Sojourner's Fray
New member
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2020
- Messages
- 5
Heyo, been doing a lot of Thinking[SUP]TM[/SUP] lately and I'm hoping for a little outsider input on my type.
This turned out longer than I was expecting, so in short: I'm emotionally repressed as a result of recurrent invalidation of feelings, typed as INTP > INFP > INTP > INTJ > ENTP > INTJ over the years, never totally clicked with their narratives, am now realising there's a very good chance I'm an NF type who used rationalisation as a mirrored defense mechanism; don't really relate to the INFP experience or its order of functions, used to think I was a hardcore introvert but insecurity and anxiety do odd things to the behaviour, so ENFP is looking a lot like home.
A bit of backstory:
When I first started reading into MBTI and taking tests (mostly the one on 16personalities, though I did try a couple others), I was consistently typed as an INTP. A couple years in, going through some very unstable times in life, I got a couple outlier INFP results which I never totally related to, and over the past two years or so I've been questioning everything more because I really just don't relate to the typical INTP experience and narrative - I looked into functions a lot more and read into INTJ and settled on that, even though I have tendencies much more typical of a P type when disregarding functions. Over the past year or so, a lot of things have changed for the better in life and I've gotten much more confident in myself to the point that I'm a lot less obvious of an introvert - I questioned an ENTP typing for a while but that didn't quite click either.
Over the past month isolated from everyone (thanks quarantine) I've been uncovering a lot of things I've been repressing. For some context, I have not grown up in the healthiest of families; parents who insist they're fine but I can't remember the last positive interaction I saw between them, a burnt INFJ mother who shows many classic symptoms of depression, an emotionally distant and uncommunicative father who seems like an ISTJ to me, though I don't know for sure, and then my older brother and I - I suspect he's something along the lines of an INTJ, more so now that I'm becoming more certain I'm not an INTJ.
In short, I've been realising I've never really felt like I'm allowed to feel. On the one hand, I have my heavy Te-using brother and father who have always seemed like the stable figures in my life, the ones I've felt the need to catch up with and prove myself in the eyes of. They always seemed like they had their lives together, while my burnt-Fe mother definitely didn't, so I guess I aspired to them - especially my brother - because that's the way I was supposed to be, if I wanted to succeed. They never really acknowledged feeling tendencies as valid so I think I developed a very heavy reliance on Te and repressed a lot of Fi because of it. Meanwhile, feelings were never really met with validation on the other side of the spectrum from my mother, either - I don't know exactly why, I don't think she intended this, but I always heard the message that I wasn't allowed to struggle; there were people worse off than me and I should feel guilty about feeling negative things when I'm so lucky.
In the end, I became a very logical person for many years - consciously suppressed feeling things because I wasn't supposed to feel them, and the role models in my life had never found any good out of feeling. I never really had a close relationship with a healthy feeler to see myself in, so I started mirroring the IxTx's in my life because they seemed like the closest thing to stability I could find. I've read about heavy mirroring tendencies in ENFPs so this makes a lot of sense to me. Good things came when I functioned in Ti and Te dominant ways, so I embraced them and villainized the thought of being an F - when I started getting some INFP typing a couple years ago, the thought of being an F repulsed me because I wasn't supposed to be one, but looking back before all these complexes started developing, I do have a lot of F tendencies. Talking about deeply emotionally intimate things with people I trust energizes me; I speak about life as an art, not an equation, and some friends have been pointing that out to me a lot more lately; I find fulfillment in exploring myself, in reconnecting with parts of myself I'd lost or forgotten, not in understanding the world. I have the classic gifted kid hero complex of being told I'll cure cancer someday, which translated, in my mind, to an obligation to fulfil that potential even though I have very little inherent interest in science. I'm a writer, an artist, I've been told I speak in far too cryptic poetry in english essays that were supposed to be formal, and I advocate for subjective truths in light of the absurd.
At the same time, I've developed this fearing identity complex over the past many years that's recently become a lot more apparent to me. I'm very defensive of my internal sense of identity - when I felt that was threatened, when it was constantly invalidated and people close to me tried to change how I saw myself, I got scared and buried parts of myself because it was easier to stay in control, to bury those parts myself than to watch others bury them for me. Because if people don't really know you, they can't really influence you, change you, take you away from yourself - or that's what I thought, at least, and I know it's not entirely true now, but for a much younger and less matured version of myself, it felt like it worked, so I stuck with it. You can't tell a secret you don't know, so I mirrored the people I aspired to so heavily that I essentially forgot my own internal world. Feelings were outlawed as too confusing and I was deemed undeserving of them. Deeply personal Fi was replaced by a tertiary Te and/or shadow Ti to try to live up to the standards of the stable figures in my life.
And then I started taking myself seriously, met my INFJ best friend who's had a very similar childhood dynamic to mine and has shown me what it's like to a) be a healthy feeler, and b) have my struggles validated, and everything has sort of been thrown into a paradigm shift. One test recently gave me ENFP, and I've been taking more functions tests for the past couple months and I get very similar results every time; very high Ne and Ni, usually very close to one another, sometimes one has a bit of an edge on the other but it's not much of a consistent trend; consistently high Fi; varied results from a bit below average to a bit above average on Ti, Te, Fe, Se, and Si.
The basic deduction I went through was that I knew I led with Ne or Ni - they were always the highest on function tests by far, and the N aspect had been the only consistent independent letter over all my years of type pondering. I knew I had Fi over Fe in my function stack, so all that left was INTJ (Ni Te Fi Se) or ENFP (Ne Fi Te Si). Started reading into ENFP and found things like this:
that describe how my whole fearing identity ordeal blew itself out of proportion pretty perfectly.
I have pretty typical N and P traits when it comes to independent letters, I'm realising I present akin to a T because of a lot of ingrained mirroring, but I have pretty typical F thought processes and very strong Fi now that I've been letting myself indulge it more and welcoming more positive influences into my life, and I'm ambivalent about the I/E. I've become a lot more extroverted as I've become more confident in myself, and I think I can put the feeling drained in large groups of people off to anxiety and some issues I have with an overload of sensory stimulation, because really, I love people - I'm fascinated by them, I can talk to someone one on one for hours about identity, experience of feelings, and intrinsic truth, and it leaves me very energized, as long as the conversation's engaging and it's not in a chaotic, large group setting that sets off my sensory overload tendencies. Looking back, I think I had a more typical ENFP persona as a kid before I became emotionally paralysed, and though I don't have it as distinctly anymore (I'm not classically bubbly and warm, but I have been described as outgoing in recent years with more confidence), I do highkey relate to the ENFP internal world narrative, and as I become more open to parts of myself I'd repressed, I do think I'm taking on a more typical ENFP persona again, just with a higher external manifestation of tertiary Te, because it's been given the chance to develop, mature, and take over in a need for control and defense of identity, a lot more than my repressed Fi.
Reading into the ENFP feels a lot more naturally like home, instead of the house I was supposed want to live in, than things like INTP or INTJ have felt in the past, but at this point the only thing I'm really sure of is that the absolute truths I've been worshipping about myself are turning out to really not be absolutely true.
I was talking through my years-long INTP mistype with a friend earlier and deduced something along these lines to explain it;
Ti - a shadow function kicking in to defend/replace Fi when it felt invalidated/threatened
Ne - naturally there from the dominant ENFP function
Si - inferior ENFP function kicking in to compensate for the internal world feeling empty in light of a suppressed Fi, and seeking to fill that with physical experience (I'm a pretty solid adrenaline junkie)
Fe - the "critical parent" shadow function role being inforced quite heavily by my actual burnt INFJ critical parent's Fe
The INTJ mistype can be explained pretty well by mirroring of my likely INTJ brother, combined with my high Ni and natural Te and Fi.
The INFP mistype seems pretty likely from having the same functions as an ENFP but differently stacked, and though I've considered it, I just don't really relate to the experiences of INFPs I've read, and I think my N function is dominant to my Fi. I also think my Te is more prominant than an inferior function would be.
The ENTP mistype was out of desperation to find something that fit me better than INTJ, but can be explained for basically the same reasons as the INTP mistype, just stacked differently.
I could go on but this seems excessive so I'll leave it there for now. I can provide some screenshots of function/type test results, or more in-depth analysis of anything I've talked about, or my general understanding of my persona, if it would help. I suppose what I'm looking for here is just a wider diversity of input, because I only really have one friend well versed in MBTI to work this through with, and I read a lot about typing and functions but I don't really know how much of my own perception to trust as my own, anymore, or just the result of mirroring perceived stable figures in my life and developing functions that I don't naturally have as a result of it. I guess what I'm wondering is if this whole experience sounds like something that could be a viable ENFP narrative, or if there are some glaring markers that I'm missing that might indicate something else - I do have a tendency to get a bit defensive over identities that I claim, but I'm way too terrified of confrontation to bite, so feel free to offer any insight you might have, because it's all quite welcome. Sorry for how long this got, but thanks for reading if you stuck around this long, and thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to offer!
This turned out longer than I was expecting, so in short: I'm emotionally repressed as a result of recurrent invalidation of feelings, typed as INTP > INFP > INTP > INTJ > ENTP > INTJ over the years, never totally clicked with their narratives, am now realising there's a very good chance I'm an NF type who used rationalisation as a mirrored defense mechanism; don't really relate to the INFP experience or its order of functions, used to think I was a hardcore introvert but insecurity and anxiety do odd things to the behaviour, so ENFP is looking a lot like home.
A bit of backstory:
When I first started reading into MBTI and taking tests (mostly the one on 16personalities, though I did try a couple others), I was consistently typed as an INTP. A couple years in, going through some very unstable times in life, I got a couple outlier INFP results which I never totally related to, and over the past two years or so I've been questioning everything more because I really just don't relate to the typical INTP experience and narrative - I looked into functions a lot more and read into INTJ and settled on that, even though I have tendencies much more typical of a P type when disregarding functions. Over the past year or so, a lot of things have changed for the better in life and I've gotten much more confident in myself to the point that I'm a lot less obvious of an introvert - I questioned an ENTP typing for a while but that didn't quite click either.
Over the past month isolated from everyone (thanks quarantine) I've been uncovering a lot of things I've been repressing. For some context, I have not grown up in the healthiest of families; parents who insist they're fine but I can't remember the last positive interaction I saw between them, a burnt INFJ mother who shows many classic symptoms of depression, an emotionally distant and uncommunicative father who seems like an ISTJ to me, though I don't know for sure, and then my older brother and I - I suspect he's something along the lines of an INTJ, more so now that I'm becoming more certain I'm not an INTJ.
In short, I've been realising I've never really felt like I'm allowed to feel. On the one hand, I have my heavy Te-using brother and father who have always seemed like the stable figures in my life, the ones I've felt the need to catch up with and prove myself in the eyes of. They always seemed like they had their lives together, while my burnt-Fe mother definitely didn't, so I guess I aspired to them - especially my brother - because that's the way I was supposed to be, if I wanted to succeed. They never really acknowledged feeling tendencies as valid so I think I developed a very heavy reliance on Te and repressed a lot of Fi because of it. Meanwhile, feelings were never really met with validation on the other side of the spectrum from my mother, either - I don't know exactly why, I don't think she intended this, but I always heard the message that I wasn't allowed to struggle; there were people worse off than me and I should feel guilty about feeling negative things when I'm so lucky.
In the end, I became a very logical person for many years - consciously suppressed feeling things because I wasn't supposed to feel them, and the role models in my life had never found any good out of feeling. I never really had a close relationship with a healthy feeler to see myself in, so I started mirroring the IxTx's in my life because they seemed like the closest thing to stability I could find. I've read about heavy mirroring tendencies in ENFPs so this makes a lot of sense to me. Good things came when I functioned in Ti and Te dominant ways, so I embraced them and villainized the thought of being an F - when I started getting some INFP typing a couple years ago, the thought of being an F repulsed me because I wasn't supposed to be one, but looking back before all these complexes started developing, I do have a lot of F tendencies. Talking about deeply emotionally intimate things with people I trust energizes me; I speak about life as an art, not an equation, and some friends have been pointing that out to me a lot more lately; I find fulfillment in exploring myself, in reconnecting with parts of myself I'd lost or forgotten, not in understanding the world. I have the classic gifted kid hero complex of being told I'll cure cancer someday, which translated, in my mind, to an obligation to fulfil that potential even though I have very little inherent interest in science. I'm a writer, an artist, I've been told I speak in far too cryptic poetry in english essays that were supposed to be formal, and I advocate for subjective truths in light of the absurd.
At the same time, I've developed this fearing identity complex over the past many years that's recently become a lot more apparent to me. I'm very defensive of my internal sense of identity - when I felt that was threatened, when it was constantly invalidated and people close to me tried to change how I saw myself, I got scared and buried parts of myself because it was easier to stay in control, to bury those parts myself than to watch others bury them for me. Because if people don't really know you, they can't really influence you, change you, take you away from yourself - or that's what I thought, at least, and I know it's not entirely true now, but for a much younger and less matured version of myself, it felt like it worked, so I stuck with it. You can't tell a secret you don't know, so I mirrored the people I aspired to so heavily that I essentially forgot my own internal world. Feelings were outlawed as too confusing and I was deemed undeserving of them. Deeply personal Fi was replaced by a tertiary Te and/or shadow Ti to try to live up to the standards of the stable figures in my life.
And then I started taking myself seriously, met my INFJ best friend who's had a very similar childhood dynamic to mine and has shown me what it's like to a) be a healthy feeler, and b) have my struggles validated, and everything has sort of been thrown into a paradigm shift. One test recently gave me ENFP, and I've been taking more functions tests for the past couple months and I get very similar results every time; very high Ne and Ni, usually very close to one another, sometimes one has a bit of an edge on the other but it's not much of a consistent trend; consistently high Fi; varied results from a bit below average to a bit above average on Ti, Te, Fe, Se, and Si.
The basic deduction I went through was that I knew I led with Ne or Ni - they were always the highest on function tests by far, and the N aspect had been the only consistent independent letter over all my years of type pondering. I knew I had Fi over Fe in my function stack, so all that left was INTJ (Ni Te Fi Se) or ENFP (Ne Fi Te Si). Started reading into ENFP and found things like this:
[from typeinmind.com/nefi]
that describe how my whole fearing identity ordeal blew itself out of proportion pretty perfectly.
I have pretty typical N and P traits when it comes to independent letters, I'm realising I present akin to a T because of a lot of ingrained mirroring, but I have pretty typical F thought processes and very strong Fi now that I've been letting myself indulge it more and welcoming more positive influences into my life, and I'm ambivalent about the I/E. I've become a lot more extroverted as I've become more confident in myself, and I think I can put the feeling drained in large groups of people off to anxiety and some issues I have with an overload of sensory stimulation, because really, I love people - I'm fascinated by them, I can talk to someone one on one for hours about identity, experience of feelings, and intrinsic truth, and it leaves me very energized, as long as the conversation's engaging and it's not in a chaotic, large group setting that sets off my sensory overload tendencies. Looking back, I think I had a more typical ENFP persona as a kid before I became emotionally paralysed, and though I don't have it as distinctly anymore (I'm not classically bubbly and warm, but I have been described as outgoing in recent years with more confidence), I do highkey relate to the ENFP internal world narrative, and as I become more open to parts of myself I'd repressed, I do think I'm taking on a more typical ENFP persona again, just with a higher external manifestation of tertiary Te, because it's been given the chance to develop, mature, and take over in a need for control and defense of identity, a lot more than my repressed Fi.
Reading into the ENFP feels a lot more naturally like home, instead of the house I was supposed want to live in, than things like INTP or INTJ have felt in the past, but at this point the only thing I'm really sure of is that the absolute truths I've been worshipping about myself are turning out to really not be absolutely true.
I was talking through my years-long INTP mistype with a friend earlier and deduced something along these lines to explain it;
Ti - a shadow function kicking in to defend/replace Fi when it felt invalidated/threatened
Ne - naturally there from the dominant ENFP function
Si - inferior ENFP function kicking in to compensate for the internal world feeling empty in light of a suppressed Fi, and seeking to fill that with physical experience (I'm a pretty solid adrenaline junkie)
Fe - the "critical parent" shadow function role being inforced quite heavily by my actual burnt INFJ critical parent's Fe
The INTJ mistype can be explained pretty well by mirroring of my likely INTJ brother, combined with my high Ni and natural Te and Fi.
The INFP mistype seems pretty likely from having the same functions as an ENFP but differently stacked, and though I've considered it, I just don't really relate to the experiences of INFPs I've read, and I think my N function is dominant to my Fi. I also think my Te is more prominant than an inferior function would be.
The ENTP mistype was out of desperation to find something that fit me better than INTJ, but can be explained for basically the same reasons as the INTP mistype, just stacked differently.
I could go on but this seems excessive so I'll leave it there for now. I can provide some screenshots of function/type test results, or more in-depth analysis of anything I've talked about, or my general understanding of my persona, if it would help. I suppose what I'm looking for here is just a wider diversity of input, because I only really have one friend well versed in MBTI to work this through with, and I read a lot about typing and functions but I don't really know how much of my own perception to trust as my own, anymore, or just the result of mirroring perceived stable figures in my life and developing functions that I don't naturally have as a result of it. I guess what I'm wondering is if this whole experience sounds like something that could be a viable ENFP narrative, or if there are some glaring markers that I'm missing that might indicate something else - I do have a tendency to get a bit defensive over identities that I claim, but I'm way too terrified of confrontation to bite, so feel free to offer any insight you might have, because it's all quite welcome. Sorry for how long this got, but thanks for reading if you stuck around this long, and thanks in advance for any insight you might be able to offer!
Last edited:
welcome to the forum! 
