Vulnerable to what?

uberrogo, I don't think we're 'hiding', but rather we're 'not explicitly showing'. I'm not sure if this makes any sense but if you liken being emotionally intimate with somebody to being physically intimate with somebody, it might make it clearer why we tend to hold back a little.

Besides, introversion is not about having a fear of letting people in. It's not fear based at all. It simply means that you do not get your energy from external sources (such as other people). In my experience, I just don't feel the need to share everything and I can't explain why.

That said, I do appreciate that there is probably be an underlying fear of being judged..everybody is vulnerable to that.

 

I don't fear letting people in, I do it all the time. Though I hate when people go out of there way to try to pry things out of me, those people I tend to shut out.

 

Usually it's done while I'm in the middle of something, it's annoying, cause well, I'm doing something.

 

For me personally I fear letting people in because when I do they use me and toss me aside like an old tissue...I dont let people use me anymore, and to do that I dont let people close to me anymore...

 

If someone asks a 'personal' question, I will tell them the answer the majority of the time. The only reason I would not tell or be secretive about something is because I know from previous expierence or from what I 'infer' with this person that the reaction will not be what I want.

It's not the rejection I fear.

Sometimes when you tell someone "I am trying to remove the foil part of this wrapper from the paper part", it's not really constructive.

I only tell other people things if I think there will be some sort of purpose to it.

And you know...I don't even think me being introverted is about not telling people what I really think. It's merely that I think more than I talk [ sometimes] and I don't feel the need to approach others or be in a group. I'm not very social because I am more consumed in my own world, and in a way, not very interested in other people's world.

The reason I will have selective friends who I share things to and not everyone else it because I see that putting my energy or investing in one project is more beneficial than investing my time and energy in a ton of different people who I will never know as well as I could know them if it was only them.

 

For me it's certainly how I was treated growing up from my family. My introvertedness is due to how my family ALWAYS treated my preferences as invalid (I was raised by 2 ISTJs, and the other significant members of my family were ESTJ and ISFJ). They completely didn't understand me and always made me feel as if I'm invalid. I just got into the habit of not showing myself. I become very introverted because that's the only comfort I had when growing up: myself.

Yes, it was that traumatic. I'm surprised I didn't turn out a super-emo INFP >.>

 

For me, an analogy would be watching someone practice a performance when they weren't polished yet.

I'd feel intruded if someone tried to read into something that I hadn't even finished analyzing yet.

Introverts tire when they're in extroverted situations for too long.

 

From what I can tell from my own personal experience, low self-esteem contributes to being afraid of criticism and judgment. In my adolescent psychology class, I read that achieving intimacy is impossible if you have not achieved it within yourself. Once you have a stable self-esteem and a solid knowledge of who you are by your own self-definition, you don't care what other people have to say about you. If you do not intimately know yourself, it is impossible to define your own boundaries and you are vulnerable to being classified by other people in ways that violate you.

 

I was broken-in near the end of highschool, before that I was a bubbly and cheerful free spirit but I got to a point were I was so tired of getting in trouble all the time, so I just shut down, became near mute and studious, the teachers loved it! They had broken my spirit. out:

 

I'm sorry to say, but school is more about breaking spirits than education... It really works!

 

Of course, that could be argued. I learn better when being self-taught.

School is a method of control and torture :spider:

 

Damn internets.... That's exactly what I meant.

 

I learn best being in an argument or forum discussion.

 

I am an auditory learner. I learn best when I listen to someone lecture. The more detail the better, "general" examples don't work for me. One of the reasons I don't get math easily.

The worst kind of learning for me is break out disucssions in small groups, or getting up and doing "activities".

 

Uberrogo: Defense is only part of introversion - whenever I 'let someone in' they set about trying to change me, which is hurtful to me.

It's probably true that if I weren't an INFJ life would be much easier, but I like my interior life - probably a lot more than my exterior life.

The main reason for keeping to myself is that it is just the way my interior life works (or the only way it CAN work) - on my own.


Indigo: for maths do you need the visual? Your prefered learning style only works in the humanities for me. For the physical sciences and maths, I need visual to be able to remember.

 

I am a chemistry major, it works for most things for me in science, except math. Visuals in math helps me a TON, I can draw my own conclusions on what the formulas mean, and how they work. To actualy do them though I need lots and lots of examples.