INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

“A somewhat strident message about why I write: If you think that money will protect you from potential pain and suffering, you are misguided. Money will certainly oil the wheels and give you a more comfortable ride but, when it comes to loss, pain, and suffering—when that hits, money will not get you out of it. Beauty fades, youth grows older, things change, success is relative. Love? Do you really know what that is? Have you gone beyond your own ego to find out? Do you know how many old people are fading away in geriatric homes, institutions, or stuck in some isolated little apartment somewhere? In this society, they are marginalised. They are out, finished. They are you/me/us some time down the line. If you are poor, who will value you? In this society, you count for almost nothing. If you are sick, or weak, or disabled in some way, will you be treated with respect, empathy, or dignity? And the religious institutions, the governments, the power brokers, the corporations, the media. Do they care? Are they compassionate? Are they humane, decent? We have our heads in the sand. I write to communicate what I truly feel. The outrage, the disappointment, the frustration, the sadness, the confusion. And I wonder—am I the only one who feels this way? Apparently not.” —Annie Lennox

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I’d been living in London when my world turned upside down and I’d had to come home. By the time my plane landed back in Sydney, all I had left was a carry on bag full of clothes and a world of troubles. No one to welcome me back, no place to call home. I was a tourist in my hometown.

Standing there in the arrivals terminal, watching other passengers meeting their waiting friends and family, with open arms and smiling faces, hugging and laughing together, I wanted someone out there to be waiting for me. To be happy to see me. To smile at me. To hug me.

So I got some cardboard and a marker and made a sign. I found the busiest pedestrian intersection in the city and held that sign aloft, with the words “FREE HUGS” on both sides.

And, for 15 minutes, people just stared right through me. The first person who stopped tapped me on the shoulder and told me how her dog had just died that morning. How that morning had been the one year anniversary of her only daughter dying in a car accident. How what she needed now, when she felt most alone in the world, was a hug. I got down on one knee, we put our arms around each other and, when we parted, she was smiling.

Everyone has problems and, for sure, mine haven’t compared. But to see someone who was once frowning smile, even for a moment, is worth it every time.

—Juan Mann

“There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And, while I don’t expect you to save the world, I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary, and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair, and disrespect.” —Nikki Giovanni

Many of us were children or not yet born, but there was a time when having a social conscience superseded personal wealth and popularity in sports, a time when empowerment among elite athletes had nothing to do with economics. You either believed in a cause and took action or you hushed up. In 1968, against the wish of his own nation [Australia], Peter Norman did something.

“I did the only thing I believed was right,” Norman said over a beer six years ago. “I asked what they wanted me to do to help.”

In the photo, he wears a badge identical to those worn by Smith and Carlos, identifying their Olympic Project for Human Rights. But Norman’s participation was more than a token. “While he didn’t raise a fist, he did lend a hand,” was how Smith explained it.

“Any other white guy, I don’t think he would have had the courage to go through with it,” Carlos said yesterday. “Our lives were threatened. We were being demonized in the media. People were saying we wanted the destruction of society instead of what we really wanted, equal rights. I just don’t think most white individuals would have been strong enough to make that commitment.

“At least me and Tommie had each other when we came home,” he added. “When Peter went home, he had to deal with a nation by himself. He never wavered, never denied that he was up there with us for a purpose and he never said ‘I’m sorry’ for his involvement. That’s indicative of who the man was.”

The Americans discussed their plan with Norman, then a 26-year-old physical education teacher and Salvation Army officer, before the ceremony. When Carlos realised he had forgotten his black gloves, Norman suggested the two share Smith’s pair. He then asked what he could do to support them, and Carlos managed to get an additional badge, which Norman attached to his track suit, over his heart. After the ceremony, Norman explained himself simply: “I believe that every man is born equal and should be treated that way.”

“I couldn’t see why a black man wasn’t allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy,” Norman said. “That was just social injustice that I couldn’t do anything about from where I was, but I certainly abhorred it.”

[…]

Norman last saw Smith and Carlos last year, when San Jose State University, California, unveiled a statue, based on the photo, of its two alumni. Typically, he downplayed his involvement. “People don’t realise that they sacrificed their lives for a cause they believed in, and it was peaceful and non-violent,” he said. “I was glad I was with them.”

Read Full Article: Peter Norman
Read Full Article: Clenched Fists, Helping Hand

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” —Dorothea Lange

“A grocery store check-out clerk once wrote to advice-columnist Ann Landers to complain that she had seen people buy ‘luxury’ food items, like birthday cakes and bags of shrimp, with their food stamps. The writer went on to say that she thought all those people on welfare who treated themselves to such non-necessities were ‘lazy and wasteful.’

“A few weeks later, Landers’ column was devoted entirely to people who had responded to the grocery clerk. One woman wrote:

“‘I didn’t buy a cake, but I did buy a big bag of shrimp with food stamps. So what? My husband had been working at a plant for fifteen years when it shut down. The shrimp casserole I made was for our wedding anniversary dinner and lasted three days. Perhaps the grocery clerk who criticized that woman would have a different view of life after walking a mile in my shoes.’

“Another woman wrote:

“‘I’m the woman who bought the $17 cake and paid for it with food stamps. I thought the check-out woman in the store would burn a hole through me with her eyes. What she didn’t know is the cake was for my little girl’s birthday. It will be her last. She has bone cancer and will probably be gone within six to eight months.’

“You never know what other people are dealing with.”

Source

“Traditional Healers are either born with their gifts or have spent much time developing their gifts. Every tribe has some form of traditional healing for their people. The concept behind Native American healing is much different than Western medicine. Native Americans looked at the person as a whole and treated the individual’s entire person instead of focusing on just the illness or ailment. As many of you know, Native Americans believe that everything is interconnected—nature, plants, animals, the Earth, sky and so on. Many Native Americans believe that everything has a spirit. If a person had an illness it was thought to be due in part to a spiritual problem.” more…

“The Hawaiians look at things in terms of energy flow, following the idea that an idea or belief can block energy flow as much as muscle tension can. Lomilomi helps release the blockages, whilst at the same time giving the energy new direction. Thus Lomilomi is not just a physical experience, it also facilitates healing on the mental, emotional and spiritual levels as well. The Hawaiians view all aspects of the body as one and believe that the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual are all part of the ‘whole’ self. When healing occurs on one level, it impacts on all levels. Rather than viewing the client as someone to ‘be fixed,’ a Lomilomi practitioner views each person as a being to be assisted in returning to harmony and balance. It is important to remember that the practitioner does not heal but is the facilitator for the healing, creating a safe place for the healing to occur.” more…

INFPs (Healer Idealists) are found in only one percent of the general population though, at times, their idealism leaves them feeling even more isolated from the rest of humanity.*

Empaths
This Gift With People
The Power of Intuition
Society’s Canaries
Stand Up and Show Your Soul

“If the healer is the one who heals us all, who heals the healer?”

The Listeners
Cancer Survivor Learns How to Say “No”
Speak Your Mind, Even if Your Voice Shakes
Empaths
The Black Sheep/Going Against the Grain
The Monastic Option
Loneliness
How I Healed Myself
Innerspace
Healing the Healer
Caring for Unmet Needs
Are You Mature?

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.” —Kahlil Gibran

“They’re an odd couple in every sense, but a monkey and a pigeon have become inseparable at an animal sanctuary in China. The 12-week-old macaque—who was abandoned by his mother—was close to death when it was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Goangdong Province. After being taken to an animal hospital, his health began to improve but he seemed spiritless—until he developed a friendship with a white pigeon.

“The blossoming relationship helped to revive the macaque who has developed a new lease on life, say staff at the sanctuary. Now, the unlikely duo are never far from each other’s side—but they aren’t the only ones to strike up an unusual friendship. Earlier this year, a pig adopted a tiger cub and raised him along with her piglets because his mother couldn’t feed him. And, in 2005, a baby deer named Mi-Lu befriended lurcher Geoffrey at the Knowsley Animal Park in Merseyside after she was rejected by her mother.” Source

“Perhaps the animal spirit is so great that one day it may inspire compassion in the human heart.” —Nan Sea Love

“Some people think only intellect counts—knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. But the functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.” —Dean Koontz

“As the firstborn and first grandson, I was generally the center of attention in my family. Very early, I came to feel that the praise my mother and other relatives lavished on me was the warmest thing in the world. I used it to be self-centered and superior, to feel I should be waited on and adored. If persons outside my family didn’t treat me the way my family did, I saw them as mean and cold. It never occurred to me that I had an obligation…”

Continue reading “Coldness, Warmth & Mistakes”

“Before I met Aesthetic Realism, whenever I saw a very poor person, I am sorry to say that, rather than having compassion, I was angry that I had to think about him at all. I was economically fortunate and didn’t want to think about other people’s suffering. I used the fact that I was pained in other ways to feel I had a right to be unfeeling both to people I knew and those I didn’t know. The greatest kindness was shown to me when Eli Siegel taught me that I had to want to know the feelings, including the pain, of other people in order to like myself.”

Continue reading “What Does a Person Deserve?”

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.” —Chief Seattle

The last piece of advice is to cultivate a sense of empathy. We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.

There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us—the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.

The fact that you’re here and participating in Campus Progress means that most of you have already done this better than most ever will. But, as you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. There’s no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You’ll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what’s going in your own little circle.

They will tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they’re all lazy or weak of spirit. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can’t learn and won’t learn and so we should just give up on them entirely. That the innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else’s problem to take care of.

I hope you don’t listen to this. I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, although you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all of those who helped you get to where you are, although you do have that debt.

It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. And because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential—and become full-grown.

—Source

“INFPs are very aware of social injustice and empathize with the underdog. Their empathy for the underdog and hyper-awareness of social injustice makes them extremely compassionate and nurturing…”*

“INFPs have the ability to see good in almost anyone or anything. Even for the most unlovable the INFP is wont to have pity.”*

“A key word for this type is ‘empathy.’ INFP children will often be the ones to ask their parents why they didn’t give the homeless man spare change, or why that woman is crying.”*

If you’re like me, you get into disputes with narcissists over their casual dishonesty and cruelty to other people. Trying to reform narcissists by reasoning with them or by appealing to their better nature is about as effective as spitting in the ocean. What you see is what you get: they have no better nature. The fundamental problem here is that narcissists lack empathy.

Lacking empathy is a profound disturbance to the narcissist’s thinking (cognition) and feeling (affectivity). Even when very intelligent, narcissists can’t reason well. They don’t understand the meaning of what people say and they don’t grasp the meaning of the written word either. Because so much of the meaning of anything we say depends on context and affect, narcissists (lacking empathy and thus lacking both context and affect) hear only the words.

Narcissists are generally not candidates for conventional analytical treatment, since psychological analysis is a dialogue and narcissism is a soliloquy.

More often than not, it’s the children and other victims of narcissists who often seek psychotherapy in order to come to terms with the damage suffered at the hands of narcissists.

Continue reading “Narcissistic Personality Disorder: How to Recognize a Narcissist”, “Narcissism 101″

For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown timer. When it reached zero, they got a “harmless but painful” electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn’t sweat. They didn’t fear punishment—which, presumably, also holds true outside the laboratory. In Without Conscience, he quotes a psychopathic rapist explaining why he finds it hard to empathize with his victims: “They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don’t really understand it. I’ve been frightened myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.”

In another Hare study, groups of letters were flashed to volunteers. Some of them were nonsense, some formed real words. The subject’s job was to press a button whenever he recognized a real word, while Hare recorded response time and brain activity. Non-psychopaths respond faster and display more brain activity when processing emotionally loaded words such as “rape” or “cancer” than when they see neutral words such as “tree.” With psychopaths, Hare found no difference. To them, “rape” and “tree” have the same emotional impact—none.

Hare once illustrated this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

“I said, ‘Here’s a scene you can use,’” Hare says. “You’re walking down a street and there’s an accident. A car has hit a child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child’s lying on the ground and there’s blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, ‘Oh shit.’ You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you’re not repelled or horrified. You’re just…interested. Then you look at the mother and you’re really fascinated by the mother, who’s emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes, you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother.” He then pauses and says, “That’s the psychopath: somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened.”

Continue reading “How Can You Tell If Someone is a Psychopath?”, “Psychopaths Among Us”, “The Mask of Sanity”

“Several years ago, I was fortunate to meet a lady named Deborah at a fasting clinic in northern California. I had several conversations with Deborah over the course of a year, and what I remember most about her is that her kindness was amazingly genuine; the feeling for me was that she had spent a lifetime enduring great sadness and suffering, and had done much inner work to identify and strive to live according to her ideals.

“One day, I asked Deborah why she chose to eat her meals alone rather than with other fasting guests. After a beat of silence, she told me that she was getting some negative vibes from another guest, and that she felt that it was best for her resting experience to stay away from that energy. I remember her using the word ‘toxic’ to describe the other guest’s energy—not in a malicious way, but with a thoughtful and observational tone.”

“I’ve learned that to keep my sensitivities open and not get demolished by a world full of negative energy, I need to protect my energy. That’s why I got interested—because I have no desire to shut myself off or to become numb or neutral. I want to stay open to the world, but I also had to learn to protect my energy.”

“Through the years, I have encountered people and been involved in events that have had huge impacts, knocked off rough corners, lifted me to the heights of joy, plunged me into the depth of sorrow and anguish, taught me to laugh, especially at myself—in other words, my life experiences and the people with whom I shared them have been my teachers.

“At times, I have felt like a helpless bit of flotsam, at one moment stranded in a placid backwater that knew not, cared not, that I was there, then swept out to be hurled about in an unfeeling sea. At other times, I felt I was being sucked under by strong, unknowing currents toward annihilation. Yet somehow, looking back through my life, with its downs and its ups, its despairs and its joys, I believe that I was following some overall plan—though to be sure there were many times when I strayed from the course. Yet I was never truly lost. It seems to me now that the flotsam speck was being gently nudged or fiercely blown along a very specific route by an unseen, intangible wind. The flotsam speck that was—that is—me.

[…]

“The genes that were handed down to me by my parents were created long, long ago. And my inherited traits were molded by the people and the events surrounding my early years.

[…]

“My mother, Vanne, now aged ninety-four, has always loved to tell stories about my early fascination with animals and concern for their welfare. One of her favorites is of the time when, around the age of eighteen months, I collected a whole handful of earthworms from the London garden and took them to bed with me.

“‘Jane,’ she said, staring at the wriggling collection, ‘if you keep them here they’ll die. They need the earth.’

“So I hurriedly collected up all the worms and toddled back with them into the garden.

“Soon after this, we went to stay with some friends who had a house near a wild rocky beach in Cornwall. When we went down to the sea, I was enthralled by the tide pools and their teeming life. No one realized that the seashells I carried back to the house in my bucket were all alive. When Vanne came up to my room, she found little bright yellow sea snails crawling everywhere—the bedroom floor, up the walls, behind the wardrobe. When she explained that the snails would die when taken from the sea, I became hysterical. The entire household, she says, had instantly to drop what it was doing and help me collect the snails so that they could be rushed back to the sea.”

—Jane Goodall (The Jane Goodall Institute)

I wanted to know what invisible thing compelled a person to read a certain book and turn away from another. Well, he said, he was a 49-year-old executive who’d grown up in a privileged family in New England, and my novel is about a 14-year-old girl who grows up in an underprivileged family on a peach farm in the South. “There couldn’t be two more different worlds,” he said.

Did it come down to this—the discomfort of differences? Do we shy away from books that threaten to tamper with our perceptions and prejudices? Do we unwittingly gravitate to works that we suspect will affirm our own points of view? Are books meant to be places of refuge or remonstration? I’ve noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others. Did the tendency spill into our reading?

“Was reading my novel painful?” I teased.

“Actually, it was,” he said, “but painful in a good way.” He went on to tell me about the surprising connection he’d made with adolescent Lily and the African American women in the book, these people with whom he supposedly shared 600 degrees of separation. “The characters got under my skin,” he confessed. “What can I say? I feel disposed now to the South, to black women and to white girls who need their mothers.”

With these words, he revealed to me a reason to write fiction: because it creates empathy.

Continue reading…

“Sometimes I think of us as society’s canaries. I expect you all remember the stories of what happened in the mines in the 19th century. The little canary was taken down the mines in a cage. If the air was putrid (the system stunk), the little bird would die and this would be a warning sign for the miners to get out. Sometimes we, too, take on the attributes of the canary. We are likely to feel bad air perhaps before anyone else has even noticed that the windows are shut. We are likely to get sick and, sometimes, this can be on behalf of so-called normal people. I like to describe us in a positive way by indicating that we are the exquisitely sensitive ones. If you listen to us you may learn something about the air…” —Merinda Epstein

“MBTI types INFP and INFJ are the predominant types in the HSP community…”*