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[NF] INFP and INFJ Friendship

SuperServal

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I love my INFP friends. I feel liberated when I am around them. It is almost like they act out my inner feelings. My inner self feels projected through them while they see their antics and their thoughts being appreciated. So we can have a lot of fun together. I think they are looking for someone that understands them and I am looking for someone to allow me to relax a bit and stop caring so much what other people think about me.
 
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so/sp
I met a guy at a friend's house about a month ago. Quiet guy. Teaches guitar at school.

I found out while driving up to this friend's house that he thought I was trying to get into his head the first time we'd met, and just our luck, he was inside going over a recording with my friend's boyfriend inside tonight. Paranoid guy, ha ha ha. Chuckle... anyway, I now know that he's infj, so I look forward to asking him more questions, and maybe discussing socionics. Maybe he feels weird about me because I don't lay myself out in the open for him to analyze. Who knows? Hopefully I can help expose him to some useful ideas this afternoon.
 

the state i am in

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Interesting. What don't you like about the way the friendship feels?

they feel so self-contained. i don't feel valued in a particular enough way. difference is unimportant. they have no interest in getting to the core of me like i do them. their feelings ARE reality and nothing else matters. they are either tragic or healing, but they are 100% on their path and it seems like nothing will change that no matter what.
 

Udog

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Wow, sorry to hear that State. It sounds like your experience with INFPs has been very stressful and very invalidating to your feelings and who you are.

I'd venture to say those INFPs are not your friends, and you would be better off without them. S/he will only do you harm. Stressed out INFPs can do horrible things and think they are 100% justified. Afterall, we don't even need to pretend to be logical to justify our actions - our feelings and values are enough.

they are either tragic or healing, but they are 100% on their path and it seems like nothing will change that no matter what.

What path would you prefer them to take - especially the healing ones?
 

redacted

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I have a very close INFP friend. We used to hook up a bunch 4 years ago, and the Fe vs. Fi thing was a huge source of drama/conflict -- but we were both super depressed, so it wasn't gonna be smooth regardless.

But yeah, she lives across the country (in Maryland). We talk every few months, and it's actually really amazing -- we get right into the depth of our lives right away, no awkwardness or small talk or anything. I really love the girl; I think we'll be friends for our entire lives. She's really amazing; one of the top 5 smartest people I've ever met for sure, and such a great person -- she works with schizophrenics.
 

TheEmeraldCanopy

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they feel so self-contained. i don't feel valued in a particular enough way. difference is unimportant. they have no interest in getting to the core of me like i do them. their feelings ARE reality and nothing else matters. they are either tragic or healing, but they are 100% on their path and it seems like nothing will change that no matter what.

How can we get to the INFJ core? I do agree with you. I often feel the INFJ will help the INFP to focus more on the INFP's needs, but the INFP can't really return the favor because they're already so all over the place that it's more difficult to stop for a second and focus on the INFJ.

I think the INFJ can see very clearly all of the disastrous traffic in my head and freeze it instantly. But when I look towards the INFJ, I see a wall. Not in the sense that the INFJ puts up a wall against me, it's just that I lack the ability to truly see the thoughts going through the INFJ. I can only scratch the surface. They can tell me how they feel about something, what they're thinking, but I feel unable to help in someway beyond listening. I feel like I cannot share in those thoughts or feelings as much as I really want to do so, that I lack so much in that INFJ ability to connect to others.

But I do really wish I could reach the INFJ "core" and better understand my friend, for she is truly one of the most honest and wonderful people I know.
 

Udog

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BlackCat

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What Udog said. I've gotten to the center and it's fine and dandy.
 

Split_Infinitive

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I have a wonderful INFP friend. We're very close and after several years still constantly surprised at what a great mix of similarities and differences we are. I find that with her I find a lot of understanding for a lot of things, but she also offers me a lot of fresh, novel insights for things that I have "thought myself into a corner about" for many years. She came into my life at a time of great change for me and helped me embrace my "F" after a lifetime of making myself believe I was an NT (Lots of NT pressure from my environment when I was growing up - be logical, be rational, don't be impulsive, think, think, THINK!), and I couldn't have done it without her. Her carefree, open minded, spiritual attitude gave me the confidence to become the F that I am and love it! She is a borderline INFP/INFJ, though, which I'm sure helps.

I do have another INFP friend, but she isn't as solid and comfortable in her own self yet, and does take a lot from me emotionally without even realising it. The first friend I mentioned does that too in a way, but I don't mind it so much from her as I'm getting so much back!

Most of my friends are INFP, ENFP, INTJ or ENTJ (with a stray ISTP in there too)... I've yet to meet a fellow INFJ!

ETA: Oh, and hear hear to Udog about the acceptance and understanding thing. It is so important to not have to feel guilty for who you are, and just be allowed to be all of your oddball, woo-woo self without someone thinking you're an oddball, or actually loving that about you!
 

LavaLucy

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This thread is making me feel all warm inside :wubbie:

My best friend is INFP and I can relate to a lot of what is being said. She lightens me up when I get to serious or worried over something or shows me another angle that I couldn't find on my own. I like listening to her come to me with her with her worries and I like how she listens when I come to her.
And where would I be without her craziness and imagination that leads to us writing stupid stories and making up silly things.

I do think I get too much for her but she has an ENFJ who is crazy bossy and insistent so hopefully I'm not too bad. And sometimes she gets to me with lack of communication.

(Love your Bret avatar Split_Infinitive!! Me and my INFP were totally trying to learn the Stay Cool dance that the Tough Brets do.)
 

Split_Infinitive

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This thread is making me feel all warm inside :wubbie:

My best friend is INFP and I can relate to a lot of what is being said. She lightens me up when I get to serious or worried over something or shows me another angle that I couldn't find on my own. I like listening to her come to me with her with her worries and I like how she listens when I come to her.
And where would I be without her craziness and imagination that leads to us writing stupid stories and making up silly things.

***

(Love your Bret avatar Split_Infinitive!! Me and my INFP were totally trying to learn the Stay Cool dance that the Tough Brets do.)
Oh my goodness, LavaLucy, are you actually me and is my INFP friend your INFP friend? It's only because we don't live in the same country that we haven't done Bret's dance together yet, but I am visiting her in America next month and we are trying to get tickets to see FotC together! She and I really seem to have the same sense of humor.
 

OrangeAppled

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they feel so self-contained. i don't feel valued in a particular enough way. difference is unimportant. they have no interest in getting to the core of me like i do them. their feelings ARE reality and nothing else matters. they are either tragic or healing, but they are 100% on their path and it seems like nothing will change that no matter what.

We value people immensely when we feel safe to be close to them, and they become a major priority in our lives. Individuals can most certainly become one of our "causes" we get 100% devoted to.

It's quite possible that the INFPs you experienced did not fully open up to you, meaning there was not a deep enough connection to value you & understand you the way you may have needed. This is likely, as INFPs are intensely private, & few people will ever get into their inner world & have an important role there.

I admit, we have more of a need to be understood than to understand others, but that's partly because we feel we grasp people much more quickly & easily than they do us. When people open up to us, we love it & take a deep interest in providing support and advice....that's why INFPs are the stereotypical therapists.

Okay, I guess I should speak for myself and say "I" and not "we" here, but I based on my knowledge this seems to be typical INFP stuff....
 

BlackCat

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^I can agree with what you said. I'm not that private with people though, I usually open up to them to bait them to open up to me if they don't open up to me eventually.

You could say there are certain degrees of "being in." There is uninterested, interested, friends, and close friends for me. I will give away certain parts of myself depending on the state someone is at.

But yes I am sure we have all experienced bad examples of types. I've met terrible INFJs, who were so caught up in what could happen that they didn't care about real facts or they bulldozed over them. Everything had to have some deeper meaning, even when the real meaning was obvious. The most simple things for them were so complicated. They made problems for themselves, they would turn nothing into something. It was pretty stupid. This especially manifested itself in relationships, platonic and romantic. They would find "hidden meaning" behind someone's actions and words, and they would somehow form a way in their mind that the person hated them. In reality these people weren't doing anything wrong.

You just haven't met the right INFP state i am in.
 

Split_Infinitive

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I agree with the previous posters, you just haven't met the right INFP yet. It can sometimes be easy to forget that people have personalities as well as personality types :) It all depends on how certain character aspects are expressed, and all positive character aspects come with a negative counterpart.

My two INFP friends are very open to trying to understand me. But they also don't need to put a lot of effort in, they just do. And I love that about them because I don't need to spend endless time trying to make them understand. Sometimes they don't understand instantly, but then they're open to learning. And all of us often have moments where we go: "oh you believe that, do you? Interesting. I personally don't, but I can see where you're coming from and it's cool!"

I'm not sure I'm getting any kind of point across right now - am I waffling? :)
 

Gengar

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I'm not sure I'm getting any kind of point across right now - am I waffling? :)

in response. . .

"oh you believe that, do you? Interesting. I personally don't, but I can see where you're coming from and it's cool!"
 

the state i am in

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We value people immensely when we feel safe to be close to them, and they become a major priority in our lives. Individuals can most certainly become one of our "causes" we get 100% devoted to.

It's quite possible that the INFPs you experienced did not fully open up to you, meaning there was not a deep enough connection to value you & understand you the way you may have needed. This is likely, as INFPs are intensely private, & few people will ever get into their inner world & have an important role there.

I admit, we have more of a need to be understood than to understand others, but that's partly because we feel we grasp people much more quickly & easily than they do us. When people open up to us, we love it & take a deep interest in providing support and advice....that's why INFPs are the stereotypical therapists.

Okay, I guess I should speak for myself and say "I" and not "we" here, but I based on my knowledge this seems to be typical INFP stuff....

i've had a lot of differing experiences with infps and i'm intrigued by what you're saying. the "feel safe to be close" thing rings true, the first girl i ever got together with was an infp and she found me extremely safe, comforting, warm, but she could never see me past the end of her nose. it was frustrating.

the way in which infps want to be understood feels different from the way i want to be understood. they want to have their subjective feelings grasped by others, i can't tell if there is any other way than similarly being a dominant introverted feeler and having the same values across the board. sharing the same experiences and being able to relate those effortlessly. i feel like part of the issue for me was that there was no faith in articulation or communication, you either had the same subjective experiences/feelings or you didn't. whereas i rely on expression to help me locate and imagine the inner inside aspect of things outside of me.

i think part of it is my desire to build bridges and dialogue and kind of direct those efforts. that i want us to connect our expressions, to produce themes and motifs, to find musical ideas that can represent and symbolize things. whereas they often have an inner reading of whether something is hitting the right way or isnt, if this person already knows what they mean and is wearing the feeling or isn't. i don't know if this makes any sense, but they get frustrated when others don't have all of the details that are so extremely subjective already mapped out exactly as they do, aren't experiencing the same subjective state simultaneously, etc.

i am still struggling so hard to understand Fi/infp devotion. i am in a relationship that involves Fi devotion. i am the one for her. one of her "causes" as you say. for some reason my image to her is heightened and more significant than those of others, stirs more powerful memories and emotional resonances, etc. and maybe i'm making too big of a deal of something or am just inexperienced or am just too much of a worrying thing, but this feels like a totally different way of operating than my Fe does for me. which is so ephemeral and fleeting and momentarily based.
 

OrangeAppled

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i've had a lot of differing experiences with infps and i'm intrigued by what you're saying. the "feel safe to be close" thing rings true, the first girl i ever got together with was an infp and she found me extremely safe, comforting, warm, but she could never see me past the end of her nose. it was frustrating.

the way in which infps want to be understood feels different from the way i want to be understood. they want to have their subjective feelings grasped by others, i can't tell if there is any other way than similarly being a dominant introverted feeler and having the same values across the board. sharing the same experiences and being able to relate those effortlessly. i feel like part of the issue for me was that there was no faith in articulation or communication, you either had the same subjective experiences/feelings or you didn't. whereas i rely on expression to help me locate and imagine the inner inside aspect of things outside of me.

i think part of it is my desire to build bridges and dialogue and kind of direct those efforts. that i want us to connect our expressions, to produce themes and motifs, to find musical ideas that can represent and symbolize things. whereas they often have an inner reading of whether something is hitting the right way or isnt, if this person already knows what they mean and is wearing the feeling or isn't. i don't know if this makes any sense, but they get frustrated when others don't have all of the details that are so extremely subjective already mapped out exactly as they do, aren't experiencing the same subjective state simultaneously, etc.

i am still struggling so hard to understand Fi/infp devotion. i am in a relationship that involves Fi devotion. i am the one for her. one of her "causes" as you say. for some reason my image to her is heightened and more significant than those of others, stirs more powerful memories and emotional resonances, etc. and maybe i'm making too big of a deal of something or am just inexperienced or am just too much of a worrying thing, but this feels like a totally different way of operating than my Fe does for me. which is so ephemeral and fleeting and momentarily based.


Hmm......I don't quite relate to the description of your INFP ex. I definitely want my subjective views to be grasped, appreciated, respected and ideally agreed with, but I don't expect that to come out of nowhere. It can be refreshing when someone simply "gets" you without need to give exhausting explanations, but it would also be boring to have nothing to explore about each other.

Also, I can get profound impressions about people, but I don't always trust them anymore, because they have been wrong. Maybe an immature INFP trusts that instinct as if it is faultless, and that is why your friend didn't see the need to actually confirm her feelings. For me, it is exciting to get that confirmation. It cements the feelings that drew me to the person, or it pleasantly reveals a side of them I did not expect.
It seems that may be what you are looking for, and I agree with you on that - the need to build a solid bridge where the INFP has cast an imaginary rainbow :p.

When I was younger I would sense something about someone and make that impression & that was that, but after having several people I was dead-set against turn out to be close friends, I've learned that I am just plain off sometimes & I needed to give people a chance to reveal themselves to me. I would also do the opposite....feel a connection & be sure that person was "just like me" and then be sorely disappointed when they were not (and I'm not looking for someone "just like me" anymore either). Part of it was letting my imagination get carried away and creating a person who didn't really exist in place of that individual. Maybe your friend had a person created for you, and you didn't really fit that. So she felt she grasped you, but it was only the you she had built in her head. INFPs will have discussions with people in our heads, and then we feel all is settled, but we never pursue that discussion in reality, so it's not settled.
But that's another tangent....

Anyway, because INFPs are sooo sensitive to criticism & conflict, we may avoid discussing our deep feelings for fear it may result in such. I enjoy discussing my views and expressing my feelings otherwise. Again, it can be a safety/closeness issue. I admit when someone brings up a topic that touches on my very deeply held beliefs, I get anxiety just thinking about discussing it.

I also hate to have my imagination bubble burst about someone when I suspected they may feel the same & they don't. Coming to terms with bubble bursting can be hard for an INFP. The bubble is like some warm womb we never want to leave, but we have to if we want to live our lives in the world. Maybe some INFPs you know have not been ready to leave that bubble yet, and your J makes you need to keep in touch with reality so that is frustrating.

We can also get very INTENSE in discussing something seemingly casual, such as music taste, and then people get weirded out. Those experiences make us clam up more, but people don't understand why we'd be so hesitant to talk about things we're passionate about (and really dying to discuss).

Not sure if this is typical for an INFP or if this is what you are getting at, but I will like to cover every aspect of an issue into the minutest details. I like to quote lyrics, books, use metaphors, and reference images to explain my thoughts, since Fi is difficult to explain in everyday language (on a side note, I suspect that is part of why many of us INFPs use some artistic outlet to express ourselves). Doing that does help me to see that someone grasps me & I grasp them, because there's an outside expression we both relate to.

That was a lot of rambling...hope some of it makes sense, haha.
 

nanook

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good/important posting, orangeappled. important to allow some Ne perception into the Fi bubble. FiNe people often confuse emotions (gut feeling) with perception. its so "visionary" to them, like synchronicity and stuff. it think its probably better interpreted as a potential, not of reality, but of themselves. it illustrates their readiness, to go with a creation. because half of reality is always creation, also in a partnership. but it will only happen, if it is co-created by both sides.

and your J makes you need to keep in touch with reality so that is frustrating.

lets say, its mostly our Ni perception, but yes its also the sort of paranoid attitude of Fe or Te that makes us burst bubbles (i burst my own bubbles, not just the Fi bubble of a partner), just to make sure that no monster is hiding behind/below it. so i tent to dismiss the co-creative potential. the 50% of reality that ought to be evoked by creation. but maybe i only do this, when the other 50%, the required basis is missing, as Ni tells me. it's hard to be honest about this and impossible to tell for sure. i perceive how much required basis (compatibility) is given, but i cant know for sure how much ought to be good enough, to use it to build a creation on top of it.
 

penelope

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One of my closest friends is an INFP (actually, several are), and what I love most about them is that they're always an open, non-judgmental ear and it's very comforting.
 

mwv6r

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As an INFP, I sometimes think I bulldoze her emotionally when I talk to her. I can be very open with her, but I wonder if I wear on her with my overly sensitive ways. I just wish I knew. I also feel like while she contributes greatly to helping me (by listening to and accepting me), I cannot really offer her much except similar humor and outlooks on life. :huh:


I'm sure you have a lot to offer your INFJ friend. I love INFPs and have always been drawn to them. Ya'll are one of the few types that I feel can understand me. And INFPs are hilarious and very ballsy. You say the kind of off the wall, evil-funny stuff that I think but am too damn polite (Fe) to say aloud except in strict confidence. I really admire how INFPs are completely unafraid to stand up for their viewpoint. There are times when I unabashedly fight for what I believe, but most of the time I stifle it to avoid stepping on toes (Fe), or after I do angrily unleash my idealism over some perceived injustice I end up worrying that I shouldn't have (again, Fe).

Someone else on this thread mentioned the brainstorming abilities of the INFJ + INFP combination, and I definitely agree. I remember my best INFP friend and I in college used brainstorm our own comedy show when we hung out, and we would think up the most hilarious, off-the-wall skits together, stuff that I never could have come to on my own and that I don't think she could have either. INFPs tend to be highly creative and artistic, and I have that side too but keep it in reserve, requiring another creative type to bring it out.

Also, INFJs can be very sensitive as well. I think INFPs are probably the most sensitive type, but INFJs may be a close second. I know some people can be judgmental of INFPs (and NF types in general) for their sensitivity, but when I see INFPs in the throes of their emotions I almost always feel that I can identify with what they're feeling.

If you want to show your INFJ friend your appreciation for him or her, I would suggest just coming right out and expressing your affection in words or in a card. I dunno about other INFJs but those kinds of expressions really mean a lot to me.
 
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