Putting Out the Fleece
We don’t trust easily. We don’t trust easily at all. No matter where you grew up or what your family was like, you wanted it to be perfect, the way you felt it should be; the way you saw it in your head. It never was. And every time you dreamed up perfection and lived through disappointment, the sorrow wove a dark crease through the next dream. You never lost hope. We never do... ...but you lost trust in the people around you.
INFJs are often called “walking contradictions,” idealists with the core of a cynic, counselors and empaths with a dark streak of potential cruelty. And it’s true. But the source of that dichotomy comes from the glory of our internal world coming into contact with the sad inadequacy of the external one. It’s like putting a hot glass into ice water - the opposites tear each other apart. Yet hope is an inherent part of the INFJ. We are people drawn toward the future, oriented toward a holistic view of the world, it’s in our nature. We believe in the future, and with our Extroverted Feeling, we believe that future is built on people. We want people to care about each other, to be as considerate as we try to be. We want people to notice each other’s needs and care for one another. And we want people to notice our needs and care.
But they usually don’t. We know that. So we learn not to trust. We begin testing. We disappear - to see if anyone notices our absence. We don’t eat - to see if anyone notices and takes care of us. We stop talking - just to see if anyone was listening. It’s not a healthy behavior; testing the people who say they care about you isn’t nice or necessarily wise. But we do it.
When we test the people around us, we’re calling out into the void, pulling on the threads that bind us to one another. We’re asking whether we really matter - who we are, not just what we do for you. We are asking you to affirm our value in your life by noticing us, by Seeing us, even when we do not openly ask you to.
See us, pass that test, and we will learn to trust, slowly and painfully. We will come to believe that you really do value us for who we are, not just what we do. If that trust is built, if it goes beyond the Extroverted Feeling of the moment and passes the constant questioning and doubt of Introverted Thinking, then it becomes cemented as part of our Introverted Intuition - a part of how we view the world. It becomes a part of that dream we’re always spinning for tomorrow.
Fail to see us, fail the test, and we will step back, knowing that while we may love you, you are likely to disappoint us.