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 ISTJ Sentinel, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you have no unique place in the world. That you have to bury yourself and blend in, because there is no special role or job for you. The fear that the best you can do is try to serve well in others’ roles, because you don’t really have one of your own. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Sentinels, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ISTJs’ weakest cognition step being Observation via iNtuition, Sentinels naturally fear that their understanding of the character of people and their motives is especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their observations lack all-important usefulness (T), in a conceptual way (N). You fear that your judgments of others are conceptually unreliable, never really able to keep up with all the intricacies of a person’s heart, and that therefore your character judgments are useless. This unconscious worry that your observations of others are not NT enough results in the fear that everyone else is on the ball except you, that everyone else knows what they’re doing, that everyone else has a place where they fit, while you’re left alone, sticking out like a sore thumb.
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 Sentinel, 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 don’t truly belong anywhere. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ISTJ Thranduil Denial.
Thranduil Denial is the insistence that no one’s place in the world really matters. As a healthy attempt to deal with the fear of not having a place among everyone else, Sentinels often do their best to build up their own little kingdoms in order to create a safe world of their own. Yet as the fear of having no place persists, even within the safety of one’s own constructed world, an ISTJ can react by declaring that nothing outside their guarded world really matters anyway. All the ignorant little people outside don’t actually have a place either; they’re just deluding themselves into thinking they have a purpose.
This results in growing resentment and suspicion of anyone not part of the ISTJ’s private dominion, as the fear ever grows that the outside world will creep in, rip down the world they love, and reveal that the ISTJ never really had a kingdom to begin with.
Thranduil Denial causes Sentinels to sabotage their own treasured specialization, denying the realities of the world as it is, for fear of losing the private world they’ve built. Particularly unhealthy ISTJs expend tireless effort insisting that their protected little world is the world as it is, while the wide world outside is all corrupt, ignorant, and dangerous. They imply or outright declare that their particular version of the world is the way things have always been forever, and the way things will always be, forever.
This leads them to ignore everything about the current world that has not always been, and causes them to deny the parts of the world that really should change. Before they know it, they end up upholding and protecting a toxic status-quo that goes against their own deeply held principles, poisoning even their private, guarded little world. Meanwhile, anyone who believes they can truly change the world for the better is considered foolish, dramatic, and childish.
Fearing the conceptual nature of that which could be, these unhealthy ISTJs live as if to say, “There is no iNtuition, there is no ‘that which could be.’ There is only experience as I know it.” None of this ever helps the ISTJ feel any better for more than a moment, and then they feel only more isolated and out of place after the high of self-righteousness passes. An unhealthy ISTJ’s entire reason for being becomes denying the sheer complex nuance of the world as it is, 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 sweet, healthy Sentinels can fall victim to Thranduil Denial when things get hard. As a natural and purely unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Sentinel may roll their eyes at others who passionately pursue their place and role in the world, as if anyone who finds a unique place in the world must be self-aggrandizing or melodramatic. These unintentional slips into ISTJ’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 place among others, 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 Thranduil Denial. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Sentinel 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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