[so] So-last SJs

[Southern Kross]

Your story about the focus being on the surrounding people (and how it contrasted to my experience) triggered interest because it brought to mind something I’d read before about how our dominant instinct drive is actually dominant as a compensation for the lack of that need being met initially. Having a mother that focused on filling the social needs enabled me to take that one for granted, and so it makes sense that I’d feel an unconscious preoccupation with filling the need that wasn’t being filled around me. I just don’t feel any anxiety about the kinds of things that give so variant people anxiety because I didn’t grow up with any sense of scarcity in that regard- yet individuals didn’t matter, and that presented its own scarcity that I became sensitive to. Although it’s not quite so clean cut as that, because it doesn’t especially explain how siblings would have different instinct variants, it’s interesting to consider because it probably does deserve *some* merit.

Interesting. I can see how a lack of recognition of the individual could be leave you feeling empty. With me, it wasn't my parents that failed me, it was everyone else. I have always stood out both physically and in my personality - and not in a good way. I got bullied a lot and was constantly and actively alienated from the group. And as a result, all I wanted to do was blend in (all of this being complicated by the fact I'm also a 4). I suppose you could say too often I've been in the situation of being treated too much like an individual.

Maybe it seems like “unnecessary (and maybe even self-indulgent) grandstanding about your opinions/feelings/rights” because so variant doms could take that for granted (and so the notion of a scarcity of it wouldn’t be threatening or cause anxiety….yet feelings of not being part of the bigger group do?).

You could be right. I didn't think of it that way. I suppose like I said earlier, So-firsts don't tend to see the expectation/need to adapt as a threat to their individuality, whereas So-lasts tend to. I guess we all like to affirm, and have others reciprocate that affirmation, the aspects of ourselves that we believe are under threat.

It’s funny, sometimes I do feel the weight of the consequences of being least so variant- because my mother is no longer a factor of daily life, those needs (networking and such) are not being met and so it’s a serious inconvenience at times to be least so variant…..a serious inconvenience. But I have an inordinately difficult time in-the-moment focusing on making so variant needs a priority. It’s incredibly taxing to me. I only feel the negative consequences of not attending to it in retrospect.

I'm still not the best at dealing with people myself. It must be even harder if you don't know where to begin.

I’d be really interested in hearing an ESFJ answer this. I don’t know, it seems to me like being Ni dominant doesn’t make it seem like such a stretch. Especially being e5. I just don’t relate to descriptions of Fe at all until I break it down and see it as a means to an end (and think of it exclusively in terms of ‘means’ or process), but my ‘ends’ themselves look nothing like what the ends of ‘Fe’ are supposed to look like according to most descriptions. [I guess that’s the answer: that I just don’t relate to Fe descriptions at all….but then even the INFJs who are so dominant often can’t relate to them very well either, so ]

But that's the way it is with a lot of aspects of type, isn't it? You have to wade through a bunch of descriptions that put you off and make you believe you could never be that type/function/instinct, until you find one that cuts through the BS and gets to the core of what it's about. I never believed I was So-first until I read a really good description that captured me so well. It wasn't perfect but it really made sense. Once I got the superficial aspects of what the instinct meant out of the way, I couldn't see how well it fit me.