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In this episode Joel and Antonia dive deep into the needs and desires of the INFP personality type.
In this podcast on INFP Personality Type you’ll find:
- Why are INFPs misunderstood?
- The cognitive function is a mental process that helps you learn information or make decisions.
- The 4 letter code tells you how your brain is wired. It’s like an entrance on how you learn processes.
- Authenticity – Is a way that you (as an INFP) make your decisions which is more inclined what resonates with you the most as a person.
- INFPs understand emotions on a whole different level.
- Questions to ethics become very intriguing to INFPs. For example: “what determines an ethical or moral action?”
- Authenticity is very in touch with the subjective human experience.
- Authenticity is where we humans find conscience. Because that’s when we ask, “how do we honor people’s individuality?”
- Oftentimes, INFPs become masters of human experience in general.
- The ability to determine that something resonates is a maturity of the Authenticity process. As it matures, it understands that not everything they experience is the same as everyone.
- Do INFPs truly want to be understood?
- Nobody could be 100% understand them apart from themselves.
- INFPs feel being marginalized and dismissed way more than being misunderstood.
- INFPs seek validation.
- We want to acknowledge that they have a specific type of pain based from their personality type.
- Authenticity type should be balanced with Exploration. Exploration (the co-pilot function) is about advanced pattern recognition in the outside world – thinking behind the curtain.
- If you want more description or definition, check out our episode “Introverted Intuition VS Extraverted Intuition”.
- Your superpowers are developed when you learn to master your co-pilot.
- Art is one of the places where INFPs thrive.
- Art is a communication of feeling and INFPs simply flourish in this context. They create art that’s impactful.
- For INFPs, they tend to recall how they felt/reacted in the past.
- They have the ability to mirror emotions. They don’t need to mirror emotions in real time. For example, the can look at an art piece and mirror the emotion to themselves.
- Authenticity people tend to recall how they feel/how they imagined they would feel and then instantly replicating the emotion inside them.
- The emotional language can be transferred in long extensive periods of time.
- In order to be authentic, you need to have a mature and vast understanding of how the world works.
- Intent: The Darker aspect of Authenticity. INFPs tend to try to give a reason that’s combated with logic.
- INFPs tend to defend their intent, because they see a wide array of positive and negative intent. They understand how people can easily go and slip into bad intent.
- Healthy INFPs view everything has positive intent.
- Being able to understand that darkness is universal and part of the human experience will help you accept yourself.
- How to go about making a living as an INFP?
- Getting something done can sometimes be very challenging for INFPs.
- INFPs have the desire to make an impact and be an inspirational leader. Oftentimes, they will disregard the passion they have. Passion is extremely important.
- Authenticity people can have the tendency to marginalize people. Make sure you do what you’re passionate with. Check in with yourself what you really want.
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215 comments
Hi Susan,
As an INFJ, I highly relate to your “dark heart” statements. All emotions are right emotions, so they can’t be bad or evil emotions. But there can definitely be dark intentions, if you define them by having the intention to corrupt or hurt someone (even oneself). I was not raised religiously, although my INFP husband was. I very much experience a pull toward corruption when exposed to a lot of violent material in movies and books. It’s like it gets inside me and takes on a life of its own, and I have to put effort into releasing the emotions that come up (through exercise, sex, writing, music, etc), without actually letting the dark intentions cloud my authentic alignment of values.
I think certain kinds of developmental trauma lend themselves to being susceptible to these dark vortexs that are a pain-in-the-arse to climb out of. Even being humiliated regularly with statements like, “your grades aren’t good enough,” by parents has been scientifically shown to damage brain development and brain response for life. This trend can be reversed through practices shown to repair the brain damage (such as deep-breathing yoga or qi gong), but most people never do heal fully, of course. I’ve got an ACE score of 5 (which is high, and bad, and indicates I suffered significant trauma as a child), but despite that, I’ve done enough self-healing work to function like a normal person. Nevertheless, I think where my mind has been influences this trend toward dark-heart paths.
Also, because my auxiliary function (co-pilot) as an INFJ is extroverted feeling (harmony), I readily pick up on feelings from others. I notice the underlying resentment, spitefulness, anger, etc. I often don’t know what it is about, but the more internal work I do on myself, and the more I explore my own inner workings, the more I can read in other people’s faces.
I wonder how practices like hypnosis affect each type, because it seems like hypnosis allows me to get much closer to my own emotions, in a more direct way that is similar to how my INFP husband seems to feel his emotions.
Anyway, I thought these thoughts might bring you some comfort in knowing you’re not alone.
~ Raederle, INFJ
Thank you for sharing Sumiko. I feel my INFP husband could learn a lot from embracing a lot of your techniques. He needs a lot of variety and imaginative interactions to feel alive and invigorated and he has terrible anxiety about ever being pinned into doing repetitive work. I sometimes worry that he will never find satisfying work (that pays).
I know I’m late to this conversation but I got here as fast as I could. Thanks for your great production and the obvious hard work you put into it.
One thing I don’t believe you discussed is what I refer to as the multi-faceted nature of INFP’s. I assume it applies to the general population of INFP personality type like it applies to me. One difficulty people seem to have in connecting with me is that I have many emotional templates under which I operate and when I’m using one, it’s sometimes difficult to access the others.
It’s hard to say from day-to-day (sometimes hour-by-hour) whether I will feel vulnerable, driven, indifferent, silly, angry, etc. All of those facets of my personality are tempered, somewhat, by my underlying INFP nature. However, if you show up and try to appeal to my vulnerable side when I’m feeling driven you will have a hard time connecting with me. In fact, sometimes my current self doesn’t connect well with my historical self and I just have to wait until I phase back into that facet of my myself.
I suppose you could think of it like a disco ball, and you will see reflections based on which part of the surface is currently under the light. All the little mirrors are unique. I think this explains part of my tendency for procrastination with periodic bouts of high productivity. It depends on which part of the ball is getting reflected.
I have been described as a “highly functioning” INFP. Most people are surprised to learn I type as INFP, but I’ve never typed as anything else. I’m a successful, self-employed professional with a very demanding profession that requires me to schedule every minute of my work day. That can obviously be a soul-sucking situation. I survive by letting my imagination loose and I turn my mundane jobs into adventures and conquests in my mind. I ALWAYS use checklists and procedures to keep me from missing things. I use every little life-hack I can to eliminate boring, repetitive aspects of my work and I embrace technology because it helps me survive in this INFP-unfriendly world of commerce. I have the structure in place to allow me to distract my mind all the time. I have more specialties than most of my peers, but it allows for diversity in my work, which is absolutely essential. I leave my toughest work for times when I’m in a facet that can focus and handle it with ease. Procrastination usually works to my advantage because of this.
It is somewhat difficult for people in my life to reconcile the intimidating, capable version of myself with the version that watches silly cartoons and cries. It’s difficult for me to deal with their confusion and it’s a challenge for me to keep from withdrawing from the world because of the turning of the “disco ball”.
I’m not sure people who are not INFP can comprehend the magnitude of the vulnerability required for an INFP to be genuine with them in all or most facets of themselves.
I applaud you for highlighting the intensity of the emotions of INFP’s and touching on the depth of their imaginations in processing those emotions. I too thought I was a terrible person for processing thoughts like I did and was led by my perception of society to believe I was just broken in some way.
One word I don’t recall you using is “restrained”. I don’t know if I am unique in this but I feel restrained, almost constantly, by my environment and social interactions. When I reveal myself to others, the thoughts I have in processing my emotions and my dreams of what I would like to accomplish or experience, just a small amount of sharing very quickly leads to a large amount of surprise, disbelief or people simply marveling at me. I love to pioneer, experiment, change things, imagine things differently and ask why things need to be like they are. I have found that there doesn’t seem to be a large audience for this line of thinking. That discourages me from pursuing what I really want.
The picking up emotions, and the ability to change those emotions as well as being able to feel what the other person is going through is an empath. It can be utterly exhausting, so if they take the time to change how you’re feeling, know it’s because they care THAT much.
Far as the whole being misunderstood, it’s not so much that. It’s more the fact that people just don’t get it. And when asked by what is meant, the reply, or response is just that: They just don’t get it.
I know this is an old post but I’ve recently started listening to PH so I’ve been exploring old content. I am an INFP and I’ve been reflecting on what you said in this podcast about intent, and about INFPs being concerned about having their intent questioned. I agree with this but I want to add another element which links back to what you say about emotional akido. I believe that the reason we are so good at emotional akido is because we are very attuned to the reasons behind why people are feeling the way they are. I can sense not only what someone is feeling but can almost always pinpoint the reason. There is always a reason behind an emotion and majority of times people aren’t really very aware of these themselves. I believe that even though it’s not fully within my conscious awareness, when I reflect on it I can see that I inherently know why someone is feeling the way they do and it’s the reason that I target when I perform emotional akido on someone. If I can give them a reason to feel slightly differently about something then their emotional response follows through. Majority of times I do it to make people feel more positive because that will help them to move forward when they are stuck in a negative space.
The word “intent” jars with me slightly and I struggled to identify with what you were saying about our preoccupation with intent being because we see all of the good and bad intent in everything. The word intent implies a level of awareness and control in the process and I believe that our emotions are so much more subtle than this and less under our own volition in most circumstances. However, when I changed the word from “intent” to “reason” I could see exactly how this works for me. I guess when it comes to having to justify ourselves to others for me this is simply because each emotional response has a reason behind it and if the reason is a good or “pure” one then I feel less guilty for pushing my agenda on someone else. Feeling guilty can also make me very defensive! Most of the time forcing my agenda on others completely goes against my general philosophy in life.
I haven’t read through all of the other comments so apologies if someone else has already clarified this distinction. I just had a light bulb moment on this and felt I had to share it. Many thanks for all of your work and insight into personality typology, it’s been life changing.