Don't get mad, get glad! Once again the ENFJ nobility rears it's head.
I've got a temper and I can be an unholy terror. I'm not just walking around being an angry person though flipping off on anyone who looks at me wrong. People react to stress and suboptimal situations in different ways. Some people mentally, emotionally, and physically go AWOL. Others
hi
go running towards Gomorrah. Personally, if I'm already in a heightened state of stress then little things can tick me off and I react towards them. I typically unleash this sort of behavior on those closest to me and I feel like a detestable dredge of a person when I do.
I have also reached the conclusion that I'm an escalator and I take situations to whole different levels of insanity. It's my gift to the world.
Even I realize that my reaction doesn't match the situation but the small triggers tend not to be the base cause of my frustration. Because I realize this about myself, I ere on the side of extreme caution and remain uninvolved to the point of detachment with most situations and people, but it's not a natural detachment so it takes a strange form.
I read somewhere that people's greatest strengths also tend to be their greatest weaknesses, their tragic flaw. I'm a very decisive person, and I typically have a rough outline in my head of what direction I think I should go in and if people want to follow me into the jungle I have a rough outline for that as well. I've noticed what tends to frustrate me is when people don't know what they want
after I feel like I've opened up channels of communication (and I'm further realizing that just because people think they have done something doesn't mean they have accomplished what they intended to do) to get us on the same page. I like to talk about interpersonal problems and get them solved ASAP (which I also realize that sometimes things need to sit for awhile and they'll solve themselves). Ideally, I try to operate in what's fair and reasonable to expect from myself and others. But the worse thing you can do to me is not communicate anything, not say anything, not do anything. Silence is a form of communication, but it's the most nebulous form and people can project whatever they want into that void. Some people take silence as acquiescence and others think the world is ending.
But this is the tug of war of personality forces at work. I don't accept that the way I do things are wrong per se, my pushing has net positive benefits too often for me to outright disregard what I do. I put things front and center, good and bad. I'm just as likely to gushingly heap praises and shower them with sparkles and pixie dust. I'm wondering if this actually reinforces bad Fe in someway and many ExFJs pick this up...that people don't like when they're openly negative but adore when they're openly positive. Once again it's a healthy balance to me. The same mechanism produces the same behaviors. I'm not going to speak for all ExFJs but I'll point out the elephant is in the room banging on pots and pans. The thing is knowing when to back off and when to push and when to switch methods when one isn't working. One thing I've noticed with my INTP and ISTP siblings is that nothing really hits five alarm with them and they're very slow and passive responders even when a quick response is necessary. I may be overreacting but are they underreacting? Are all of us reacting with rather extreme responses only in opposite directions?
I'm trying to create strategies to deal with human ugliness and not treat it like it's some asteroid that hits the planet once every hundred million years. Conflict is such a common thing and people deal with it badly across the board. We see the fruits of people dealing with it badly on the news every night, in our homes, in our relationships, within ourselves, it's just as ubiquitous as air. We even enjoy it for entertainment value when we're not directly involved in it. Being comfortable with a certain level of disharmony is a necessary coping mechanism, we even have hormones in a bodies made to deal with such things. Living in a constant state of turmoil is acidic to any person and many issues stemming from this are lifelong struggles to overcome.
