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 ENFJ Veteran, your central fear, beneath all others, is that nothing you do ever really makes a difference for anybody. That no matter how much you do, or how much you care, all your supporting and teaching and helping ends up having no real effect. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Veterans, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ENFJs’ weakest cognition step being Data via Thinking, Veterans naturally fear that their understanding of details, and the conclusions they draw from situations, are especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their conclusions lack useful correctness (T) in an experiential way (S). You fear that your understanding of the intricacies of situations is too unreliable to be of any benefit to anyone. This unconscious worry that your reading of situations is not ST enough results in the fear that you can’t seem to take everything into account in the situations where people need you the most, so you end up choosing the wrong actions and failing to be of any real help. You try, but you fear that your attempts to help will always end up ineffective.
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 Veteran, 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 no matter how hard you try or how much you care, all your efforts will end up failing to help anyone. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in the ENFJ Faramir Dilemma.
The Faramir Dilemma is the tendency to turn a blind eye to cruelty, selfishness, or pettiness, in an attempt to keep everyone in your group happy. Since Veterans already fear that nothing they do will have any beneficial effect anyway, they feel that there’s no point in trying to stand up against people they care about even when they know they’re in the wrong. They may have even tried, many times, to defend people who were being hurt, but felt that it didn’t really solve the problem. So rather than add to discord by standing up for people who need it, Veterans can be tempted to pretend that nothing’s wrong in their group, that bullying and spite aren’t actually happening, and that everyone will get along just fine if the Veteran keeps pretending everything’s okay.
What almost always ends up happening, however, is that the Veteran does take a side, and it’s typically the wrong side. In their desperation to remain neutral, they find themselves appeasing the more aggressive people in their lives. When the people they love have disagreements that turn into conflict, a Veteran might inadvertently endorse mean behaviors by not doing anything to acknowledge them. It’s easy to blame victims by saying that they must have done something to deserve what they’re getting, but the truth is that bullying happens, passive-aggressive needling happens, and people lie and badmouth others who genuinely did very little, if anything, to deserve it. Insecurity leads people to be resentful and outright mean to others who make them feel uncomfortable.
Yet when a Veteran insists on ignoring such aggressive attitudes, they plant themselves on the side of the bullies. They may even become uncomfortable when someone they love shines too brightly, and try to pull them down to the level of others who are insecure, for fear that the insecure parties might become resentful otherwise. And if a target of bullying or abuse makes any protest, the ENFJ may react by turning against them, as if the victim caused the problem by mentioning it. The Faramir Dilemma causes Veterans to sabotage their own treasured specialization, tearing apart their group by endorsing or even causing pain to those they love in an effort to keep everyone on the same level.
Particularly unhealthy ENFJs expend tireless effort seeking out ways to insult and nitpick at anyone who seems happier, smarter, more skilled, or better off than someone else the ENFJ cares about. It never helps the ENFJ feel any better about themselves or their friends for more than a moment, and then they feel only less able to help their group after they come down from the high of tearing others down. An unhealthy ENFJ’s entire reason for being becomes tearing apart relationships by making sure that no one is ever too happy, successful, or special, 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 Veterans tend to indulge in the Faramir Dilemma when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of trying to keep their group happy, a Veteran may subtly insult loved ones who succeed too much, or allow aggression against friends who shine too brightly. These unintentional slips into ENFJ’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. It can tear you in two when you see some members of your group resenting others, so it makes sense for you to just want everyone to play nice. But unless you are willing to stand up and show your quality, your fear will come true, and you will choose to have very little beneficial effects in the lives of those who need you the most.
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 the Faramir Dilemma. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Veteran 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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