Another question:
I've noticed that INFPs don't get along well with FJs (even INFJs).
ENFJs however seem to be doing well.
How so?
My mom is an ESFJ and she's my best friend in the entire world. Usually if I disagree with an FJ, it's because they're holding me to their expectations or system when I don't feel like complying with it. But it's not that we don't get along. Sometimes I just don't feel like fitting into their order for things, and even when I do it takes effort. We get along fine though.
INFPs are you empathetic?
I think Fi doms are more value based than empathetic. Fe feels the outside and feels it in the inside. Fi has personal values.
Is that how it works in you folks?
Shouldn't that be backwards? If you're an Extroverted Feeler, wouldn't your inside feelings be shown externally? Versus an Introverted Feeler feeling things internally rather than externally?
Either way, yes, I'm very empathic. It was a problem for a long time, but finally I managed to harness it. Now I've kind of reached a point where I'm confident enough and able enough to manage the empathy that I can even be a bit cold or sarcastic. Conflict doesn't consume me for days like it used to.
Wow, that sounds very specific. Developing value systems is a very complicated activity that requires a great deal of determination and conscious practice. To do that, a person would need to carefully analyze what moral principles are worth fighting for, which principles of society are misguided and how the misguided notions can be corrected. One would have to be considerably skilled at ethical discourse and even moral philosophy to pull that off. It seems to me that it is a mistake to ascribe such lofty characteristics to the profile of an INFP or any type for that matter. After all, even six year old children are sometimes labeled as INFPs and they certainly don't have the philosophical acumen to think in a manner that leads to a wealth of discoveries centering on illumination of original moral insights and trenchant criticisms of society's moral failures.
First of all, as I'll get into later, you can't type children. The different elements of the type are developed at different ages. So no six year old will be an INFP.
Second of all, you're right, a person would have to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about those things. Which is why an INFP's personality is centered around it. That's something we spend many hours of many days of many weeks of many months of many years thinking about and reading about and working out for ourselves. If you ask an INFP about their personal values, they can go on and on about their favorite philosophers and activists and causes to demonstrate the things they hold most dear. For me it's individuality, freedom, liberty, art being superior to science (and the dangers of a pro-science society), and the lack of respect we have for our own humanity.
To a non-INFP, that would be complicated for a six year old. But that six year old spends a lot of time between six years old and sixty years old thinking about those things. It's not complicated to us because it's what we value the most in our lives. We invest that time and thought and energy and emotion into it.
This is why typology just seems to make little sense to me, the INFP is portrayed as a "moral philosopher", the INTP as the "mathematician/physicist", the INTJ as the Scientist, the ENFJ as "messiah". What the heck is going on here, we're assigning all of these four-letter codes to children and all sorts of unremarkable adults, yet we're ascribing all sorts of panegyric qualities to the basic features of their personality. Can someone here help me understand how I can resolve this apparent absurdity?
We don't apply MBTI types to children. Each of the functions is developed at a different stage in our lives, and we don't fully settle into ourselves until our late teens.
The descriptions are arbitrary. They're meant to be descriptive of the average person who has that personality type rather than being job descriptions. Just because we're the "moral philosophers" doesn't mean that our moral philosophizing is what separates us from an ENFP. It just means that's something we tend to that the person who was describing the personality types thought would best set us apart from the rest of the MBTI.
Every person who describes personality types gives them different names and titles. You're reading too much into one version of them.
I see, it would seem that an introvert has a tendency to detach from the mainstream social view, but I am not sure if it is fair to say that every introvert can achieve that. My hunch is that INFPs have a tendency to strive for a perspective that's independent from society's mainstream view, though it seems puzzling to assert that all INFPs by definition have achieved that goal. I don't think that any person who has "Thinking" as part of their type is an exceptionally good logician or any person who has "Feeling" in their type is empathetic. Such skills can be developed only with deliberate practice.
Sure, not every xxTx will be a logician. But the ones whose first function is Ti? Yeah, they will be. That's literally the first filter of their thought process.
You need to remember that a large part of why you're having trouble understanding how the INFP analysis can be accurate is that you're using your non-INFP perspective to see it.
I'd guess the whole internal dynamic of the type changes when it becomes first and foremost extroverted and intuitive as opposed introverted and feeling-oriented. I don't find the idea that by reversing the order of functions in a type, we end up with simply an extroverted version of the type. Should we say that an ESTJ is an extroverted, thinking, sensing and judging version of the INFP?
No. We should say that an ESTJ is an extroverted, thinking, sensing, and judging version of a person. Just like an INFP is an introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving version of a person.
I guess you can say that introverts in general tend to detach from the mainstream ethos and that may lead to eccentricity, but I remain troubled by the idea that a certain type is eccentric by definition.
Maybe not the connotations of eccentric, but if you mean the definition of eccentric -- (of a person or their behavior) unconventional and slightly strange -- then it's not that hard, given that we prioritize very refined personal values that we identify more than we identify with any culture or social standard.
Doesn't everyone need time alone, even the most extroverted of us? I don't see how this tells us any more about the ENFP than it does about other extroverted types.
By definition:
An introvert expends energy for social interaction, whereas an extrovert gains energy through social interaction.
I guess that could be true if INFPs follow through on their natural tendencies to become unconventional in their values, but a lot of INFPs who fail to actualize their potential will remain social conformists and typically similar to an average person in society. Besides, I'd imagine that even the most self-actualized of INFPs may reach unique values and have moral disagreements with other people who share their type, yet it's unclear how different they can be. In general, it's difficult for any person to construct his own moral framework in a manner that is both coherent, plausible and at the same time dramatically different from the mainstream view. We can debate about issues such as racial equality, discrimination, sexism, fair labor practices and so on, but we generally share similar fundamental assumptions about the overarching moral principles such as human dignity, fairness, the value of human life and so on. At best, we're just modifying our opponents' conclusions and explaining how the moral premises that we all agree on lead to a different conclusion from their own. For example, most American racists of the anti-bellum south accepted Lincoln's proposition that all men were created equal, they just didn't regard blacks as human. Hence, the anti-slavery activists had to correct them by pointing out that blacks were humans and the moral beliefs of the racists behooved them to reconsider their commitment to slavery. Martin Luther King made a similar argument by appealing to the deep-seated values of human dignity and fairness that even the most ardent of his opponents subscribed to. I guess my point is that the autonomy of moral reasoning can only lead one to deviate from the mainstream view so far, I doubt it'd be enough to make self-actualized INFPs dramatically differ from those who are less morally autonomous or those who are just as autonomous but reject some of their convictions.
For someone who's come into the INFP thread to ask questions about INFPs, you sure are quick to tell us all about ourselves and explain to us how we can and can't operate.
Not to be rude, but we really would know better than you about that.
Where there's a will, there's a way. I believe you will succeed in turning your life around for the better, because I see a great amount of potential in you.
Maybe you could say Fi is empathetic to the meaning and Fe is empathetic to the implications. I don't know, [MENTION=7111]fidelia[/MENTION], what do you think?
