What I’ve Learned From My Struggles As An INFJ Personality

For the longest time, I felt like there was something wrong with me. I always get lost inside my head for a little bit too long and lose track of time and everything else that’s going on around me.

I’d try to explain to people the ideas that looked so brilliantly clear in my head but what would come out was a garble of words that sounded like the ramblings of a person who was not in full possession of their mental faculties.

I’d know things without any clear explanation as to how I arrived at that particular conclusion and people would think I was delusional. I constantly felt the urge to scream, “You don’t get it!” I felt like I fit in everywhere but belonged nowhere.

Since I struggled to speak my thoughts, I took to writing them down and that became my safe haven. Then I realized that I was an INFJ personality type.

If you’re reading this blog then you can probably relate to some of these things. In this post, I want to share some of my personal experiences with the struggles that come with dominant Introverted Intuition (Ni) and auxiliary Extraverted Feeling (Fe), in the hope that it might help other INFJs.

Lessons I’ve Learned from Understanding My Intuition

A couple of years ago, when I was in college, there was a week when I was really busy and couldn’t interact with my friends. After this week, I met two of my friends for coffee and immediately noticed a shift in the way they interacted with each other.

I wasn’t instantly able to pinpoint what had changed in the time I wasn’t around, but over the next hour, it became glaringly obvious to me that the two of them had started to like each other romantically. Alarm bells started going off in my head because I couldn’t see this ending well for them.

The most frustrating part was that they seemed to be unaware of this shift in their relationship and so I couldn’t address my fears in front of them. I had to watch on helplessly, as both of them danced around each other, completely ignorant of the fact that their relationship had entered dangerous territory.

A month later, I was having dinner with one of them and she broke down in front of me and told me that their relationship had come crashing down and that she was really sorry for keeping it all from me. I had to assure her that she didn’t need to feel guilty for hiding it from me and that I knew it all along but never told her or anyone else in order to respect her privacy.

My prior knowledge of her circumstance gave her more courage to open up to me and consequently that allowed me to help her through her heartbreak.

Dominant Ni can feel like a burden sometimes because we have this knowledge that we don’t know what to do with, but it can actually be a wonderful gift as it allows us to gauge a sensitive situation beforehand and hence we can tread carefully.

Lessons that I’ve learned from this incident and similar experiences are:

Lesson 1: Don’t intervene in a situation immediately, watch it play out a little bit

As much as you love your friends and naturally want to protect them from getting hurt, you have to allow people to make their own mistakes. This is not only to allow them to learn but also to preserve your own relationship with them.

If you step in on impulse, it might affect the other person’s view of you because you don’t have solid evidence to support your observations. In most cases, the people directly involved are unaware of their emotions. Your intervention at this point, no matter how good your intentions are, will only lead to unnecessary complications.

Lesson 2: Let people come to you for advice

When somebody takes the initiative to approach you, it shows a willingness on their part to accept advice. This way they will be more receptive to your point of view on the matter and the suggestions that you have to offer. In this case, the room for animosity is minimal and a solution can be reached in a healthy way.

Lessons I’ve Learned From Understanding My Extraverted Feeling

Similar to Ni, the INFJs Fe can cause problems too because it leads to the absorption of others’ feelings.

One day, I was going through my YouTube recommendations and happened to come across the channel of a person suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. The channel was fairly new and had only six videos, so I binge watched all of them.

For the next few days, I had flashes of traumatic feelings and extended stretches of depressive moods. This is because I had been directly affected by the mood and experience of the person in the videos.

Another time, before going to sleep I was checking my Twitter feed and I came across a clip of a band that I follow. The members of the band were messing around and teasing each other and one of these comments happened to hurt a particular member.

The hurt was not obvious but I happened to pick up what they were feeling because I was tuned into them. This comment ruined my mood for the rest of the night and I couldn’t sleep well. The sullen mood even carried itself until half of the next day. For me, this was an indirect trigger.

If you struggle with absorbing harmful emotions that are not your own, I would suggest that you:

• Recognize what is triggering you: If there is a certain pattern to your mood shifts, it’s more likely that there is a particular stimulus that is causing them. It’s important to dig a little deeper to find out what your trigger is so that you can deal with it more effectively.
• Make rules for yourself: Once you’ve recognized your trigger, make rules for yourself that would eliminate the effect of it. When I learned what was causing my mood shifts, I stayed away from watching videos that I know would affect me and for the indirect ones, I made rules to limit my social media usage before I go to bed. Since I go to sleep after midnight, I stop using my phone at 10:00 p.m. This way I am minimizing the window of opportunity for these negative emotions to crawl through.

These methods work when there’s a particular source that’s feeding the emotions. However, often these triggers aren’t recognizable.

There is a great Personality Hacker Podcast that offers valuable advice on managing the constant influx of emotions that INFJs experience. While I haven’t mastered the process, I am learning.

My hope is that some part my story resonates with you and encourages you to see these personality traits not as burdens, but like the gifts that they actually are.

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