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 INFP Ranger, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you’re out of touch. That you dig so deep into meaningful quandaries, that you lose your bearings in the rest of the wide world as life speeds on. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Rangers, this worry is at the root of them all.
With INFPs’ weakest cognition step being Principles via Thinking, Rangers naturally fear that their understanding of the world at large is especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their understanding of universal principles is flawed conceptually (N) and therefore of no real use (T). You fear that your grasp of how the world consistently works on a universal scale is too simple, too trite, and too foggy to be applied in any useful fashion. This unconscious worry that your worldview is not NT enough results in the fear that you’re an oddball, an out of touch eccentric forever relegated to be on the outside looking in.
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 Ranger, 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 are out of touch with the practical realities of the world. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in the INFJ Great Pumpkin Distraction.
The Great Pumpkin Distraction is the tendency to imply that specific observations of what may be true in one situation are the same as universal principles that are always true in every situation. Faced with the sheer size and frightening complexity of the universe as a whole, it can be tempting for INFPs to act as if their zoomed-in observations of meaning are in fact universally useful, and that therefore they aren’t out of touch with the world.
It’s good for Rangers to zoom in, to dive deep into questions of meaningful possibilities and even to get a little lost in labyrinths of philosophy. But when they feel embarrassed and out of touch due to this deep diving, the Great Pumpkin Distraction leads them to cope by implying that their specialized knowledge is the universal zenith of all meaning. And like Linus’s venerated Great Pumpkin, such localized ideals tend to become actually out of touch.
Rangers are excellent askers of philosophical questions, but it’s hard to ask a question when you have to act as if you already have all the answers. INFPs are not naturally good at comprehensively answering the questions they pose, so when they try to force an answer, they are likely to end up with simplistic truisms that require numerous exceptions and special considerations, rather than an elegant principle that truly works universally. This can not only cause an INFP to look even more out of touch than they initially feared, but it can also prevent further pursuit of meaningful inquiry. Any attitude that your truly significant insights are the highest, most edifying truths in the world ends up stopping your quest for greater mysteries. In this way, the Great Pumpkin Distraction causes Rangers to sabotage their own treasured specialization, standing in the way of questions rather than leading the way in asking them.
Particularly unhealthy INFPs expend tireless effort seeking out ways to stop others from asking any questions that might poke holes in the INFP’s ideals. It never helps the INFP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only more out of touch after the high of preaching passes. An unhealthy INFP’s entire reason for being becomes declaring that the grand sum of all meaning has already been found, so there is no need for any further searching, 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 Rangers tend to indulge in the Great Pumpkin Distraction when things get hard, when the world seems too harsh and hostile, or when life just seems to demand answers on a universal scale. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Ranger may assert shaky truisms as truths of universal usefulness, perhaps in the hopes of making some of life’s scariest questions and most painful situations a little easier to live with. These unintentional slips into INFP’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 more out of touch, 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 the Great Pumpkin Distraction. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Ranger 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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