Of the few INFJs I've casually known, I'd say what annoys me is:
- Overly formal, stiff way of talking/writing sometimes. It can seem very pretentious. Actually, INFJs can seem very pretentious, period. INFPs seem a little more light-hearted, but keep in mind this is coming from me, and I know I can seem somewhat contrived at times.
- INFJs can seem rather non-committal to large ideas, yet quick to judge on things which seem trivial to me. Their values seem too fluid & dependent on the external for my tastes. As mentioned, it can make them seem like they jump on and off bandwagons of ideas that seem, er, rather ridiculous and not very well-developed.
Being flexible on small things and having a strong, solid foundation of principles makes sense to me, as an INFP....I don't want to change with the wind on my basic moral tenants, which are well thought-out before solidified, not adopted arbitrarily. INFPs are said to be truth-seekers, and INFJs seem more like idea-seekers.
- INFJs can
seem intolerant. Because their values seem to be more tied with community standards, I suppose they feel some justification in expressing these opinions. I think INFPs are the most
tolerant type, although not the least judgmental. The ability to hear and accept many different viewpoints without abandoning our own principles seems like the epitome of tolerance to me. (We talked about this on INFPgc, if this sounds familiar to anyone who posts there also).
- The INFJ forum is sooooo boring. If INFPgc seem whiny, that place seems like a big snooze fest. INFPs seem so much more playful and whimsical. It's hard to see the side of INFJs that isn't overly serious, but I know it IS there.
And after saying all that, I rather like most INFJs I come across.
infjs who don't get out and challenge themselves may rely on community standards for their Fe sense of right. but ultimately our values are designed to protect ourselves from our perceived weaknesses and deficiencies. my intj is constantly reprimanding me for coming across as rude to the esfj salespeople we interact with when apartment shopping, or a cashier, or ____. i'm not unkind (rude probably denotes cultural crudeness/brutishness), but i do not like having to put up a front if i find the game's interaction to be rotten at the core.
we are judgy in the sense that we, like intjs (and intps) are HIGHLY impatient. this is a principal source of social frustration, and why we seem so j. fucking hurry up and let's get going! we run at a quicker rate and get burnt out more easily than infps, which makes us act like pricks sometimes.
infps (that i know) are often more naturally slothlike and comfort-craving. i binge on everything, which includes comfort. i need to go fast and get more. they take it slower, more easy, as it comes. they do not rush (and it is more damaging for them to do so than for infjs, who also need to slow down!). infps are self-absorbed but so are infjs, it is just in a different way. i will see people as numbers, letters, language, symbols, ideas, representatives. infp will see people as selves, subjective experiences, personal histories, stories, motivations, etc. but we both get lost in our own worlds. really the Fi is selfish slogan should be re-named e4 and e8 are selfish. 4w5, 5w4/3w4, and 9w8/7w8, and all 8s. we create the strongest sense of entitlement. Fi just relates everything to its own experiences, and some Fi types don't perform enough error checking to imagine what the others are experiencing, recognize they are their own subjective creatures, etc. just like infj types often judge the fuck out of others well before they turn that judgment inwards and realize that most of what they say, too, is a paradoxical crock-a-shit.
advanced infjs spend an entire life exploring questions of truth. i don't think i will ever believe in any conception of truth beyond pragmatism, buddhism, mysticism, poetry, and imagination. it's just using language to get at things that are so complex. my inner mappings of Ni are where i create my highest insights, just as infp Fi is where they do most of their organization, arranging, weighing, trying to create fluidity and movement of value and holism out of fractured and fragmentary subjective experiences and feeling-tones attached like post-it-notes. what is real to us is our own inner vision of the world, which we know can change more drastically with new information. bc we are tied to INFORMATION more than we are tied to specific judgments of what that information means. those things are anything but fixed, so we trust our ability to process information well, to perceive, to view, to represent, to use language-systems to understand the world as well as can be done. trying to get to the limit of what we can say (which is a judgment process), so that we may be able to see over the wall of that which cannot be said.
I think Seymour touched on the tendency to sign up for various causes and then abandon them once they find the holes in it. I wonder why they didn't consider it more carefully to begin with, but I suppose they just like to try ideas on.
I realize that may be their process of finding external values which suit them (and that these may be immature people), but to an INFP, it can seem rather frivolous.
I think this is an area in which you can tell INFJs are dominant perceivers. Supposedly, INFPs are less "organized", but that's only externally.
we feel like you infps are too slow at trying out new ideas. you hold your values too fixedly in place like an anchor, whereas we lose our values like socks and hats and things that are never where you thought you had lost put them.
also, being an N dom, we can easily see phantom connections, sense rain that does not come, imagine a highly distorted reality.
in fact, i find one of the major issues for both types is just straight up accuracy. our iNtuitive imagined perceptions can be way off the mark, and the F only makes us more (superficially) erratic/complexly holistic. it makes us get a sense of a wide range of relationships but rarely pinpoint the specific relationships to double-check for accuracy in our judgments. so the whole float can get majorly fucked up and skewed. Fi dom takes longer to let an idea work into its perception and connect new threads to its value framework that might change the equatorial balance. Ni must symbolize ideas into its own framework, and while these symbols are rather picky and exist in a very specific language-game that might be totally off-base, as symbols they can change much quicker. but it can be very disillusioning or relieving when this happens.
i suggest that the infj forums may not be quite so infj as they suggest. plus many infjs (like infps) are in a somewhat broken phase (think a 1992 ford taurus that needs a new transmission). i think their are a lot of infjs and infps who are isfjs and isfps. but equally important, there are many N types with no development of their imaginative faculties, who end up offering no valuable perceptual insight. we're all only as good as the discourse we participate within. nothing comes from outside of that fabric.
i personally don't find the mass of infps all that interesting, just like you don't find many infjs all that interesting. i at least relate to the infj profile, life story, etc, like you do, which feels good. but in the end, i relate to enneagram types just as strongly as mb types, and i relate to well-developed N no matter what type.
The major problem I tend to have revolves around the INFJ doorslam. I'm a troubled person, I don't think that comes as a shock to anyone on this board. I have a lot of problems. Being an INFP, these have emotional consequences which I try to keep from others (irl at least), but with close friends who probe it just isn't possible (and INFJs probe a lot). Being "real" about yourself even when it's ugly is a huge part of intimacy for INFPs. The biggest. My problem with INFJs is that this kind of realness exposes my troubles, and then they get really invested in trying to fix me. I appreciate the concern, and the effort. I really do. But, for reasons not clear to me but almost certainly my fault, their solutions tend to either not work or not stick. Then they get disappointed and upset, and eventually frustrated/resentful. They keep picking at you until it gets to the point where neither of you can relax in the other's presence. Then the INFJ doorslam. Thus I've found the only way to maintain a degree of friendship with them is to not be real with them. Keep them out. Obviously they pick up on this. This has all been based on my experience with only a few INFJs, so I'm not really sure how true-to-type it is.
So I guess it boils down to what I perceive as the ongoing conditionality of their friendship. I don't think it's an unreasonable quality to have -- in fact it makes perfect sense. But for me once a friendship passes a certain point it's pretty much irrevocable. I'm 80% sure I'd help a genuine friend bury a body, even if I spent the next 50 years trying to convince them to turn themselves in. That is what it is -- I don't think it's a virtue. I'm sure it isn't, actually.
Thinking about it some more, with the INFJ friendships I've had the "being real" process has seemed to me to be a one-way street. I share with them, they use what I share to try to fix me. They don't share back, unless it's in the form of "this is how I learned the lesson of why you should do this". I'm not saying that if I share something personal with you then you owe me something personal back. But when there seems to be a blatant pattern of one-sidedness to this unveiling of self then I have to wonder at the dynamic of the friendship. Often it seems to me that these confessions serve simply to give them leverage to tell me how to live my life. Which makes me wonder if they're really friends at all, or simply a kind of roaming developmental paramedic. So I guess I've never really felt that close to INFJs.
There are other things which irk revolving mostly around typical Fe/Fi differences, but those are the biggest for me personally.
Edit: nothing in this post is based on any forum INFJs.
what you've said is obviously well thought out. infjs hold back a lot, sometimes for fear/anxiety of what will happen with said participation, and sometimes because they are unsure of how they will be received. it is future-focused (protecting the future by avoiding fuckups). feeling like the other person is hearing them in EXACTLY the right way is soooo crucial for an infj to disclose important details that involve vulnerability. i only speak these things when a) i'm with someone who gets me (rare!) or b) i feel so fucking sky-high open that i love everyone and will sow my seeds freely with everyone. sometimes we will be a bit strategic, too, and disclose to promote someone else opening up to us. but we do see potential that we want to set free. my interest in setting people free is almost exclusively focused on people who i value, whose insight and talents i recognize as helpful to the people like me of this world. i'll listen to those who i meet and know and become acquainted with and try to help, but serious and difficult problems with additional energies expended are reserved for the people who are special to me. i have many infp friends and a couple of enfj friends who can frequently require more energy expended than they give back in return. but i like them. they have much to offer me and others like me. i want to get them back on track, which, as i think you recognize, sometimes means nothing more than i want to catalyze the process and speed it up (which may be not only unnecessary but unhelpful). sometimes with infps you want to reiterate over and over and repeat until they have to address what you say. same with intps. break the fused judgments and allow them to expand with Ne, to evolve, etc. but it takes time and we need to recognize this. we need time apart too bc suffering of others we care about is very disturbing to us and we are not nearly as in-touch with the process of internal emotional purification/photosynthesis as infps bc we do not have experience cleaning our judgments and allowing them to be re-planted and re-populated in better soil. we don't recognize the process half as well as infps do.
there's a huge cathartic epiphanic shocking revelatory experience for infps who free themselves and whose Ne just causes a huge evolution. like a hesse novel. or like soaring neutral milk hotel epiphanies. i like to be part of the process where we both help each other move forward and experience those moments that capture the very best of our gifts.
i get frustrated with infps for being slow moving with value transformations, but openly admit that i love their steadfastness, their ability to fight resistance and stay true to their values (true of those who have made serious work of their lives and developed deeply inspiring/aesthetic/wise values). i get too easily threatened/budged/distracted/distorted by the input/impressions of others. i hear everyone well when centered, but a downside to this is that i feel naked to their true thoughts about me and i have less shielded layer to protect myself against their onslaughts bc they are what i hear more than myself. then there is the additional w4 facet, which infp 4w5s know all too well what it is like to perceive these differences as defects and be envious of others who are free of a sometimes debilitating self-critique.