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In this episode, Joel and Antonia talk about which Myers-Briggs cognitive function is more selfish “Harmony” (Extraverted Feeling) or “Authenticity” (Introverted Feeling).
In this podcast you’ll find:
- Joel defines selfishness as taking more than you should.
- Antonia defines selfishness as making sure you get yours first.
- Extraverted Feeling “Harmony” Fe – All FJs and TPs
- Introverted Feeling “Authenticity” Fi – All FPs and TJs
- Fi is selfish for the individual.
- Fe is selfish for the collective.
- Fe may define selfishness as individuating away from the collective.
- Fi thinks it’s selfish to make everyone assimilate.
- Fe finds it rewarding when someone gets their needs met.
- Fe also takes a hit if someone isn’t getting their needs met.
- Fe uses other people’s emotions to calibrate if everyone’s needs have been met sufficiently.
- To a Fe user, Fi does feel selfish because they are taking more energetic resource than they are allowed.
- Why is it okay to sacrifice inner turmoil over group turmoil?
- Fe allows everybody to have a bad day as long as everyone agrees that they take turns.
- Fi sometimes forgets that other people have struggles too and need a turn in the bitch fest.
- Fi sometimes wants everybody else to focus on their problems and solve them.
- Fe can be a sickly sweet commandant who condescends to others and forces them to do things their way.
- Fi can’t understand why anyone would suppress who they are for the group’s benefit.
- Fe sacrifices themselves every day for the group’s benefit.
- Fe creates a system where everybody gets their time/day to be special. And the rest of us acknowledge when it is our day and when it is not.
- Fi doesn’t understand why they need to assimilate for the benefit of everyone.
- We all have to take the hit on occasion.
- Fe does more emotional labor than the other types, so they notice when things are imbalanced.
- Sometimes we project selfishness on to people who have permitted themselves to do what we haven’t. So, it’s a sort of envy.
- Fe: “I wish I had permission to take for myself.”
- Fe can learn from Fi that they need to acknowledge their needs freely.
- Individuals matter, and they need to acknowledge their needs eventually.
- Fe users can become passive-aggressive, angry, and resentful against the people around them who seem to take, take, take.
- What Fe fails to realize is they are the ones who created the situation.
- It becomes a false virtue for Fe users to sacrifice to others while hiding feelings of anger and resentment.
- Resentment’s root is in envy.
- Fe hates feeling negative emotions about others, so instead of stacking resentment maybe they can learn from the actions of the Fi user.
- “They’re giving themselves permission to have those feelings and be disruptive, and I need to give myself the permission to do the same thing on occasion.”
- Less mature Fe wants us all to buy into the same reality.
- Fe teaches us that even if we can’t find compassion for ourselves, we can still be compassionate to others.
- Fi can feel emotionally cavalier to Fe because Fi assumes everybody can deal with their emotional experience.
- Fe is more gentle with people’s emotions, but they tend to overdo the nurturing and over-protecting.
- Over-protecting is selfish of Fe because they are protecting themselves from having to see someone else in pain.
- Our egos are the manifestation of selfishness.
- So, our way is always going to appear better to us than someone else’s way.
- Selfishness is not the product of a cognitive function.
- Selfishness is the product of the individual.
- All of us are selfish.
- We have thrived as a species because we are selfish and have a will to live and dominate.
- We accuse each other of selfishness but rarely admit it to ourselves.
- Fe has its finger on the pulse of how serving the group helps serve self.
- The more seasoned Fe gets, the more it will bring in Ti and need less input from others.
- It’s common for younger Fe users to conflate harmony with agreement.
- When Fe is caught up in something symbiotic, it wants to share it.
- Fi has to get good at knowing the sweet spot.
- “Most of me is on board, so it’s good.”
- Fe assumes everyone is going to be on board.
- Fe feels good when everybody is experiencing the same emotion.
- Fi wants to make sure it won’t regret doing something that runs contrary to its values.
- Project positive intent on others.
- Fi can learn from Fe and vice versa.
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50 comments
Great discussion! I’m an ENTP mom and definitely related to using my weak FE to prioritize the needs of the collective, without concern for my own. In my case, that means ESFJ daughter, INFP daughter, ENFP daughter, (and a few more grown & married children) plus, my INFP husband.
I have found that my FI users can start trying to use the group to deal with their feelings if they have not done enough processing in their alone time. Being alone isn’t sufficient; they also must actually use their time to “feel the feels.”
And I do have a sickly sweet commandant child who is learning how to respect boundaries, which is also challenging me to learn to have better boundaries and teach them.
One thing we do in our group that helps us stay on the same team: while I’m prioritizing the group’s needs (FE), including my FI husband, he has my back and includes my needs as part of his FI – as if we are one person – so that I do get my needs met now, too. This kind of ensures I will have resources for his needs later, so it is a virtuous cycle. Otherwise, he has learned I will run out of energy and there won’t be any fun for him.
Despite trying to sense this happening, I’m completely unaware of it until after the fact, seeming to render me with no monitor for my energy while I’m concerned with the group’s needs.
His willingness to do this depends on how much of his own FI he has processed, but he has realized thanks to the car model, that my 3 yr old SI will be a problem I need help with as long as we have kids at home.
It works for the most part! Thanks again for the light you’re bringing!
Antonia briefly mentioned that an extroverted Fe user probably struggles more with the whole “forcing everyone to agree” dynamic than an introverted Fe user. This has definitely been my experience as an INFJ. My idealized harmony world is exactly what Joel described- “Why can’t we all just accept each other, even though we believe/think/act differently?” Though I guess that’s my Ni showing, my drive to understand is stronger than my desire to harmonize.
I do want to say that I think that behavior that Joel kept coming back to of how certain Fe users will try to force everyone to conform to the group just because it’s “the group” is less about Fe and more about just being dogmatic. I have seen Fi users be equally as dogmatic when they take up a personal cause. I’m thinking of that incredibly annoying vegan girl we all know. Yeah… her. What being dogmatic looks like is different between Fi and Fe users but both can be equally as controlling and completely disallowing of “otherness”.
Other thoughts on the INFJ’s specific relationship to Fi/Fe.
I’ve always deeply appreciated Fi users for a few reasons.
1) I’m not very in touch with my feelings so seeing Fi in action often makes me have epiphany moments of “Ohhh maybe that’s what’s going on for me too.” Like I think Joel said “What’s most personal is most universal.” I don’t know if all Fe users realize that the principal also works in reverse! Fi users use the self to learn about others, and Fe can use others to learn about the self.
2) My Ni means that I don’t want to just meet the needs of others, I want to meet the needs of Humanity. In order to do that, I need to really understand the system that is Humanity. NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, is more in touch with all the intricacies and dark corners of Humanity than Fi users. So I love them for that too. I love that they are willing to go to emotional places that a lot of other types aren’t willing to go. Because the reality is that those dark shadows are a big player in the system. I think of Fi users as the divers who are willing to go deep into the ocean and bring back interesting new data for me that I can then sort and analyze on the (much comfier for me) dry land and use to make life easier for everyone else. Fi are emotional explorers. Without Fi we would just be suppressing all that darkness and being passive aggressive and exploding at random times in murderous rages with no understanding of why.
3) My introverted self really empathizes with their desire to remain an individual and not be forced to merge with groups “just because”. I don’t believe in harmony for it’s own sake. If literally everyone in the world decided that it was time to go back to human sacrifices to appease the old world gods my Ti would have a definite problem with that. I don’t just want whatever everyone else wants. I want what’s good for humankind, for something like The Ultimate Good, as much as I can conceive of that with my limited capacity. That investigation has to start at the individual human level and include as many individual human perspectives as possible and treat them all as containing valuable information.
Also, I see a lot of Fi users above saying that Fi is more selfish than Fe. Simply because they spend less time thinking about others or think about their own desires first.
I think this is a simplification. Fe is 100% just as selfish.
First of all, most of the time, I want to create harmony because I feel uncomfortable around negative emotions. It’s just as selfish for me to not want to be uncomfortable and to try to change that outcome as it is for you to do something that makes me feel uncomfortable.
People think I’m super nice, for instance, because I do a lot of work and plan and prepare things. The reality is that I don’t want to deal with negative emotions so I plan ahead for all potentials for negative emotions to arise and eliminate as many of those possibilities as I can.
Or they think I’m nice because I do nice things for them because I like them. But people feeling positively towards you is just as self-gratifying as having someone do something nice for you.
I think of Fi as the desire to survive as an individual, and Fe as the desire to survive as a species. They are both ultimately rooted in selfishness. I think perhaps the only differentiation I could make is that Fi is more “short-term” (what feels good to me personally in this moment?) and Fe is more “long-term” (what promotes good dynamics and ensures lots of good moments?).
Both perspectives are in my opinion 1) selfish and 2) completely necessary.
Thank you guys again for another interesting podcast.
Forgive me for going slightly off-topic, but I’m starting to think I experience some confusion over Fe vs Fi due to my enneagram type being ‘phobic’ sp 6 (based on the Beatrice Chestnut/Naranjo model) that seems to carry a quasi-Fe ‘flavor’, which isn’t ‘proper’ Fe (in and of itself) but can bear a superficial resemblance to it. The mindset is something like ‘the world is very hostile with loads of booby traps and I need to be like-able or I’ll be cast out on my own into a dark pit of doom’.
I also think that when you try to compare Fe and Fi it is difficult to avoid biasing Fi towards enneagram 4 or maybe sx6, in making Fi sound more ‘edgy’ or ‘difficult’. Certainly I am often internally very edgy, but I am restrained in expressing this as I hate being in ‘open’ conflict with people, unless perhaps I don’t have to see them again.
I can also be relieved to find out that I wasn’t the only person to have a particular opinion, and I think again this is more down to e-type as well as a personal history of feeling invalidated, but this has improved with age.
I loved the exploration here but I was disappointed that for much of the conversation, Fe was boiled down to trying to persuade or convince people to adopt your point of view. In many of your other discussions about Harmony, it’s been described as wanting to get other peoples’ individual needs met to harmonise the group dynamic. I think there’s a distinction between the two, and that instead of Fe being ‘selfish’ because it wants people to adopt its point of view, Fe is selfish because it wants social situations to be harmonious which is both socially and personally advantageous.
Fi type here. I think the time comment is on point, but at least for me that’s still not the whole story. I am less proactive in seeking out opportunities to put time into others, but when I do I make sure I give them my full attention, and make sure they feel comfortable, respected and understood. So less quantity of time, but certainly not less quality. I have observed similar traits from other mature Fi users I know too.