Z Buck McFate
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2009
- Messages
- 6,050
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
I feel like I'm pretty good at figuring things out right away
Just out of curiosity, do you mean you're good at knowing exactly what is bothering you right away- as in, you know precisely what the external trigger is- or you're good at knowing exactly why it's bothering you, why the person shouldn't be doing it/why it should be pointed out?
This has actually come up in conversation before (there's endless discussion of INFJs bouncing their thought processes of each other in this forum*), and we tend to know immediately what the external trigger is- but figuring out exactly why it's a problem/causing a sudden strong emotional reaction or 'red flag' feeling, in a way that can be put into words to make others understand and without sounding the least bit histrionic, is the thing that's difficult. It really helps to have a person to bounce the raw reality off of, to bleed off the emotional charge and distill the issue down to a logical core. But we tend to really be unwilling to get remotely confrontational about an issue before the emotional charge (which informed us it was an issue) has mostly been neutralized. It's like we don't trust our own notion of what's causing the emotional charge until we've had the opportunity to see it without the emotional charge, until it feels like we've gleamed an objective enough view of the issue. (Again, something we've been criticized for. )
*When you wrote above "trying to constantly untangle my web and figure out who I am and why I am the way I am and how I can improve"...that actually sounds as much or more INFJ to me- not sure if you were kidding about it being more INTJ like. At least, in this forum, we bounce our thinking process off each other all the time here to better understand it. I'm sure INTJs have their own version. That would make an interesting thread actually, asking INFJs and INTJs to describe how that statement I quoted applies to them. But anyway.