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 ENTJ Crusader, your central fear, beneath all others, is that nobody cares about what you have to say. You worry that people easily grow tired of listening to you, or annoyed with what you’re saying, or simply that they have better things to do with their time than pay attention to the things you care about. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Crusaders, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ENTJs’ weakest cognition step being Data via Feeling, Crusaders naturally fear that the conclusions they draw from life, and the insights they gather, are especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their insights and conclusions lack meaning and significance (F), in an experiential way (S). You fear that your feelings and inferences about situations don’t matter to anyone. This unconscious worry that your impressions and insights are not SF enough results in the fear that nothing you have to say really matters in anyone’s actual life. That all your brilliant realizations, all the exciting connections you make, and all the information you’ve gathered doesn’t really excite anybody. You see the importance of everything you have to share, but you worry that it isn’t worth others’ attention in their everyday lives. You fear not only that no one wants to listen to you, but that in the end, they shouldn’t.
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 Crusader, 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 nobody cares what you have to say, nor should they. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in the Great and Powerful Trixie Tantrum.
The Trixie Tantrum is the desire to try to get people’s attention by talking more, talking louder, more boldly, more cleverly, more charismatically, more musically or intellectually or whatever it ends up taking. After all, you know how much your insights, ideas, and talents mean to you, so there must be a way to get others to see it too! Some Crusaders pursue the loud and impressive route, while others tend to be quietly determined in an almost nonstop, dogged explanation of their beliefs. Either method can have the effect of pushing others away, though. Whether by shouting over what anyone else has to say, or by quietly repeating the same soapbox all the time, you can turn your fear into a reality by making sure that fewer and fewer people want to take the time to listen to you.
Passion is good, and for Crusaders it’s one of your greatest assets, a key result of your Type Specialization. Yet in the drive to help others see the importance of what they have to share, it’s all too easy for ENTJs to inadvertently oversimplify their message, boiling it down to a few key points that can be more easily shouted or repeated. And with the details of Data being your weakest step, you may not even see how drastically inaccurate your simplified ideals have become. Before you know it, all your shrewd and effective ideas may be reduced down to a trite and misleading bumper sticker.
At the same time, you may find yourself oversimplifying the arguments of anyone who disagrees with you. Losing the intricacies and complexities of a situation in your desire to be heard, you end up confusing people about your own thoughts and abilities, while building up strawman versions of everyone who disagrees with you. In a strawman argument, you tear down a simplistic version of an opposing viewpoint which only slightly resembles the actual views of those you disagree with. Beating a strawman doesn’t prove anything. Showing the ignorance, inconsistency, or badness of an opponent’s argument isn’t very effective if it’s not really your opponent’s argument after all. Missing out on details, you can fall victim to such oversimplifications frequently in daily life, both in what you say and in who you agree with.
Passion, your great strength, thus becomes your greatest liability when it causes you to oversimplify your thoughts and desires, as well as those of others. All this can mislead others when they do listen to you, and it can hurt or estrange everyone else who might’ve been on your side if only you’d given them a patient chance and treated them with respect, yet who lose patience with simplistic, muddy wrangling. So all the people on your side become ineffective due to their confusion, while you push more and more people away from ever wanting to fight alongside you. The Great and Powerful Trixie Tantrum causes Crusaders to sabotage their own treasured specialization, driving others away instead of rallying them to battle, while watering down the effectiveness of all those who do take your side.
Particularly unhealthy ENTJs expend tireless effort badmouthing anyone and everyone, always repeating the same old views without hearing what anyone else has to say, all while grotesquely oversimplifying everyone who might disagree with them in even the slightest degree. None of this ever helps the ENTJ feel any better about themselves or their cause for more than a moment, and then after the high of stubbornness passes, they feel only more like no one cares what they have to say. An unhealthy ENTJ’s entire reason for being becomes standing in the way of all progress and useful change if it doesn’t come from their team, in direct opposition to their Type Specialization of pursuing effective victories with conviction. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting against one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Crusaders tend to indulge in the Trixie Tantrum when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of defending their cause, a Crusader may misrepresent others’ views or get a little too aggressive about their own, as if they’ll reach their goals better if they don’t listen to anyone else’s opinions. These unintentional slips into ENTJ’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. Recognize that you’ll achieve all your goals far more effectively by slowing down and taking time to genuinely show others why you believe what you do, so that they can voluntarily join with you. Remember that when others point out flaws in your viewpoint, they’re not getting in the way of your goal, but rather saving you from failure. Complexity is not a vice, and taking care to avoid oversimplifications, listen to everyone, and adapt as needed, leads to real successes at goals that make an actual difference.
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 Great and Powerful Trixie Tantrum,. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Crusader 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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