the state i am in
Active member
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2009
- Messages
- 2,475
- MBTI Type
- infj
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
mmh . i dont know guys.
In my case I am particularly vulnerable to infjs overall, whether friends or romantic interests.
But I can't really afford to be vulnerable. it breaks me, and it can take me years to pick up the pieces. As a risk taker when it comes to things that have potential to redefine my life I find most people do not share the same risk taking pattern, it is disappointing. I for example changed countries, cultures etc. at a moments notice. Stepping into a plane about 3 days after deciding, and deciding in less than a minute, and I can explain exactly why I made that choice. It was rational but the trick to me is stress management. I do not really, experience stress, if i do it probably equivates to a total mental breakdown curled up in a ball and moaning for your average stress prone infj.
Correct me if wrong, but overall infjs are a very stressed type, (stress is a word I use rather than a real experience for me), they stress, then overanalyse, go into loops, hang onto the answer they find, the answer brings actionable relief, relief is needed, stress is feared, the answer become truth.
While it's very understandable, I'm just not willing to deal with that kind of utter bullshit in my personal life.
so all that to say that except if I lived 1000 years i'd probably never be ready to be so vulnerable to someone ever again. Then again im a risk taker, so. mhhh.
You guys have fun keeping that thread alive.
stress management is within all motivation. it sounds like you (and i'm making a generalization based on type and tone of your posts more than on knowing much about your real life behavior) just manage stress by moving through it with greater focus and greater hardening of your emotional self. and it's from running so you don't have to stick around for the actual effects. the downside of just moving forward is that part of you is always running from experiencing the full weight of your truth. the answer that is the most relevant is the truth for you. that is your truth. that comes from softening rather than hardening, that's centered in your emotional experience, especially as you sink down into the deeper layers of it, as you notice what is really happening and how all those "really happening" things are balanced, weighted against each other, and what that music sounds like when you pluck the strings. when you just up and move to another country, you open up incredible new opportunities. you also lose a big part of yourself, your family, the people who have become part of you that you have shared much of yourself with and who now house much of you within themselves. when you have to just change selves because your self is drowning, or when you are not content enough with yourself that the only thing that motivates you is novelty or conquering something outside of yourself, you are just really careful to maintain the conditions of a different kind of trap. and really that's the basic premise of the enneagram for all of us. and part of our conflict is in being so attached to the traps that we are afraid of losing because then we would have to find a new way to be without the illusions that have kept us predictable enough to pretend that we do not have any fucking clue.
it should be clear that we are just as vulnerable as you. we cannot move forward, cannot outrace the explosion. we are not action movie stars. we are not movers and shakers. we cannot hang our hats on our accomplishments with as much fervor and focus. we do not conquer with the same aplomb. when we commit to share, we really begin to identify deeply with you. we will know you. in every relationship i have ever been in, one of the things that has been said to me is that our relationship transformed how they saw themselves. that i could see them in ways that they could not even see themselves. this is part of what we do. nfjs, when they're working for you, when they're committed to you, know how to offer incredibly subtle adjustments. they are incredibly skilled interpreters. they try to reveal, to clarify what makes anything beautiful, valuable, understandable, significant. they show new ways of entering into problems that help the problem change in a way that eventually it can just dissolve. they may not be good at proving anything, but they can offer a perspective that, when embodied, is incredibly valuable to experience. but these skills are often difficult to utilize. they require balance, which is difficult to find in this world. otherwise, they are easily distorted, pushed over, and taken advantage of. we of course have egos, but we're often not very good (the enfj 3w4s are, however) at advancing ourselves and improving our own lot. our lot, by contrast, has to be a distributed one. it is what Fe aux requires of us. to harmonize and take care of all that connects through us. all Fe types struggle staying open and connected in the face of threats to their personal boundaries, their personal well-being. it gives them difficulty in setting boundaries at all. that entp and especially 7w8 and 3w4 types are so good at turning off connection or manipulating the sense of connection to maintain a sense of value through the eyes of others without really connecting to whether or not that is actually valuable to oneself, often times leaving authentic sincere connections for dead. you lose the part of yourself looking for that, striving for that, trying to explore its own completeness, it's own core of significant relationships and nurturing rather than severing those. F requires sacrifice and at times submission. it can't be easily compartmentalized, which makes it harder to be in control of, harder to move in a straight line. a relationship with an infj requires an acceptance and appreciation of this. this part of you will wake up. it requires change in a more fundamental way, and this kind of change is costly because it is more significant, deeper rooted. moreover, we understand, because a part of us wakes up too, that helps us see how to take control of our own behavior and test the outcomes of our choices in more effective ways. it is threatening to us because you can control us and lie to us in ways that are difficult for us to fully test on our own, to know what is true apart from what the communication says on the surface of it and into the endless realm of possibilities that make reality so infinite and shape-shifting. and we struggle because we become vulnerable to ourselves, recognizing that a huge part of ourselves is undeveloped and struggles to anchor itself, that all the mirrors in the world still can't tell you who you ultimately are. because equally significant is the choice you make to decide and the choice you make to notice without attaching too rigidly to the meaning of things (as a way to purport to know when often times it's better to just admit that you don't).
but we also simply struggle with issues in relationships in general. like all types, apart from you. knowing what we want. responding to what is and what has actually happened rather than the ideas that allow us to perceive anything at all, that mark what is valuable or not, that categorize valuableness. oftentimes p types use these less, but they're still there for everyone. when we become good at being ourselves, we learn how to be more reflexive of these categories than p types. we recognize our way of thinking so clearly, that we know when it works against us. this, however, is not an answer. the answer is in finding new ways of being, thinking in fundamentally different ways that help us just be there, be present, improve the directness of our perception and our willingness to experience without judgment and without meaning. we are threatened by this part of you that is so clearly a part of ourselves we do not yet trust. that's the gist.