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 INTJ Dragon, your central fear, beneath all others, is that everything bad that happens is ultimately your fault. That if only you’d tried harder, been a little better, a little faster or smarter or more virtuous or something, then you would have been able to protect good things and prevent failure. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Dragons, this worry is at the root of them all.
With INTJs’ weakest cognition step being Observation via Sensing, Dragons naturally fear that they’re out of touch with others’ thoughts, motives, and secret opinions. Specifically, they worry that their observations of people lack all-important usefulness (T), in an experiential way (S). You fear that your interactions with others are not dependable, that you can’t be relied upon to be there when others need you. This unconscious worry that your evaluation of others’ needs is not ST enough results in the fear that anytime anything goes wrong for anybody, it’s because you failed to understand the need and anticipate it. You feel that if only you were smarter or more skilled, more influential or more able in any way, then you would be able to prevent so much unnecessary pain and misfortune. Therefore you look out at the world and especially at events around you, and feel the creeping fear that everything bad is your fault because you failed to stop it.
This is almost certainly 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 Dragon, 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 anything that goes wrong is at least partially your fault. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in INTJ Anakin Angst.
Anakin Angst is the tendency to seize control of situations, people, and events in order to help them become everything you know they can be. This comes from a great desire: after all, your Type Specialization is all about using principles to help the world become everything it can be. But with your difficulty in observing people and their motives, and the resulting difficulty in anticipating their complex and changing needs, you can frequently cause more difficulty in others’ lives when you seize control. Whether you’re trying to fix individuals, situations, or the world at large, your good intentions can lead to awful pain if you try to control too much. You are good at fixing things and you are great at seeing the trends of life and knowing how to help them run better, but only when you resist the temptation to control too much.
Living by universal principles, you know how complex the world is. But you have tremendous difficulty understanding all the tender, fragile, almost infinitely complicated feelings and dreams of people. When you try to remake the world as you envision it, which you should, you may unwittingly neglect so many of the intricate needs of people. Yet if you make a continual effort to hold things loosely, paying careful attention to the reactions and requests of others, you can go forward and be of enormous benefit to the world without burning anyone.
Sometimes, when the maladies you seek to fix are especially virulent, you may decide that more drastic measures are indeed needed in order to finally eradicate the problem. Yet your brilliant and decisive solutions may, once again, inadvertently fail to take into account the softer needs of others if you try to take on too much at once. If you aren’t very careful, your fear that all misfortune is your fault may start to come true, as you end up causing far more damage than you initially set out to fix. Anakin Angst causes Dragons to sabotage their own treasured specialization, burning the world down out of a desire to control, rather than building it higher.
Particularly unhealthy INTJs expend tireless effort hunting down and destroying the dreams of any person they see as a threat to their vision for the world. Rather than being careful not to squish the varied needs of others, such dangerous INTJs come to see people as too complicated, too messy and unpredictable, and therefore as something of a problem in and of themselves. These INTJs grow ever more willing to ruin the lives of everyone, if the people around them aren’t helping the world live up to the potential they see. They discredit others, demean them, and use any means they can to pressure and compel them to do what the INTJ wants them to do.
This never helps the INTJ feel any better about their vision or about themselves for more than a moment, and then after the high of power passes, they feel only more responsibility for everything wrong, tempting them to seize even more control. An unhealthy INTJ’s entire reason for being becomes ruining the world and the lives of others in order to make everything work better, 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 Dragons tend to indulge in Anakin Angst when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Dragon may lash out and try to fix a situation in one decisive move, but such quick moves almost always end up trampling someone’s hopes and needs. These unintentional slips into INTJ’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. Beating yourself up may make you feel safer from the accusations of others, but in truth it will usually make you feel only guiltier, making the cycle worse.
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 Anakin Angst. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Dragon with a vengeance, and your mind will retreat less and less into the fears and scars that result in your Type Angst. 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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