Everyone has good days and bad days; every type enjoys successes and suffers through failures. Yet we each react to those same successes and failures differently, depending on our cognition. The things we value most, and the things we focus on most, determine how we subconsciously interpret everything that happens to us. While our Type Specialization reflects what we most desire out of life, every cognitive type also has a Type Angst, a reaction to our deepest fears, worries, and insecurities.
Of course, anyone can be afraid of anything. And anyone, of any type, can suffer from any weakness. In fact, it’s much easier to gain the unique weaknesses of other types than it is to gain their unique strengths! When we attempt to adopt the strengths of another type before mastering our own, usually all we end up with is the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither. Yet each cognitive type has one deepest, most fundamental worry, resulting from their unique order of cognition steps.
As an ESTP Spartan, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you aren’t naturally intelligent. You may compensate by talking nonstop about how intelligent you really are, or you may immerse yourself in not-so-brainy pursuits, taking pride in a certain practical sense and wit, but deep down you’re still afraid that you’re actually dumb. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Spartans, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ESTPs’ weakest cognition step being Action via iNtuition, Spartans naturally fear that their actions, and their understanding of the resulting consequences, are especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their actions lack all-important usefulness (T), on a conceptual level (N). You fear that your actions appear foolish, having no long-term benefit. This unconscious worry that your choices, opinions, and actions are not NT enough results in the fear that for all your ability in the moment, when it comes to conceptual thought, you’re a failure. That no matter how much you learn or how hard you try, you’ll never be all that smart. That in the end you’re a meathead, a jock, or an insensitive and thoughtless jerk who’s not good for anything except fun in the moment.
This is entirely false, but that doesn’t make the fear any less persistent.
Since these worries come from our cognition, we might not even realize that not everyone has them, just as we sometimes forget that not everyone has our same Type Specialization. And since these fears come from our cognition, they’ve been with each of us for as long as we’ve been thinking. They can be overcome, entirely, but only by understanding how they work. Yet when each of us is young, we inadvertently react to every scare or disappointment through the lens of our own type’s central fear. The things that leave the deepest scars are the ones that hit us right in this most vulnerable place.
But since our minds therefore associate these fears with the earliest experiences of childhood, we ironically tend to run to these fears as if they were a place of safety. Childhood usually feels warm, safe, and right in our minds, even if in reality it was nothing of the sort. So when life gets hard, when disappointment strikes, whenever we feel insecure, overwhelmed, or uncomfortable at all, our minds naturally and inadvertently rush back to these deeply ingrained childhood fears. The coping behaviors that result are our unique Type Angsts.
As a Spartan, whenever you feel or experience anything stressful or negative in any way, your mind tries to rush back to the supposed safety of childhood. This causes a surge of your central fear that you’re stupid, and that you always will be. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ESTP Jayne Justification.
Jayne Justification is the assertion that other people aren’t really so smart, and that your form of cleverness is actually a great deal better. Of course there’s a lot of truth to this; many people who parade themselves as smart can be very foolish, because they’re only smart about a few niche things. And as an ESTP, your Type Specialization is celebrating and using the person you already are to the utmost, so you’re naturally protective of your own abilities, experiences, and insights. But Jayne Justification becomes a problem when it starts tearing down others in the drive to feel smart, or when it gets you to cope by saying you never wanted to be smart in the first place.
In either case, this limits a Spartan from being and enjoying everything they are. When you imply that you never really wanted to be smart, you’re accepting the lie that you’re not. When you act as if all smart people are impractical, out of touch, weak, or sheltered, you end up implying that by contrast you must be insensitive, impatient, and crude, even if you insist that you’re smart as well. And when you parade yourself as smarter than everyone else, putting other people into little boxes, you end up putting yourself into one that’s just as limiting or worse. Jayne Justification causes Spartans to sabotage their own treasured specialization, limiting themselves with labels instead of pushing the limits of everything they are.
Particularly unhealthy ESTPs expend tireless effort asserting their own intelligence over everyone else, while simultaneously mocking any kind of intelligence besides the one they claim. It never helps the ESTP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only dumber and cruder after the high of superiority passes. An unhealthy ESTP’s entire reason for being becomes placing limits around what everyone is and what they can do, in direct opposition to their Type Specialization. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting against one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Spartans tend to indulge in Jayne Justification when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Spartan may try to imply that “brainy” people aren’t so great, or that they’re in fact the smartest, brainiest, cleverest and sharpest jerk anyone will ever meet. These unintentional slips into ESTP’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. There’s no problem at all with a Spartan being proud of themselves; it’s what you’re supposed to do! But beware of the lie that because you don’t approach problems the way some might expect, that therefore you’re not intelligent. You can be smart, academic, intellectual, bookish, and on and on, but none of that means you have to do it in anyone else’s way. Therefore, there’s no reason to tear down other people who are smart in a different way from you.
All types can be tempted to declare that they or their loved ones are already everything they’d like to be, even if it means ignoring glaring truths or putting others down. Our Type Angsts tempt us to feel entitled, like we deserve to already be at our goal, rather than being willing to learn and grow patiently, gaining successes for real. This sense of entitlement is a harmful twisting of the good desire to be special. In reality, everyone can be equally special in ways that are different from one another, allowing all to be unique in unique, diverse ways.
As you surround yourself with the loving support of people who care, as you seek out others who try to understand you and accept you, you can grow less and less vulnerable to the self-sabotage of Jayne Justification. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Spartan with a vengeance, and your mind will retreat less and less into the fears and scars that result in your Type Angst. You can enjoy everything about yourself that you love, while being willing to change the bits of yourself that you secretly never really liked anyway. And even when no one else is around, perhaps the best, most effective, and most fulfilling way to gradually eliminate your Type Angst for good, is to get in touch with your Paradoxitype.
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