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 ISFP Explorer, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you cannot keep anything from breaking. In the end, everything ends, everything dies or breaks or gets lost, and you worry that sooner or later, everything and everyone you love and cherish will go away too. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Explorers, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ISFPs’ weakest cognition step being Principles via Thinking, Explorers naturally fear that their understanding of the wide complexity of the world is inadequate and unreliable. Specifically, they worry that their understanding of universal principles, the unerring rules of how life consistently works, are not reliable or useful (T) in experience (S). You fear that your comprehension of the unchanging trends of life is too shaky to be useful. This unconscious worry that your understanding of the world is not ST enough results in the fear that you cannot be relied on to always be there to safeguard the things you love. You can do your best, but still you worry that eventually, each precious treasure will slip through your fingers.
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 an Explorer, 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 everything breaks, that there’s nothing you can do to prevent loss. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ISFP Banner Trepidation.
Banner Trepidation is the desire to hold desperately tight to your personal world, even if it means you smother it to death in the process, and let everything else fall to pieces. The things you’ve explored and the treasures you’ve gathered are so deeply important to you, and they should be. Yet Banner Trepidation becomes a problem when it causes you to neglect other important areas of life because you’re too busy trying to cling tightly to the treasures you fear to lose.
It can cause you to turn a blind eye to the needs of others, caring only about protecting your own happiness. Or it can lead you to build a nice, pretty, impenetrable picket fence around your personal world, keeping everything good at bay in your desire to protect the good you already have. Before you know it, all the treasures within the bounds of your emotional fence will waste away, starving for exposure to the outside world. Banner Trepidation causes Explorers to sabotage their own treasured specialization, draining the joy out of each object and every experience in a vain attempt to keep everything pristine.
Particularly unhealthy ISFPs expend tireless effort seeking out ways to demean anything outside their own private world, as if that will somehow make their world safer. It never helps the ISFP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then after the high of bullying passes, they feel only more powerless to keep their treasures safe. An unhealthy ISFP’s entire reason for being becomes tearing down others’ happiness while squeezing the life out of their own, in direct opposition to their open, cherishing, exploring Type Specialization. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting against one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Explorers tend to indulge in Banner Trepidation when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, an Explorer may be willing to stifle their world or hurt other people to keep their own treasures intact. Or they may grow aloof, trying not to care about anything at all, because they feel they can’t keep anything from breaking anyway. The solution is to learn to feel free to let go, letting life go through its natural cycles of change. Remember that there will always be more moments and details to experience and enjoy, so you can freely let go of the ones you have. Only by letting go can you be free to really immerse yourself into whatever details and experiences you already have, and whatever new ones that may come your way.
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 Banner Trepidation. Look to your Type Specialization, be an Explorer 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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