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 INTP Alchemist, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you are second rate, and therefore obsolete. Specifically, you fear that you are second rate at the things you most love to specialize in; that for all your focus, all your study and thought and emphasis, you will never be the best, making all your effort moot. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Alchemists, this worry is at the root of them all.
With INTPs’ weakest cognition step being Principles via Feeling, Alchemists naturally fear that their understanding of the world at large is especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their understanding of universal principles lacks meaningful insights (F) on a conceptual level (N). You fear that the universe is just too complex, too ambivalently huge, and too varied for you to be able to make any meaningful sense out of it in a comprehensive fashion.
This unconscious worry that your worldview is not NF enough causes you to retreat into deep corners of specialization, hoping that if you can at least learn to know every little detail about your chosen specialty, then maybe you won’t be so insignificant in the face of the sprawling cosmos. This in turn results in the lurking fear that if you fail to master everything about your specialization, then you don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. You worry that you have to be the best, you have to know everything there is to know about what you focus on, or else everything you are, everything you dream of and care about, may as well cease to exist.
This is entirely 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 an Alchemist, 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 second rate, and therefore that you have no real meaning or significance. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in INTP Moriarty Fear.
Moriarty fear is the competitive desire to push others down in order to be at the top. Rather than simply enjoying the thrill of discovery, the excitement of posing new questions and the satisfying click of concepts fitting together, Moriarty Fear tells Alchemists that none of that matters if they can’t be the best at the things they explore. If they can’t be the smartest kid in their particular class, then they feel worthless. They may react by nihilistically implying that no one else has any worth either, in order to make themselves feel less alone in their imagined insignificance. Or they may try to find a new specialization that they can be the best at, and try to push down the efforts and successes of a new class of competitors.
Meanwhile, the sheer existence of other disciplines outside one’s own chosen specialty also feeds the fear of cosmic irrelevance, causing INTPs to feel the need to imply that others’ specializations don’t really matter. Yet even while Moriarty Fear tempts Alchemists to act as if their own area of expertise is the best, most useful, and most important, it also impels them to try to prove that they can do it all. That they’re so skilled, so naturally able, that they don’t have to specialize; they can show the universe how meaningful they are by mastering everything. Such broad mastery is not where zoomed-in Alchemists excel, and it frequently results in embarrassment, but you shouldn’t have to feel like you need to prove your worth by excelling at everything. INTPs are supposed to specialize, and they need to feel free to do so with devoted passion.
But Moriarty Fear constantly mocks enthusiasm, yours and everyone else’s. It tells you that to be the best, to matter at all, you have to resent, ridicule, and misrepresent everyone who can do anything you can’t. You have to prove that they’re really not so great after all. You have to show the world that only your specialization is needed, only yours makes sense, and only you can do it the way it’s meant to be done. It tells you that only by tearing down everyone else who excels can you reach the top and remain there. Rather than trying to be the best by excelling, Moriarty Fear causes Alchemists to sabotage their own treasured specialization by focusing on beating others instead of actually improving. This paranoid enmity leaves no time or energy for inquiry or invention, and there’s certainly no room for asking new questions when you have to prove you have all the answers.
Particularly unhealthy INTPs don’t really specialize in much of anything, except expending tireless effort seeking out ways to discourage others from asking insightful questions and making new discoveries. This never helps the INTP feel any more meaningful for more than a moment, and then they feel only more insignificant and second-rate after they come down from the high of their self-appointed inquisition. An unhealthy INTP’s entire reason for being becomes stifling and slandering all discoveries that aren’t their own, 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 Alchemists tend to indulge in Moriarty Fear when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, an Alchemist may roll their eyes at things they don’t understand, insisting that everything that matters must be comprehensible through the lens of their particular specialization. These unintentional slips into INTP’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. Nor do you have to feel doomed to the tyranny of Moriarty Fear. You can enjoy discovery and questions, and you aren’t lessened by needing others’ unique strengths just as much as they need yours. Beware of implying that because you’re good at grasping the details you focus on, that therefore your entire worldview is correct. Specific data does not apply unilaterally to every situation, and it’s okay for you to look to other types to zoom out and show you things you’ve never known.
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 Moriarty Fear. Look to your Type Specialization, be an Alchemist 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.
Recent Comments