overwhelming influx of mistypings feels like when you liked a band, and then you didn't want to see their shows anymore because the crowd was too gross. something important to you, that brought you to other people in a specific way, changed. sure the life narratives we use to help define ourselves are informed by this kind of thing, and everyone has their own way of arriving. but the salience, the motivation, and the sense of place that we get from it can be there, as something really shared, or not. i don't think that's such a stupid thing. it feels understandable to me. there can be a kind of palpable sanctity to groups. or not. when it is, that alone, regardless of the exact narrative or symbol set, can be a healing thing. it kind of depends. different resources for different things.
i personally don't see the special snowflake thing for infps, altho i do see it for e4s. i think e4s epitomize the problem of taking everything personally. they're more obsessed with feeling special, not as a goal, but simply because doing so is a natural tendency. they identify with their mood, and aren't exactly blessed with the most resolute, grounded, consistent emotional endurance. they set up so many disappointment traps for themselves and others when they're status imaging themselves and constricting their acceptable image so tightly. so they end up in a lot of loss and sadness, and if they don't wait it out patiently, and instead try to act, they can make it worse and really easily get caught in a self-shaming spiral. this is what it feels like for me, at least. i'm sure it has different characters for different subtypes. ultimately the shift is from hyperidentification with image to total disconnection. just pushing away themselves and others. trying to stay in control by drowning out what is actually happening. there's just a terribly difficult boundary issue when it comes to evaluation, prejudice, assumptions, that is really, really reactive. that is getting totally immersed in self-containment, or totally immersed in other-focus, and the intensity of that, coupled with the inherent mood instability, is difficult. if too much energy vitriol is happening between them, then you get the blowback past e2 into e8, until we just start to numb out, unable to escape into others or into ourselves, having burned ourselves up from the inside with resentment until we are nothing.
with that said, all types are literally a kind of specialization, and negotiating the perceived, stereotypical value of that is just something that happens. the inherent status attributed to those specializations is part of the inherent political game we play with others in groups. part of what grosses us out is having to let go of the status we have accumulated. part of it is when we lose the conditions for sharing as constructively when the game gets overrun. these can feel really alienating. our words and key concepts no longer mean what they used to mean to us, in the contexts that they were relevant. it's always a house made of sand, but that doesn't mean it isn't disappointing in some sense either.
i mean, on facebook, for instance, nearly every time i see someone post their type, i feel huge sweeping incredulity. all e7s seem to think they're enfps. 8s think they're F types. intps mistyping as infps. every e4 type thinking they're infp whether they're 3w4 entp, 5w4 intp, etc. i probably see more mistypes as infp and enfp than i do infj. or recently, a much more charismatic, gregarious than me enfp 7w8 student of mine was remarking that she was an infj. at times, her big personality kind of runs the class. maybe it's the introvert in me, but i just don't think there's anything wrong with trying to protect your space. i'm not saying that witch hunts are a good thing (which sound like an absence of listening, emotional unawareness, not owning one's own needs, etc). but i am saying that there are different groups for everyone, and that it seems okay to me to respect the fact that you need a more specific admission group. especially if you are really sensitive to alienation, or you want to have shared goals for the group, or anything like that. sharing purpose is a big part of why people come together, too.
with all that said, i've never belonged to an infj only group. they never seemed engaging to me, and i always seemed to find more legit (for me) interlocutors here or in other spaces based on shared interest. i mean, ultimately, there seems to be a lot of head type energy on this site, which supports a really engaging kind of shared inquiry. generally speaking, i enjoy interacting with np types the most anyway. i certainly feel incredibly strong solidarity with a few infjs, but that feeling is still a rather rare occurrence for the majority of the others, claimed or otherwise. in all actuality, i feel more consistent solidarity with e5s. enneagram self-typing generally seems a bit better. jungian is really difficult to find stable perspective to observe. i mean, for me, it's holding up individuals next to each other again and again until it starts to come into focus, and observing little details that can never by themselves be enough.