Being introspective & intuitive has its cons

I know what you mean, but this is more of a problem with your core worldview than some innate flaw in introspection. People are more receptive to those who aren't afraid of being deceived because this sort of disposition radiates power and confidence in their own resilience and self-efficacy, which in turn promote a healthy cycle of self-improvement. It's the proverbial "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger".

I'm still trying to be better at this myself, but I'm certain now that cynicism is fool's idea of wisdom - even if it prevents one disaster, eventually it always leads to stagnation.

 

@OrangeLizzard your comments really hit home with me. Even to the point a while ago I looked at a book on charisma to see what I am doing that almost turns people away. So your comments came as a refreshing take on that. Thank you.

I've come to the conclusion that my early life has been a predominant factor in whether you are seen as "open" or "closed" off. I think a lot is about trust of others when young. If you are brought up being able to trust others, then you have that almost set in your features. ie your face is more open, your physical bearing is more open, your attitude is open. But even then it takes something special again to become extraordinary in this regard.

All of that said, you have abilities that others don't. The intuition, the introspectiveness, the authenticity. It's just that in today's world, being likeable and having charisma is seen as a valuable tool, similar to being extraverted.

We all seem to want what we cant have sometimes, and having more self acceptance of that is my focus and the lesson I am attempting to learn now. I'm still on a quest to improve my openness, as I see my being closed off as a detriment, but to get up to the heady heights of the people you refer to? No, I don't think I will ever get there.

 

Maybe the issue is that you're trying to go from A to B without learning what's in between. The irony with being vulnerable is that you still have to feel invulnerable while doing it if you don't want to recoil every time something vaguely threatening appears.

I often found this sense of power slowly building up when I actively offered help to people. Being too passive creates a feeling of subjugation, which is naturally something that won't elevate your self-esteem. When you try to be vulnerable at that point, there's not much to show but disappointment with yourself and nobody really gets enraptured with that. Acting cultivates strength, being forced to react promotes wall building.

I have no idea if this is applicable to you, but it's what I can offer.

 

Do you hold expectations about people? @OrangeLizzard

When handling suspicious people, my mind operates between "if innocent" and "if guilty". I balance my actions based on that - choices which are good in either scenario. It depends on circumstance too.

Being wary and introspective isn't wrong or bad. The dose makes the poison.

Also, anybody can be manipulated. It happens. Does that bother you?

 

Greetings dear one you are not alone in your query, one of the most vulnerable things we can do is self inquire. As you have.
For awhile I felt as you, questioning why's daily, hourly, minutely...is there a wrongness i am unaware to? There's no formula, but my breadcrumbs led me to ask why I was questioning myself so much and my friends and family only seemed further away. Maybe it's a product of the journey inward, our innate energy guides us from others into the realm of self. Seemingly isolating, but only for the conditions we have learned to "fit in". Empathy was the key I held to open the door I was knocking on, and in my being like a hand reaching out, I reached into the dark asking why do I feel so deeply disconnected...the 3rd time I asked from total surrender cuz I had given up. And once the last syllable echoed into the dark, i felt, saw, experienced a hand reaching back. And in that recognition, I had a choice to embrace or to question further. Questions got me to giving up...I'm done with questions so I embraced that hand.
It's a continuous life of revelations, yet in that shared embrace I saw that empathy had brought me to the place where empathy dissolved. I was feeling so disconnected because i desired the connection I wasn't seeing in the world, not just for me, friends family, the world seemed disconnected. Empathy is Love in a different spelling. I desired to know Love, to know myself, to find the barriers built around love that sent me into disconnect.
Well, as I held the key in my hand, to my surprise I realized I was on the inside. And the door was open. I walked through, turned around and... ...no door. Huh...
Some time went by and I wasn't so dismayed by people or the world and that was good. Then I'd get into my why's. Why me, victimizing myself, but I remembered that room I was shadowed in....yep I'm in there, the doors open ohh cool. And it's always open.

The judge inside us is the ego. And I recognized if I'm aware to an ego, what's this aspect I'm seeing with. Well I spell it Soul awareness, loving awareness and in conversation I see that judging happening while also aware that I'm watching thoughts from a place that doesn't care about judging. And the more I practice perceiving from loving awareness, I notice I'm actually emptying the old energy we're shifting from and in that emptiness, I am filled with core truth. A vibration more aligned with what tells me that connection with other people, is from raising my own vibration from heart. From the desire to be free. To be happy while talking with loved ones, who are just like me with unique ideas, struggles, creativity and love. It's a resonance, practiced in order to empty all the order I think I want there to be. Cuz really I see how as I open myself, I am opening to energies that are empathic(love) where I'm like whoah, unconditional love is having no box of conditions about my self, which allows me to be that emptiness or created space inside of love, where theres no agenda, no outcome, no other, and I can see me, that infinite me in a flower, a wall, a question, and in the eyes I look into. For those eyes look into mine, and if my truth is that it's all Love and I am infinity and finite, those eyes hold that sameness, hold my eyes too, are mine just from another You. Unity and the illusion of seperation bridged, balanced.

Push the boundry of what the walls of belief tell you. You are loved, You are magnificence, Always have been, and You always will Be. And in this moment, our breathe is shared, our life breathes only into right now.
In vulnerability, our nakedness is experienced, dissolving in our heart as we see each other as shadow dancers within the light of Love.

I hope this answers something, and doesn't feel like a what to do. The questioning that you speak of is so understood. Light and love!

 

Can you forgive yourself for not being as trusting & friendly as others? like, is this an aspect of yourself you can accept and be comfortable with?
Also, you mention your friends made you feel bad about this? how so?

 

In a word - yes! Similarly to @JustPhil perhaps, my early life experience at junior school gave me a deep distrust of people my own sort of age that persisted until my 20s and 30s.

It’s revealing to try and imagine the difficulty of responding to the reverse problem - suppose a friend of yours told you they really envied you your intuitive understanding of what goes on below the surface of other people and asked you to show them how to do it? It's not a far-fetched situation because I suspect intuitive empathy is a gift that many people desire. Not something that could be passed on to them very easily, and nor is a solution to the issue you raise.

I’m afraid these are long rambling thoughts to play with, looking back at my own life. Sorry about that . You'll need to pick and mix because we all have different issues and experiences - some might resonate while others won’t.

• A big part of this problem can lie in a deep insecurity and lack of confidence in ourselves, a feeling that we are not OK compared with others.
• We are wired up a bit differently from most of the other people we meet – they think and interact with each other differently to us. We end up watching from the outside because of it. When we are little, we don’t realise that their experience of the world is not like ours, so their response to us says we are doing it wrong and we try and be like them. It’s a bit like a left-handed person forcing themselves to use their right hand to be like others, and we may do it badly and look and feel inadequate in company. This childhood feeling is hard to throw off in later life.
• Our empathy can be like having an emotional broadband radio that's forever switched-on full volume and we are bombarded with everything that others around us are feeling, even things they aren't aware of themselves. It can be hard to tell which are our feelings and which are other peoples
• Because we are insecure ourselves, this constant noise also triggers all sorts of insecure responses deep within us - and these manifest as defensive reactions. We project our own emotions back onto people around us to the point where we don't know which are our own and which came from others.
• So we protect ourselves by building a castle and engaging the world defensively from within it. That defensiveness can trigger negative strokes from other people which of course reinforce it.

How to deal with it? No magic bullet, and a lot of work, but things can improve.

• One of the keys is a lifetime's journey inwards to discover our own immeasurable value and really accept it. Life has given us times, places, situations, people and gifts that in combination are unique to us and these reflect our own unique value.
• It mustn't be a false sense of value, a delusion, but an honest, true one.
• Discovering it is a never-ending process, but a little travel down that road gives us a bedrock of confidence and belief in ourselves – and that can start to remove the burning need to affirm ourselves in the mirror of others who we feel are better than us in some way.
• We need a volume control on the emotional hash that surrounds us. Learn to ignore it unless you intend to listen. Easier said than done, particularly when we are tired and stressed. Being aware that it’s needed is often enough to objectify the noise and get it into control.
• Develop your strengths primarily not your weaknesses – be the best INFJ we can be, not something else. Everyone has different strengths and difficulties.
• In particular, we need to give our intuition space to work. It’s important to try stopping an immediate instinctive judgement of other people. @plurjosh focused strongly on this and it's something I've said in a more general context elsewhere. A hidden risk is that when we judge another like that, often it reflects a hidden judgement of ourselves that piles fire on that feeling we aren’t OK in relationship to them. Try and let intuition work by itself without immediately burying its perceptions with feeling and thinking judgements and criticisms. This is surprisingly hard for many INxJs because Ni is not well received by the world at large, so we are encouraged in childhood to focus far more on the other functions and downplay our intuition. Try and use it like sight - without a constant dialogue of critique which distort and filters out what you see in judgement prejudice.
• All people are a mixture of good, bad and indifferent characteristics - if we can set aside our analysis and judgment and just give our intuition plenty of unobstructed time to work, then we can see more clearly the beauty and complexity that is buried ( sometimes deeply ) at the heart of the miracle of each human person - a miracle of overwhelming worth. Giving others a glimpse of the deep worth we see within them, regardless of the surface bubble and froth, can endear us to them.
• Intuitive empathic people internalise other folks – we bring them inside us, which is how our empathy works. It’s very important we learn how to control this consciously because they can easily give us inner boundary problems, and that can harm our sense of value and of who we are. Our relationships may be very black or white if it’s happening partially unconsciously – either there is no significant contact, or we set off from the outset with the first steps of a very deep contact on our part, not because we want that, but because we know no other way. Because almost all folks are incompatible with us at this depth, we can’t tolerate them across our boundaries, and we push them all the way out pretty quickly and pull down the shutters. Most people don’t relate to each other in that way and are much more casual about most social contacts at the outset. The way for us to be more open and casual about this is to strengthen our inner boundaries and not allow anyone across apart from people we are already very close to indeed and comfortable with. It takes practice to bring others inside so we can see them, but not let them over that key boundary – it took me till my 40s to find out where mine is, but it needn’t have taken that long.
• It may sound strange to say this because it runs counter to the idea of letting go of our ego as a popular psychological development goal. In fact I think many INFJs have problems with egos that are weakened by boundary issues and need to give strengthening them the priority. It’s hard to let go of something that we don’t really have a firm hold on to start with.
• Accept there are risks in all human relationships, just as there are risks every time we go out of our homes and travel somewhere. Mostly, it only hurts us badly when we feel devalued, and that can’t happen very easily once we stop valuing ourselves by the way other people relate to us. Explore your social space like a toddler learning to walk – lots of enthusiasm, no eschatological expectations, a good sense of fun, accept the slips and bumps as part of the game, get up and carry on …..

 

Hello OrangeLizzard I'm finding the balance I practice now to integrate with my people relations , is coming to the relationship I have with Creative Source(god). The predicament I look at, stems from the notion I am aware to that infinite source, and my finite relation. And being unified. From the get go in any interaction whether it be with another person or with traffic, movie choices, color selections for painting, I'm practicing that balance by understanding and deepening my connection to the truth that I am co creating with my world. The physical realm, or matrix, visible reality,...is interacting with my consciousness through the thoughts I'm choosing to transmit and the emotions I'm tuning with. Brain being transmitter, and heart the tuner. In this understanding of interaction with my world, the empathic aspect of me is more related with the balanced unifying of my predicament of being in a form(co creator) while experiencing the infinite in a finite frame.
Yes, I have given my self away as the compassionate "giver" to many "takers" which drove me to search for some understanding of why I kept giving so much, just ending up with the same hurt, again and again. I believe empaths are "old souls" and a great many are starseeds, indigo children, lightwotkers, beings that have a massive accumulation of Akashic Memory.
I looked at why I'm so considerate of people, friends, and family and it's cuz I want for people to be happy. I want people to be loved. Well I asked myself why I would disregard my happiness for the sake of hurt. Saw that in my disregard, my idea of loving people was a bit skewed. I had the belief that if I saw and felt the suffering of beings around me, I had to give and give and give, suffering my self in the process. Well I noticed it finally and embarked on the inward journey of self inquiry and meditation.
It's a on going practice. Though any personality we think we have to uphold, with needs to be met, is perception from ego/mind. If I'm perceiving the person I'm talking with from personality, I'm just gonna see from that level. Which is dualistic seperation, furthering suffering. Which isn't what I want.
I like to practice a multidimensional vision where I visualize a knob on the side of my head where my temple is. On level 1, I see black and white, man and woman. Level 2, I see skin color and nationality. Level 3, I see star signs, you're a Pisces I'm an Aquarius. Level 4, i see the other being as another universe just as mine. Level 5, I don't really see at this level, however I percieve another being as the entire universe encapsulated inside the universe just as I am and we're so drastically unique with our paths. So my perception I practice with is that of a balanced awareness. A loving awareness, that knows about levels 1-5. And when interacting with another being, whether if they're on level 1 or 5 doesn't matter, the Only thing that matters is my level of perception and my relation with the Infinite Creative Source. If I'm seeing from level 5, then I look at that being with unconditional love, knowing the eyes I stare into is the universe looking at itself.

Ultimately the best thing I can do to help you, is work on myself through compassion and self love. The best thing that you could do to help me, is work on yourself through compassion and self love.

Hope theres an asnwer somewhere!

 

To Be Free
Rather Than Be Right

Do what you do,
but don't forget your heart,
don't forget your beloved.

The door of my compassion is open,
if closed,
it is shut on myself.

I remember.
Who am I not loving?
From here, lights compassion intends from me.

Formed statues,
Made from shared ground,
Stand in same place.

If I remain silent,
Open in love.
What isn't love?

I see my forgetting,
And glance back looking at love,
Under every robe and each saying.

It is true, robes cover,
Sounds far from home,
Each color You.

The more I look,
Grass, trees, birds, and clouds,
Are your blossoms too.