INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

Sponge-like people absorb whatever is in their environment. They readily take in what’s around them and think they have no choice but to become like the people around them. Sponge-like people see themselves as victims. They think like victims, i.e. “You made me the depressed person I’ve become!” “What can I do? I had no choice.” “If I were to do what is important to me, you would be upset with me.”

Unlike sponge-like people, stone-like people are seemingly immune to their environment. They are cold and distant. They appear to be unfeeling. They seem to be apathetic and indifferent to the feelings, needs, and desires of the people in their lives. Nothing seems to faze them. Stone-like people are emotionally-repressed people. They are neither in tune with, nor aware of, their own feelings and emotional needs. They have cut themselves off from their deeper feelings. Consequently, they are hardly mindful of the feelings, needs and desires of the people in their lives.

Unlike sponge-like and stone-like people, sugar-like people are involved people. Often, they are a pain to both stone-like and sponge-like people. They nag, cajole, scream at, or sensitively nudge, encourage or challenge the stone-like people to come out of their shells, to own up to their feelings and needs and start relating to others. They encourage sponge-like people to stop blaming, to give up the attitude of inertia, and to start taking responsibility for their lives. They light candles instead of cursing the darkness. They know life can be better, people can be more caring, and we all can be more loving. They are determined to leave their world a little better place than how they found it.

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“What can you do about your own personality? After all, you are who you are. Carl Jung said that we are born with a ‘true personality type’ and stuck with it for life. Whether that’s so or not, a personality is a raw thing and therefore a ‘work in progress.’ What we do with it is up to us and will determine the direction and success of our life because our personality largely determines our attitude.

“Regardless of what we start with, over our lifetime our personality can remain immature and become atrophied, or it can mature and grow to reach its potential. Let me give you a simple example. An immature extrovert will continue to use his/her behavioural preferences to elevate her/himself at the expense of others—often by putting others down. On the other hand, a mature extrovert will endeavour to build others up and allow them space to grow and develop, to the advantage of all.

“Similarly, an immature introvert will seek to withdraw, to hide and will become self-absorbed. Conversely, the mature introvert will usually seek to include others and to use his/her own introspection to help others become more self-analytical. Whether extrovert or introvert, the mature personality develops positive attitudes which encompass those around them.” —Adam Le Good

A person may be chronologically-mature, but emotionally-immature. A person may also be intellectually-mature, but emotionally-immature. There is no correlation between chronological age, intellectual age, social age, or emotional age. Just because someone is “grown-up” by chronological age doesn’t mean they are “grown-up” emotionally.

Chronological-maturity and intellectual-maturity combined with emotional-immaturity is not uncommon—and potentially dangerous. A person whose body and mind is adult, but whose emotional development is that of a child can wreak havoc in the lives of others as well as himself.

Your relationships are dependent upon your total emotional development. The best way to understand your relationships is to understand yourself. A relationship is only as well-adjusted as the two participants. The single most important task for any person wishing to improve his relationships is to increase his self-esteem and emotional maturity. To determine the level of your emotional maturity, compare your behavior to the symptoms of emotional immaturity and the characteristics of emotional maturity.

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The Awakening:
By Sonny Carroll

I actually began writing this piece in 1996, shortly after coming out of a long drawn-out and painful breakup. I was a total mess. My life was in shambles and as I tried to make some sense of what had happened, and why, I began to write “The Awakening.” This piece is a compilation of all the lessons I learned and the observations I made about myself, about other people and their relationships, and of the wisdom that my most dear friend has shared with me over countless cups of tea.

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“The potential ways in which an INFP can irritate others include: avoiding conflict and not giving forthright criticism when it is needed…”*

“INFPs do not like conflict and go to great lengths to avoid it. This trait sometimes makes them appear irrational and illogical.”*

“INFPs seldom confront situations directly, in part because they do not like conflict.”*

“They have unconsciously diminished their presence in order to find a niche in their family and a place in the world. To be seen and heard, they feel they must take care of, or bend around, others.” Read Full Article

“I’m melting! I’m melting. Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?!” —Wicked Witch to Dorothy

“I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” —Harry Truman

“‘People are afraid of me,’ says [Sandra] Bernhard, when I mention that some people really dislike her. ‘People don’t like the truth. They don’t like to be called on their bullshit. They’d rather be nice. They’d rather hide behind the pretension of being nice and being nice doesn’t really get you anywhere in this world. It’s a cop-out. It always has been. Being nice is bullshit. Being real, being concerned, being passionate, loving, all comes from very strong emotions.’” —Jonathan Van Meter

“Comfort is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being comfortable.” —Swami Vevekananda

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” —Winston Churchill

“Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous; you get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.” —Margaret Thatcher

“Every now and then when you’re onstage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.” —Shelley Winters

“If I was president, I’d get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday, and buried on Sunday.” —Wyclef Jean

“I love you and, because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.” —Pietro Aretino

“I’m constantly asked about my life and why I worked in Amsterdam, or lived in Germany, or graduated from high school in Switzerland, or hung out in Africa as a 17 year old kid, or met my soulmate, Steuart. My answer is always the same: ‘Wait and read my book…’ That book has been in the offing for several years now, but I’m always putting it off for one reason or another, until recently. Over the years, I’ve written about 100 pages and am now trying to figure out how to write the book of my life and all the people in it, without ticking off all the ‘famous’ folk that I know by writing what I really think/know about them—not what they want the world to think. The other day I told Steuart I think I have to wait for all these people to die first—or I’ll have to be dead before the book is published to avoid the outrage some of my experiences will evoke. People don’t like the truth. They don’t like to be told they are petty and jealous, especially when they are petty and jealous. But in the words of one of my idols, Sandra Boynton, ‘everyone’s entitled to my opinion’ and so the book will be written. I just have to decide if it’s going to be fiction or not. Maybe a combination, thereof, to really drive my detractors crazy.” —Jane Dewar

Related: Much Ado About Nothing, Are You Invisible?, The Challenge of Setting Boundaries, Bully Online, Thru the Looking Glass

“An INFP is a perfectionist who will rarely allow themselves to feel successful, although they will be keenly aware of failures.”*

Pathological vs. Positive Perfectionism
Source

Perfectionism has, sadly, been hyperpathologized by most mental health professionals, and hence, by popular culture at large. But such unequivocal vilification is unwarranted. 

Perfectionism is, in its purest and most benevolent form, a search for beauty, truth and goodness. Perfectionism is an inner calling to find and fulfill one’s destiny; to realize one’s potential; to pursue vigorously one’s unique vocation. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, vocation is “a feeling that one is called by God to a certain career or occupation.” 

But this feeling of being “called” doesn’t need to be couched in theological terms. It can be seen also as a secular calling, a strong proclivity or inclination of the self toward a particular type of work, trade or profession. 

In either case, when we, like the biblical Jonah, find the requisite courage to follow that inner “voice” of vocation, it is likely to lead us toward competency in our chosen field. When, on the other hand, we refuse the call, as did Jonah initially, we will likely wind up doing some kind of work about which we have no real passion. 

There is a relationship between passion and perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a form of passion. It is an expression of one’s passion for a particular vocation. For balance, form, harmony and wholeness. When one has passion for one’s work, perfectionism is the natural and normal expression of that passion. This is the positive, constructive type of perfectionism.

Positive perfectionism is not, as some assume, the compulsive worship of order and neatness, as we so often see in obsessive-compulsive disorder. This sort of pathological perfectionism is a neurotic denial of life’s inherent imperfection, and a vain attempt to fend off chaos, messiness, disease, suffering, anxiety and, finally, death itself. 

Neurotic, negative or pathological perfectionism can, in fact, impede creativity and competence. Placing unrealistic expectations and demands on one’s own work or that of others is fraught with problems ranging from resentment, shame and erosion of self-esteem, to blocked creativity due to fear of producing anything less than perfect.  

In such cases, psychotherapy can be helpful in accepting and embracing life’s pervasive imperfection. It is a perfectly imperfect world in which we live, inhabited by imperfect beings. 

Perfectionism, when not taken to neurotic extremes, acknowledges the inexorable reality and primacy of imperfection while at the same time heroically striving toward perfection nonetheless.

Non-pathological or positive perfectionism accepts its human limitations and the ultimate impossibility of attaining or sustaining perfection.

What the healthy or constructive perfectionist does is labor as passionately and perfectionistically as possible on a project, knowing all the while that he or she is destined to fail; but that despite the inevitability of failure, something good, something positive, something new, something worthwhile, something meaningful can come of the futile effort.

And, for the healthy, positive perfectionist, this makes the frustrating, arduous and sometimes tedious journey toward certain defeat a worthwhile and triumphant failure.

Watching reruns of “Seinfeld” that you’ve seen a dozen times. Bidding on eBay. Reading magazines and tabloids for celebrity gossip. Collecting knickknacks. Checking game scores on ESPN. Watching CNN during most of your waking hours. In dribs and drabs, habits like these consume our days.

Judith Wright says spending our time like that costs us much more in hours and dollars than we think. The Chicago-based life coach and author has a name for such time- or money-wasters: soft addictions.

The problem with soft addictions, she says, is: “We end up eventually spending thousands of hours, and maybe thousands of dollars, on them. Then we hit a certain point in our lives and we wonder: Where has it all gone? Where has my life gone?”

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Life is a theater, invite your audience carefully. Not everyone can or should (or is healthy enough to) have a front row seat in our lives. There are some people that need to be loved from a distance. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you let go of, or at least minimize, your time with draining, negative, incompatible, not-going-anywhere relationships/friendships.

Observe the relationships around you. Pay attention. Which ones lift and which ones lean? Which ones encourage and which ones discourage? Which ones are on a path of uphill growth and which ones are going downhill? When you leave certain people, do you feel worse or better? Which ones always have drama, or don’t really understand, know, or appreciate you?

The more you seek quality, respect, growth, peace of mind, love and truth around you, the easier it will become for you to decide who gets to sit in the front row and who should be moved to the balcony of your life. You can’t change the people around you. But you can change the people you’re around.

—Author: Unknown

“Although two well-developed individuals of any type can enjoy a healthy relationship, INFP’s natural partner is the ENFJ, or the ESFJ. INFP’s dominant function of Introverted Feeling is best matched with a partner whose dominant function is Extraverted Feeling. The INFP/ENFJ combination is ideal, because it shares the Sensing way of peceiving, but the INFP/ESFJ combination is also a good match.” Continue reading “INFP Relationships

Self-knowledge leads to wisdom, compassion and freedom. Learned people (scholars, professors, intellectuals, professionals, etc.) who do not know themselves are really unintelligent, unbalanced individuals; they are not free from ignorance, delusion and suffering, from self-centered craving and attachment. In self-understanding, there is the whole of existence. Life itself is our greatest teacher. The more we learn about life, the more we learn about ourselves.

When I returned to Canada, I experienced horrendous reverse culture shock. I was so open and childlike, and profoundly affected and transformed by my experiences in India and Nepal that I felt very vulnerable to the realities and superficialities of modern, materialistic society.

After being in a culture where communication in public was easy and effortless, I found people quite self-centered, isolated and lonely, and shopping in supermarkets terribly cold and impersonal. It seemed really amazing that one could buy a lot of groceries, go through the checkout counter, pay your money, and not have to utter a single word. In Asia, it is the human contact that is important, the product that you are purchasing is secondary; in modern society it is the product and its cost that are important, human contact is secondary, seemingly unimportant.

I found the environment very sterile, uninteresting, superficial and isolating. I just wanted to turn around and return to South Asia, to the ancient, exotic, mystical, and very human culture of India and Nepal. I felt like a fish out of water, but I could not afford to return.

It was a time for healing and deep introspection.

Excerpt: “An Inquiring Mind’s Journey”