Z Buck McFate
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2009
- Messages
- 6,050
- Enneagram
- 5w4
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
is this mostly applicable to enneagram 5 related concerns. so it would influence 5w4 and 4w5 infjs? how do the boundary issues of e9 compare?
First of all, this is totally feasible to me, because I do this: confuse my e5 with my INFJness sometimes. I really thought it was a J thing, though. With perception directed inward and Se being the least function, our connection to the outside world is weaker than most types. In any given situation, we’re operating largely on information already in our heads- rather than information in our direct environment. For this reason, I kind of envy the people who have difficulty deciding whether they are INFJ or INFP- because they probably have more of their perception directed outward than strong J types which gives them more malleability in their interaction with the external world.
I have much higher expectations for the few people that I care deeply about, and almost no expectations for the rest of the world.
And when someone does fail to meet our expectations, it is, like scortia said, a relief to be able to understand why that happened. It's like, if I tried to understand and explain the motives of say, a serial killer or rapist or something equally heinous, some people get very offended and believe that I'm trying to excuse the behavior. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I'm just trying to UNDERSTAND it better. It's the difference between reason and justification. I feel better knowing why someone does something horrible, perhaps because it gives me comfort to know that it's not just a completely random act.
Someone told me once that people aren’t like mathematical equations and that I need to be more chill about my need to understand others’ behaviors, motives and intentions. My reaction was to explain that there was a *certain* amount of predictability in people, and figuring out as much of it as possible made life a whole lot easier. This was quite a while ago- before I had MBTI constructs at my disposal to better explain- I’ve just always known it was something I needed to do more than most people.
I don’t have many expectations for people who aren’t likely to cross my path on a regular basis, but I do find that I have expectations for some people- who I’m not particularly close to- if I have to deal with them on a regular basis (i.e. co-workers or neighbors). These aren’t necessarily good expectations in which I expect them to adhere to a certain moral standard: I take my observations of them into account and create a mental list of “this is how the person might react†to use while interacting with them. It helps me to anticipate reactions, and make decisions about how to interact with them according to the specific expectations I’ve collected for them.
I worked with an ESFP nurse for a while who was completely inconsistent with the way she managed her staff: she’d fire people for things that she often turned a blind eye to with others, she’d dump a group of new hires on me for training without any notice whatsoever and she quickly dismissed any feedback I tried to give her about this. This is an example of someone I wasn’t close to- but I really needed to form a basic understanding of her motives and intentions and create expectations specific to her in order to continue working with her. I didn’t need her to adhere to the high moral expectations I have for the people I am close to, but I did need to anticipate how she’d react during my daily interaction with her. I need to do this- create a sort of mathematical equation out of their characteristics to predict how they’ll react before it actually happens- with just about everybody I am required to interact with regularly. I think finding out about others' motives and intentions is such a relief (for me anyway) because it takes the randomness out of interacting with other people, it removes some of the unknowns and makes the external environment more predictable.
I don’t know. I can definitely see some e5 influence in there- lots of overthinking. But I thinking the e5 (or maybe even the sp variant) just makes me need to do this more than other INFJs- and the tendency itself is an INFJ thing?
It's interesting, however, that I love spontaneity in my daily life and don't feel the need to plan every detail before doing something, but I feel uncomfortable if my expectations aren't met on a more general level... such as with my relationships, career, etc.
I’ve noticed that I like being spontaneous myself. It was always something about the INFJ description which puzzled me, I’ve always liked leaving a lot of things ‘up in the air’ till last minute, especially in my social life. But I’ve come to realize that it’s usually stuff which I’ve loosely anticipated in the back of my mind which I can act spontaneously on. I don’t like having others’ spontaneousness imposed on me if the option wasn't already sitting in the back of my mind somewhere.