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 ESTJ Cannon, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you are not enlightened, inspired, or meaningful. You fear that you’re just too focused on what needs to be done, when you hunger for deeper significance. Regardless of whether or not it’s true, you fear that you’re simply not deep, philosophical, or enlightened enough. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Cannons, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ESTJs’ weakest cognition step being Data via Feeling, Cannons naturally fear that the conclusions they draw from life, and the insights they gather, are especially unreliable. Specifically, they worry that their insights and conclusions lack meaning and significance (F), in a conceptual way (N). You fear that your feelings and inferences about situations lack importance. This unconscious worry that your impressions and insights are not NF enough results in the fear that every idea you have, every goal you reach, every breakthrough you gain and every experience you live is ultimately mundane. Routine, dull, unexciting, and humiliatingly meaningless.
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 Cannon, 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 your feelings, conclusions, and insights are not enlightened. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ESTJ Threehorn Pride.
Threehorn Pride is the assertion that you are already as enlightened as you’ll ever need to be. Of course, you probably are very enlightened and thoughtful, whether you realize it or not! There’s such a uniquely strong meaning in being so useful. But Threehorn Pride becomes a problem when it seeks to assert your meaningfulness over the meaning of others, or when it outright declares that no one’s really meaningful anyway, and that anyone who appears to be enlightened should ease up and get over themselves. This second, more cynical approach is just a defensive coping mechanism; when an ESTJ feels unenlightened, they may roll their eyes at so many things, attitudes, and people that genuinely are so good, so meaningful, and so precious and needed.
Yet when an ESTJ fears that they won’t be needed if they’re not meaningful, it can be tempting for them to either behave as if they’re already more meaningful than anyone around, or to imply that all meaning is weak and pointless anyway. Such attempts to prove your own sense or wisdom can cause you to leap into action or form opinions before you’re sure of the details of a situation, which will tend to result in embarrassing mistakes. Threehorn Pride ends up causing Cannons to sabotage their own treasured specialization, no longer paying attention to the task at hand because they get caught up in worrying about their own meaningfulness or cavalier lack thereof. Eager to prove their own sensible practicality, they get in their own heads and run into walls.
Particularly unhealthy ESTJs expend tireless effort trying to prove that anyone who tries to be enlightened is a fool, while simultaneously putting themselves forward as the best voice of clever insight. This never helps the ESTJ feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only more mundane and meaningless after the high of pontification passes. In direct opposition to their type specialization of using the best methods to reach their goals, an unhealthy ESTJ’s entire reason for being becomes attempting to prove that their own weaknesses and mistakes are intentional, useful, and in fact better than everyone else. They become utterly useless in their tantrum to prove their own superiority. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Cannons tend to indulge in Threehorn Pride when things get hard or uncomfortable. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Cannon may scoff at others’ tenderness, or put themselves forward as a beacon of enlightenment. Or both. They may judge others’ worth by their ability to be efficient, hiding their own fears of meaninglessness. But these unintentional slips into ESTJ’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 even less meaningful and wise, 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 Threehorn Pride. As you let yourself enjoy being an efficient and direct Cannon, you’ll find it easier to point before shooting, and you’ll find new treasures of meaning by doing so. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Cannon 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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