to extract blood from a stone. However, an egocentric person isn't rational. Since they are self-preoccupied, they inadvertently treat their own needs as more important than others'. And since they view people merely as objects for personal use, they place unreasonable expectations on others to fulfill their needs. Such self-absorption is a common cause of relationship conflict.

With all that in mind, if you truly want to address relationship problems in the right way, here are the steps you ought to take:

1) Empathy: Have you taken into consideration the perspectives of everyone involved in the conflict (or do you insist on believing that only one party is to blame)? Have you objectively analyzed and identified the underlying factors/causes of the conflict (or do you insist on believing that "personal moral failure" is the one and only simple explanation)?

2) Needs: Everyone has the same psychological needs, but not everyone ranks their needs in the same way. For example, Ts rank independence higher than emotional support when compared to Fs. Have you identified and understood the unmet needs of both yourself and the other party (or do you only care about your own needs)? Have you understood exactly which unmet needs are coming into conflict in the relationship? Have you properly considered whether you are capable of meeting their needs AND whether they are capable of meeting yours? Reciprocity is necessary for a relationship to be healthy and grow over time.

3) Communication: Have you communicated your needs in a neutral and objective way that helps the other party recognize and understand what they are? Have you communicated your needs in a way that properly instructs the other party on the best way to meet your needs, in the event that they don't know how to proceed? Have you really heard the other party when they express their capabilities, with regard to being unable to meet your needs?

4) Alternatives: If, through good communication, it has been established that the other party is unable to meet your needs or even meet you halfway for whatever reason, have you considered other healthy, possibly better methods of getting your needs met? Have you considered ALL your options and do you know how to choose the better option? (I.e. Have you developed Ne enough to be a creative problem solver?)

Yes, it is a sad fact that many children grow up in unsupportive homes. Such children are more likely to develop maladaptive attachment styles and suffer from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. However, suffering privation in childhood doesn't have to stop you from developing into a healthy adult. The key is that you have to take your development into your own hands.

It is important to address the challenges you have with your parents, otherwise, those unhealthy relationship dynamics can easily carry forward and recur in your future relationships. Today you are desperately seeking validation from mom, tomorrow it might be your boss or your spouse.

The way to resolve relationship problems is to learn how to put relationships into the right perspective, i.e., to go beyond the egocentric perspective and be more objective. Parents are human beings with their own unmet needs and developmental issues. The sooner you can acknowledge and honor their humanity, the sooner you can have empathy for them and then free yourself from them, to become your own person.

If you really care about personal growth, you should want to outgrow things like egocentrism and overdependence. You can take the initiative to learn the knowledge and skills you need to overcome the challenges you've faced at home. It's not a crime to need emotional support, we all do at times, but you have to get smarter and discover better ways of obtaining it.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: My boyfriend is an ENFJ though I notice a lot of people would say things about him that would normally be associated with ENTJ. He's been described as "bossy", "rough", "ambitious" and "goal-oriented" by most, and I do recognize that in him too. Though, I typed him as ENFJ because he's very socially aware (like sometimes it feels like he's over-reading social cues, such as easily attributing a specific emotion or an intention to someone even when they barely express anything that could confirm their hunch...) and secondly, he has difficulty managing technical information and feels easily overwhelmed or lost, I (INFJ) often have to help him out as I'm good at managing time and breaking down tasks for him.

What confuses me though, is that despite the fact that he's bothered and upset by how people perceive him ( the "rough" and "bossy" descriptions specifically), he doesn't necessarily want to change his behaviors. He blames people being oversensitive or having "authority issues". I'd think his Fe would urge him to reevaluate the way he handle individuals, but why would an ENFJ be upset at how people describe him yet being resistant to change his approach to interpersonal relationships? Why can't he simply accept he's indeed rough and bossy and just move on? Would an ENTJ react that way too if met with the same criticisms?

(Note: I don't necessarily want to him to "change", as I don't really care if he's bossy or not, but I'm not denying that he indeed can be rough with people and I told him that. But I guess, I'd expect an ENFJ to be more "receptive" and adjust his approach from that kind of feedback, and since he hasn't and blamed people instead, l got confused. If he doesn't like to be described that way, then why does he keep using the "rough" approach? Or why can't he just accept that he's that way?)

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"Why would an ENFJ be upset at how people describe him yet being resistant to change his approach to interpersonal relationships?"

Why would anyone? You're describing a human problem, aren't you? Surely this is not the first time you've witnessed someone reacting negatively to criticism? Have you always reacted perfectly well to criticism?

"Would an ENTJ react that way too if met with the same criticisms?"

It appears you don't understand why people are sensitive to criticism. It is an issue of a fragile ego, which can afflict anyone. Anyone of any type can be in denial of their negative qualities because they are too psychologically immature to handle a threat to their self-image. Everybody wants to see themselves in a positive light, which can make it painful to admit negative qualities. A lot of people would rather avoid that pain and do so by rejecting criticism. And wouldn't it make sense for Fs to be sensitive to pain, which might lead them to avoid confronting it?

"If he doesn't like to be described that way, then why does he keep using the "rough" approach?"

When people won't change their negative behavior, it is usually because, from a purely egocentric perspective, the "benefits" of keeping the behavior outweigh the costs. In this case, his negative behavior efficiently gets him what he wants, doesn't it? Why would anyone change a behavior when 1) they believe it works, AND 2) they believe that changing the behavior would be more negative (for example, they wouldn't be able to get what they want)?

"Why can't he simply accept he's indeed rough and bossy and just move on?"

1) You have said that he doesn't agree with the assessment, so why should he "simply accept" something he disagrees with? He doesn't believe his behavior is wrong. 2) You make it sound like acceptance is a very easy task when the evidence suggests that it isn't.

"I'd think his Fe would urge him to reevaluate the way he handle individuals."

Are you basing your judgments of people on crude stereotypes? What makes you believe that the mere presence of Fe automatically makes people receptive to criticism? In fact, FJs are notorious for being easily upset by criticism. The manner in which any given individual expresses a function is unique to them and is greatly influenced by their psychological maturity. Why don't you take development into account, as explained in the study guides?

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I suppose I don't really understand the purpose of your question. In my experience, when people ask a question like yours, it is actually a way to distract from a more important issue they aren't yet ready to confront.

For instance, you say you don't want him to change or that you don't care. However, if you really didn't care, you wouldn't flag such behavior but rather be indifferent to it or simply accept it without second thought. Is it possible that you are downplaying your feelings about it (for some reason that you might not yet be aware of)? If so, this could be the more important issue to address because emotional repression is a common issue for INFJs.

Do YOU believe that it's right to be "rough" with people and boss them around? Do YOU condone this way of treating people? If not, if you believe it's wrong, then denying the fact is going to make you feel more and more uneasy in this relationship, as you keep pushing aside your own moral values. Denial breeds anxiety. Anxiety breeds overthinking.

Instead of asking me to read your boyfriend's mind (I don't have that superpower), perhaps it's better to ask yourself about the true source of your confusion and what is really motivating you to expend energy to understand this behavior of his?

[mbti-notes]

HI there, My question to you is can one be in denial about being in denial, in the development stages of INFP there is a section that states, still deny negativity and avoid harsh truths, I guess in my case I did not want to believe that was doing this and found it hard to believe until recently is when I have been able to admit this defense exists in me, I put this question because I want to help people sort of get insight to themselves because it can be hard to even admit to you self. Thanks.

You are referring to psychological defense mechanisms: the means through which the ego protects itself against unpleasant, undesirable, or painful experiences. Denial is a defense mechanism that is closely related to another defense mechanism called repression. Repression involves pushing unpleasant, undesirable, or painful feelings away into the unconscious mind so that one does not have to confront them directly. Denial involves pushing away facts that are deemed too unpleasant, undesirable, or painful to confront.

Whenever you are faced with a conflict between your subjective belief versus objective fact, do you have an automatic tendency to side with belief over fact? If so, you might be prone to denial. This can be exacerbated in FPs by overvaluing Fi (feelings) over Te (factuality). To overcome this requires Ne development for INFPs (such that they become more open-minded and willing to consider differing ideas).

Many people don't know how to tell the difference between belief and fact, or they simply don't care about properly distinguishing them. What is the difference?

belief: has yet to be proven true or is merely presumed to be true (without sufficient evidence)

fact: provable (with sufficient evidence) and, once proven, is indisputably true

Looking at it as a neutral and objective party, trying to dispute the indisputable sounds like a futile and even insane thing to do. But that's basically what denial is, and the effort required to dispute the indisputable means that being in denial can get quite tiresome after awhile. You exist in a state of ongoing psychological tension, as reality keeps threatening to intrude upon you. Each time your belief gets contradicted by fact, you have to expend that much more mental energy to prop up and maintain your problematic belief. And, yes, eventually, you even have to deny being in denial because you are just that desperate to keep up the charade.

The point at which it becomes more mentally taxing to keep up the denial than to face the facts is the point at which a window of opportunity opens up for you to break free and rejoin reality.

Despite being a well-known and widespread defense mechanism, most people don't really understand denial and can't detect it in themselves. This is because defense mechanisms operate below conscious awareness. According to psychoanalytic theory, it is necessary to bring those unconscious activities into consciousness so that psychological conflicts can be resolved in a healthier and more rational manner. Of course, this is easier said than done because the ego prefers that unconscious activity stay unconscious for a reason. Anyone wishing to dig into their defense mechanisms will find that they continually meet blocks along the way.

That said, there are some tricks you can use to spot denial. These tricks come from having a deeper understanding of why people use defense mechanisms in the first place. As mentioned above, they are used for ego protection, so it helps to go into detail about what exactly is being protected against. There are three main categories of threat:

1) Pain: There is no going through life without encountering negative people, objects, or events. Even when nothing too tragic happens to you personally, you can't avoid witnessing other people go through tragedy. Any object/event that makes you feel bad, whether afraid, sad, or angry, takes an emotional toll on you. When your capacity to handle emotional pain is limited, denial can be a way to reduce the amount of pain you experience.

However, chronically denying negative feelings and emotions has the effect of blunting all emotional life, eventually turning you numb and making your life seem quite dull or monotonous. Therefore, prevailing experiences of numbness or dullness can alert you to denial that stems from emotional repression.

2) Lack: Sadly, we live in an unequal world and people don't always get their needs and wants met. You may struggle with poverty. You may grow up in an abusive home. You may lose your job in an economic recession. Lacking the means/ability to obtain what is needed for a more fulfilling life causes stress and even long-term distress. A common method of coping is to deny that one has needs/wants in the first place, in order to feel less bad about not getting them met.

For example, a person in a loveless marriage might deny their need for intimacy and keep telling themselves that they love their spouse regardless, or a person who couldn't afford college might glorify a working class lifestyle. However, denying your own needs and wants doesn't make them disappear, quite the contrary, they generally come out in other more destructive ways. The person in a loveless marriage might eventually find themselves in an extramarital affair or using alcohol to cope. Therefore, (self-)destructive behavior or inexplicable formation of unhealthy habits can alert you to denial that stems from lack of fulfillment.

3) Shame: Unfortunately, many children are raised in environments that make them feel less than, inadequate, or unloved, which leads to chronic issues with low self-esteem, low self-confidence, or low self-worth. Shame is a painful emotion because it messes with your self-image. Everyone wants to see themselves in a positive light and it can be quite painful to encounter evidence to the contrary. A common way to avoid having one's self-image shattered is to deny all feedback and criticism from the world.

However, turning a deaf ear to feedback often means that you have no good way of verifying your beliefs. The more you deny feedback, the more distorted, unrealistic, rigid, and fragile your self-image becomes, and the more you unwittingly invite unpleasant feedback and harsh criticism, in a vicious cycle. The shame of feeling less than, inadequate, or unloved can eventually become crippling because of constantly sending you into spirals of self-doubt and self-reproach. Over time, it becomes more and more difficult to deny how much you hate yourself.

Therefore, self-image issues can alert you to denial that stems from shame. For example:

Do you get recurring feedback about a negative characteristic, trait, or behavior?

Do you often get surprised by how others view/judge you?

Do you bristle at the slightest criticism?

Do you often detect judgment/criticism where none exists?

Do you inexplicably do things for attention or validation?

Do you often try to prove yourself to a particular person?

Do you often feel inferior or superior to others, or even both at the same time?

Do you often tell yourself you could do something but just don't want to?

Do you often accuse others of being guilty of something only to get accused of the same thing in return?

Do you feel like you live in a mental bubble?

Do you avoid showing your true self in relationships?

Do you often find you don't know how or where to begin when asked to express yourself?

These are all signs that you might have an unrealistic view of yourself due to being in denial (of shame).

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: What can I do in these situations? I realized I feel very fearful, even phobic about the internet now, by seeing how is talked about the way big companies manage private data, the thing of devices being vulnerable to any cyber attack and the way AI is being used to harass people and scam.

I feel… very terrified by all of this, I don't feel at ease even at my own home by living with smart devices. Is there a way I can make this more tolerable? I know we all need technology in our lifes now, but I don't want to feel spied on and vulnerable by it. It feels… very apocalyptic to me, and has made me fall in a pit of existential despair.

Then I started to think about my forgotten accounts, which made me VERY panicked. What if something happened to them and I didn't know? What if they're used for terrible things?

This worry has become so magnified in my mind, that I fear crumbling down when facing daily life things, and then even become bed ridden by the immense anxiety. I was bed ridden through many years by anxiety before so, this has become a huge concern.

I'm INFJ btw. Thank you very much!

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Your anxiety sounds serious enough that I would strongly recommend getting professional help for it.

Phobias are considered irrational because they are based on faulty reasoning, distorted beliefs, or circular overthinking. For example:

1) Phobics exaggerate negative possibilities because they treat mere "probability" as near "certainty". This is often a problem of being bad at math or logic.

For example, the odds of dying by drowning are about 1 in 1000. What does that really mean, though? Does it mean that if you go swimming 999 times, you'll certainly die by the 1000th? No. What if you rarely go swimming? What if you are an Olympic-level swimmer? What if you only swim in recreational pools with other people and never alone in the sea? There are so many contextual factors that could affect the odds of drowning that trying to calculate the odds is basically meaningless when it comes to making life decisions.

2) Phobics envision mainly negative possibilities and overlook positive ones. This is a problem of distorted perception that then leads to distorted beliefs.

Let's say you read a statistic that car accidents are one of the leading causes of death. Because of this, you developed a fear of driving and thus always have to rely on others to transport you everywhere. Unfortunately, you don't live in a very walkable city, so this dependence on others causes you to lose a lot. You lose time because you often have to take indirect or slower routes. You lose energy because you always have to plan your outings very carefully. You lose opportunities because you can't always get to every place you need to go on time. You may even lose relationships because of being too dependent on people to come to your rescue when stranded.

If you were to objectively compare what you lose by not driving against what you could gain by being able to drive yourself, being able to drive is the better option. Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that you still need to be in a car on the road, but not driving yourself means that you have far less control over the outcome. Generally speaking, feeling less in control only exacerbates fear.

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From these examples, it becomes more obvious why the best way to overcome phobia is to confront it and learn to master it, rather than give in to it. Just as not driving doesn't keep you out of vehicles and off the road, in 2024, there's no way to live life properly without accessing the internet. If you must do something you fear doing, the answer isn't to look for ways to avoid doing it but to learn how to do it to the best of your ability.

E.g. You can learn effective ways to protect your privacy. You can learn how to avoid getting scammed. You can learn how to use social media constructively. You can improve your judgment and be less naive or gullible.

You believe your fear is an indication of a dangerous world out there but, actually, your fear is an indication of your own low self-confidence. People lack self-confidence when they lack the knowledge and skill necessary to meet challenges and solve problems. The world is constantly changing and life will keep throwing challenges at you. The best way to cope is by being a good learner and adapting to change with new knowledge and skills.

Since phobias are irrational, an important aspect of overcoming them is becoming a more rational person, which means it's necessary for you to improve your critical thinking skills. For example, which option is more rational: 1) Avoiding the internet and living in a state of ignorance and anxiety, which basically means your life comes to a standstill? or 2) Learning how to use the internet more wisely, which means you can live your life confidently and fully?

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: ISFP, asexual, beginning a 5-year PhD in a a conservative state. I’ve noticed grad students in the program like to bond over dating/guys (the cohort is mostly women in their 20s). Although my love life is technically none of their business, at every place I’ve worked, people have asked if I’m seeing anyone, what my taste is guys is, etc. I usually “play along” with assumptions that I’m straight and give the sort of answers people seemed to be looking for. But 5 years seems like a long time to fake such a fundamental part of myself. I think I’ll end up having to go against the grain one way or another.

Many people don’t know about asexuality, so not only would I risk people’s prejudice, at minimum I’d probably have to play “educator” about my identity. I’m trying to decide whether to a) clearly communicate that I won’t discuss my dating life with my cohort and then keep enforcing that boundary (which will be hard because I do want to bond with people in the program), b) just say I’m not interested in dating or that I’m “not inclined that way” (although in my experience, that doesn’t deter people from further prying), or c) be honest and open about my identity if anyone asks (but then have to “explain myself” to people)

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It is unfair, tough, and taxing to feel as though you have to hide or suppress such an important aspect of yourself. I do find that it helps to think of it as just one aspect of oneself rather than one's entire identity. The fact of the matter is that people don't know every aspect of each other unless they are in a very close and intimate relationship.

The kind of conversations you're referring to are classified as "small talk". People use small talk as a way to subtly feel out if a deeper relationship is possible, which means it doesn't have to be any more serious than discussing the weather. You get to control exactly how near or far you want to be from people by choosing to respond or not respond to their small talk seriously. Perhaps you're taking it more seriously than is necessary because it's a sensitive topic for you?

Option 1: Limit the truth because it's none of their business. If other people want to assume, then it's their problem, not yours. Speaking from my own experience, unless the person is an outright bigot, I often find it extremely funny rather than offensive when they reveal how ignorant they are through their assumptions about me. Once again, you can choose the degree to which you take such things seriously, which is easier to do when you feel secure in your identity.

I don't think you need to be a hard-ass about it, as you won't make many friends that way. Setting a hard and solid boundary out of the blue or without provocation often leads people to think something's "wrong" with you, which isn't ideal.

I think the issue here is what you call "being fake" or "playing along". I don't really see it that way. I think it's quite possible to be private without being inauthentic. When you're a good communicator, it isn't necessary to lie. There are a million ways to say something without saying it directly. Perhaps your thinking on the matter is too black-and-white if you're framing it as "honesty" vs "lying". Socializing successfully requires more nuance than that.

Yes, you could say it's private business, in a friendly way. There's nothing morally wrong with being a shy or private person, is there? Or you could say... Relationships aren't your priority right now... It's not something you care much about... You haven't met anyone you feel that way about... You haven't really thought about it... You care much more about <fill in the blank>...

None of those statements are lies and they are honest enough that a savvy person might even grasp the subtext. For the less savvy, yes, they might ask further questions, but they'll eventually stop once it becomes obvious that you have little to contribute on the matter. And if someone does press too hard, take it as a helpful sign that they should be avoided.

Although, you shouldn't assume that people are "prying" just for asking questions. It might appear to be prying when you're standing in the perspective of having a secret to keep, but, to them, it's merely curiosity. Curiosity is necessary for furthering relationships, otherwise, how would we get to know each other? Maybe you can learn to take people's curiosity in stride? For example, sometimes a bit of humor works better than a hard boundary.

Option 2: Be open because it shouldn't be a big deal. Do you derive pleasure from challenging people's ignorance and prejudice? There is something to be said for standing up, being visible, getting counted, and providing representation as a minority. You could help advance people's awareness and acceptance. However, if you don't want to be a crusader, what's your reason for being open?

You say you're ISFP, so you presumably think it's important to be yourself and freely express who you are? I agree that this is an important value to hold and uphold. Unfortunately, freedom of expression doesn't mean you are free from consequences. Being a person of integrity isn't always easy since upholding your values can bring undesirable consequences. The logical consequence of expressing yourself freely is that your business becomes other people's business if they take an interest in what you're expressing. The question is: Is this a price you're willing to pay, or is it a price you believe is worth paying?

Option 3: Be selective. There is a third option, which is to only come out to the individuals you trust. Perhaps this middle ground would be more comfortable for you? You won't have to "educate" and "explain" to everyone and face public scrutiny. You'll get to express who you are in a way that's satisfying enough. Of course, the tough part is exercising good judgment about who to trust. It's important to remember that there are good/accepting and bad/prejudiced people everywhere, regardless of whether the place is conservative or liberal leaning.

It is entirely your prerogative as to what aspects of yourself to reveal to others. This is why it's not my place to tell you whether to reveal or not. I can only tell you to weigh the options thoroughly and make the decision that you can best live with.

[mbti-notes]

Anon wrote: Hi, I'm a troubled INFJ asking on how to find an answer for a dilemma I'm having w my family members. I don't truly hate, but I lack affection for my father and sister; caring for them doesn't bring me comfort.

I grew up in a poor family. From a young age, I witnessed my father indulging in gambling and abusing my mother. Our conversations at home were often filled with yelling and swearing. My mother, despite her kindness and sacrifice, couldn't restrain my father's behavior (I believe my mom is ISFJ). We endured many nights of fear and tears as my father gambled away our livelihood. My father never cared about our education or well-being; his selfish pursuits always came first. He never provided for us financially, spending all his earnings on gambling and accumulating debt.

My sister dropped out of school early and never held a stable job. She is stubborn and refuses to listen to advice. Despite my mother's efforts to support her, my sister remains dependent and directionless. As for me, I finally completed university and secured a stable job despite tons of obstacles that could have made me give up halfway. I contribute financially to support my family, paying off debts and even purchasing land and building a house for my sister. However, the lack of love and warmth in my family has left me feeling lonely and disconnected.

I fear marrying someone like my father and becoming trapped in a cycle of misery. At home, I fulfill my responsibilities but keep my distance emotionally. I provide for my family's needs, but I find myself only caring for my mother, not my father or sister. I wonder if I'm selfish or afraid of responsibility for feeling this way. How do I find an answer to this question myself?

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Growing up in a poor family isn't the issue. The real issue is that you grew up in an abusive environment and thus haven't learned what healthy relationships should look like.

What exactly do you mean when you use the word "responsibility"? Okay, common sense dictates that you are responsible for yourself and the choices you make. But are you responsible for your father or sister and the choices they have made? Do you have a responsibility to fix their mistakes and compensate for their bad behavior? Are you solely responsible for keeping the family together when half of the members don't care?

Yes, it's important to be a responsible person if you want to feel like you have good moral character. However, taking on more responsibility than is reasonable for a single person to shoulder is a serious problem in several ways:

1) It is damaging to your well-being. Responsibility comes with stress, and stress has a deleterious effect on both physical and mental health. Taking on the responsibilities of others compounds stress dramatically. Your capacity to handle stress is finite, which means that you will eventually feel burn-out or experience a mental breakdown or lash out destructively (Se grip).

2) It makes you ripe for mistreatment. Lack of healthy boundaries is a common symptom of Fe overindulgence in INFJs, i.e., it is a problem that needs to be remedied as part of your type development. Taking responsibility for someone else's decisions means that their problems become your problems. If you allow this to happen again and again, you are broadcasting to the world that you are an easy target for manipulation and exploitation. All they have to do is activate your guilt and you'll take care of whatever they throw at you. You'll become a doormat at best and a victim at worst.

3) It rewards other people's bad behavior. Facing up to negative consequences is essential for human learning and improvement. When you take responsibility that should rightfully belong to someone else, you are essentially shielding them from the consequences of their behavior. When there is always someone else to clean up messes for them, what incentive do they have to clean it up themselves? If anything, they are incentivized to make even bigger messes. This makes you complicit in their bad behavior because you are enabling it. When you or your mother are excessively "supportive", you might actually be making this unhealthy family dynamic worse.

Your question implies that you have a duty to always be caring and loving to everyone in your family no matter what. Why do you hold this belief? Do you come from a culture that tells you family is everything and going against them is always a betrayal? There's nothing I can say to help if this is truly what you want to believe.

A healthy family should have a sense of equality and equity. Every member of the family should contribute a fair share. Every member of the family should care enough to only take what is needed (as opposed to take advantage of kindness). Every member of the family should get enough love and support.

When one member of the family behaves in a way that is harmful to the other members, they no longer deserve the privileges of membership. Social "responsibility" shouldn't be one-sided. A relationship is like a social contract where both parties agree to terms and conditions that aim to keep the relationship healthy and thriving. When one party intentionally breaks the contract over and over again, you no longer owe them the duty of carrying out your portion of the contract. Is it reasonable to force yourself to like/love someone who has repeatedly shown that they don't like/love you? Wouldn't this amount to torturing yourself?

Perhaps you think it makes you a bad person for turning on family. Nobody is saying that you have to do bad things to your father and sister or treat them cruelly. The point being made here is that you have a right to be treated with respect and you deserve care as well. And when people don't treat you with respect and care, you have a right to protect yourself from their harmful behavior by pulling away from them physically and emotionally. In other words, you have a right to your personal space, you have a right to set rules of social engagement, and you have a right to end any interaction/relationship that hurts you. Having healthy boundaries means being assertive in advocating for your own needs and well-being.

If you don't learn to set healthy boundaries in your family, this problem is very likely to carry over into your friendships and romantic relationships. Do you want this feeling of loneliness to come up again and again? If not, what you need to do is learn to seek love from the right sources. Family or not, do not hope or beg for a person to reciprocate your love when they have shown you that they are not capable of love. This is part of what it means to have self-respect.

[mbti-notes]

Hi. My spouse and I (both entj or so) both handle conflict terribly. We stonewall, work around each other, withdraw to sulk for hours/days when called out, or at worst lash out verbally. I already find it hard to understand and articulate my emotional needs. It doesn't help when he seems to want clear black and white rules that don't ever have to change according to what's going on with me or accommodate me when I'm struggling. Do you have any tips on how to get started addressing this pattern?

When both parties handle conflict terribly, it's like the blind leading the blind. Since there isn't someone skilled enough to steer things in the right direction, it might be necessary to get expert help from a neutral third party in couple's therapy. It sounds like you both have a lot to learn about relationships. While it's possible to get tips online or read books to make some improvements to the situation, it might not be enough to help you tackle the deeper issues. Therapy is often a more efficient option because the learning is tailored to your specific needs and you get real-time guidance and practice.

Relationship skill is actually a set of skills including things such as: emotional intelligence, stress management, assertiveness, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, moral reasoning. While it may seem overwhelming to think of how much there is to learn, you can view it as an investment. After all, you spent many years of your life learning reading, writing, and arithmetic so that you could one day be able to support yourself financially. Isn't it just as important to be able to handle yourself well socially in order to live a truly fulfilling life? If you agree, then you should be more than willing to put in the time and effort to learn these skills.

From your description, it's not yet clear to me that your spouse is as up to the task of learning as you are, so this seems like the first major issue that needs to be addressed. Imagine that you're learning to drive and you believe you must follow every little rule of the road at all times, in exactly the way the driver's manual taught you. Would doing this make you a "good" driver? Actually, it could make you a terrible driver and even create dangerous situations. An important aspect of being a great driver is adjusting to the immediate conditions of the road. For instance, driving in a snowstorm requires you to slow down, drive defensively, and grant leeway for others to make mistakes on the ice.

Generally speaking, human beings have succeeded as a species not because of rules, but because they have evolved to be highly adaptable, which keeps them in touch with reality and able to confront the challenges of their ever changing circumstances. Adaptability is especially important in relationships because social interactions are very fluid situations, with lots of variables in motion, with lots of potential for unexpected events. The more you can take the whole social context into consideration, the more likely you are to speak effectively and make good social choices. Emotional intelligence is one important way to increase your mental flexibility and thereby your adaptability, which you can read about in the dedicated articles I've already provided.

Of course, human beings need some rules because life would get too chaotic and fall apart otherwise. However, when a person relies too heavily on rules, they become more and more mentally inflexible, and then rule following can easily become a mental health issue that creates more problems than it solves. (I have discussed before how an exacting rule-based approach to life can be a sign of psychological immaturity.)

Mental flexibility isn't a genetic trait, rather, it's largely learned through environmental influences. This is an important point because mentally inflexible people tend to claim "this is just how I am". This is true only to the extent that people can become more and more set in their habits as they get older. However, this decline into stasis is not inevitable and it does not preclude the possibility of change. In fact, one should actually nurture the ability to change periodically in order to keep the mind active and stave off cognitive decline in old age.

It's quite possible to improve mental flexibility, but, first, a person has to acknowledge that their mental inflexibility is a problem that produces self-sabotaging behavior. Once they can admit the problem, they can address the underlying causes. For example:

- Some people feel as though they need fixed rules because they are afraid of making mistakes, getting caught by the unexpected, or feeling unmoored in unfamiliar situations. The underlying issue is often insecurity, low self-confidence, or distrust of the world. They don't feel as though they can handle situations successfully without rules to guide them through the challenges. Unfortunately, they don't realize that their strict belief in the rules is precisely what prevents them from being able to perform well on their feet. They usually need to learn and practice acceptance, in order to relax and go with the flow better.

- Some people only know to follow rules because they suffer from an utter lack of imagination. The underlying issue is often a stubborn narrow-mindedness or short-sightedness. For them, everything in life exists within the confines of the rules, which means life easily becomes stagnant. They never accept new ideas and thus never encounter ways to improve or progress. Eventually, life moves on without them and they become a relic of the past. This kind of alienation is a painful state. However, if they can acknowledge that pain, it can be used to motivate change and rejoin the flow of life. They usually need to learn and practice open-mindedness, in order to take advantage of good opportunities to move forward.

- Some people rely too much on fixed rules because they use laziness as a defense mechanism. They don't want to deal with complexity, complications, ambiguity, or shades of gray. The underlying issue is often an unwillingness to commit. They simply don't care enough to put out time and effort, often because their efforts have been met with disappointment too many times in the past. They may use rules as easy mental shortcuts or hide behind the rules to avoid being held accountable for bad decisions. Eventually, they fall into deep existential boredom that infects their relationships and drives people away. Their relationships won't improve until they can finally confront and resolve their fear of commitment.

- Some people harp on the rules out of arrogance. They take too much pride in their ability to follow the rules and in having the willpower to resist straying from them. The underlying issue is often egotism or perfectionism. They use rule abidance as a way to define people's worth and cast moral judgment upon those they dislike, and they might even lord the rules over people in order to feel superior. Unfortunately, their perfectionist enforcement of the rules can lead to blowback that worsens aggression in a vicious cycle. Until they can step back, reflect, and become more aware of what's really driving the perfectionism, their relationships will remain extremely shallow and unfulfilling for everyone involved.

I don't know your spouse, so I can't tell you why he's mentally inflexible. Perhaps he's resistant because he doesn't want to face up to his own shortcomings. However, it's important to acknowledge that, in many cases, relationship problems are rooted in the unresolved psychological issues of the individual. Thus, it is necessary to do a certain amount of self-work in order to be a better partner.

Psychological issues shouldn't be viewed as "personal failings" to be ashamed of. It's better to view psychological issues as matters of ignorance - lack of knowledge and skill - that can be properly remedied through learning, study, and practice. Many people think they should go to therapy because there's something wrong with them. In my view, therapy isn't about "fixing" what's "wrong" with oneself in any moral sense. Rather, it's about learning the knowledge and skills you missed out on for whatever reason earlier in life. You aren't born knowing everything and you don't always have the opportunity to learn all the tools you need to tackle life's problems.

Relationships are the prime example. People learn their approach to relationships unconsciously as children, through observing their parents, authority figures, and peers (see: attachment theory). This can be a problem when those people weren't good role models or were bad at relationships, thus passing on unhealthy ways to the next generation. As an adult, it's important to realize your true power. You don't have to keep those unhealthy lessons you learned earlier in life. You can learn how to do better at any time as long as there is opportunity and access to the right learning resources. Your motivation to learn should come from deep within you, from a longing to make the most of your potential.

Is there enough willingness to learn and improve, though? Resistance to learning new things is a big obstacle in personal growth and relationship growth. In order to establish the right frame of mind for growth, both you and your spouse have to nurture as much openness to learning as possible. Once the both of you are equally motivated and committed to improving, the learning can begin in earnest.

My suggestion is usually to start at the surface and move your way down into deeper territory as necessary, which allows you to go gradually from easy to difficult in a logical fashion. The first thing you could learn is better ways of communicating, e.g.: choosing more appropriate words; using more constructive language; framing ideas in a way that is more palatable to the listener; listening more carefully to the real meaning; asking clarifying questions in a neutral manner; etc. A therapist can help you with this and you can also consult the communication books I've recommended on the resources page.

In the process of improving your communication skills, you're bound to meet some obstacles. For example, you may find it difficult to communicate when emotions are heightened. This obstacle points to a deeper issue beneath the surface of the communication of not being able to manage emotions well. Thus, the second layer to work on would be emotional intelligence. When you're working on that, another obstacle may arise, such as a past hurt that keeps triggering heightened emotions. Exploring and resolving that past experience would then be the third layer to work on. And so on and so forth.

In short, each obstacle you run into while learning a psychological skill might point you to a deeper problem. In this way, you gradually get deeper and deeper until you finally bump up against the heart of the matter. There is no timeline I can give you as to how long this learning process takes because there's no telling how deep the matter goes until you get there. It really depends on the individuals involved and how much work each of them needs to do. For some couples, improving communication might be enough to get the relationship back on track. For other couples, they might eventually realize that individual therapy is necessary for healing old psychological issues before they can recommence together.

It's important to be patient and take one step at a time rather than focus too much on the end result. There is always hope to mend and salvage a relationship as long as both parties are willing to make some necessary changes and meet up somewhere in the middle.