The INFP journey is about embracing your true self, discovering your heart’s deepest callings, and finding beauty in being uniquely you.
I had taken the Meyers Briggs personality test years ago and knew I had tested as an INFP. Introvert. Intuitive. Feeler. Perceiver. Okay, yeah. Check. Check. Check. Check. But, what the heck does any of that really mean. Who the bleep am I besides a woman riddled with CPTSD who from birth has felt broken inside, cast off. I had spent so much time pouring over understanding those who had harmed, abandoned and hurt me, grieving for them, learning to forgive and give them grace, some at total distance. I intuitively knew it was time to understand, truly, myself.
God answered my prayer through a secular You Tuber helping pieces of me fall into place. God is not confined to theological spaces. I am so grateful.
These video classes unlocked so many truths about myself and the way I intuit and perceive and experience the world. And, I finally learned I am not alone. By now I’ve taken dozens and dozens of classes to become self-aware and finally for the life of me meet others like me. We INF’s comprise a mere 4% of the population. We typically sit on the fringes of mainstream society. We are writers, artists, healers. We tend to know and attach to others through their deepest wounds. This can get us into trouble even with the best intention when the other doesn’t want their wounds exposed let alone healed. We have a natural way of digging until we find “it”. We can be relentless about finding one’s wounds as we expose our own in order to bring the communal healing we know is possible. Jesus was in the business of exposing and healing wounds so it would make sense this is what we do in church, right? See how this thinking can cause great confusion and anguish?
We INF’s can see lies and injustice as clear as day. We can see behind masks to motive and intentionality. Mood shifts, facial expressions, word to action inconsistencies. We are detectives who can see and intuit the slightest mismatch incongruities. For some of us these abilities became amplified for our very survival as children inside dysfunctional homes. Inside the church I did not fear shining a Light on lies and injustices believing and knowing Jesus Himself brings darkness to Light. Are we not as followers called to do the same? Not hide our Light under bushels? It came as an utter shock to my core, an electrical current pulsating my soul threatening to stop my heart when those ordained in His name protected the darkness offering no beacon of Light except to the perpetrator surrounding him as allies. My Light almost flickered out, almost.
But, for Jesus. My Lord and Savior.
Not all INF’s are neurodivergent. Personality alone does not make you neurodivergent. I am an Emotional Empath later learning more accurately I have hyper-empathy in conjunction with being a Highly Sensitive Person these not always coexisting, nor are they synonymous. One can be highly sensitive to stimuli in their environment ie. sights, sounds, smells without being energetically porous to all the emotions seeping inside of them most often unconsciously until discovery this is even a ‘thing’ becoming voila lightbulb self-aware.
Even after aware, it is still extremely difficult to stop emotions from automatically permeating us as we are naturally made, created with porous boundaries. We expand our energy fields to allow people into ours naturally holding space for them and all their emotions spoken and those unspoken, but felt. The rest of the world does not do this, I just learned. The majority have hardened boundaries, a protective shell that says you can come this far and no farther to me, my psyche, my core.
As an EE, you can walk away from an encounter with a loved one or a total stranger with no words passed between, yet having taken on (absorbed) their negative energy while simultaneously giving them your positive energy (with the subconscious purpose of healing them) and not even know that is why you feel off, icky, dark, moody, anxious. To add, yay, we tend to be Internalizers which means we go inward to process all these lovely negative emotions while blaming ourselves for having them when sometimes, a lot of the times, they are not even ours to own.
Overactive empathy is Self-harming albeit unintentional. We were not created to carry the full intensity of another human being’s sorrows, depression, anger, worry, trauma. When others turn away from these abandoning them to be felt alone in crippling shame and isolation, we EE’s are drawn like magnets pulling the full heavy weight of them into ourselves with no filter.
How is one not to experience life like “a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” filled with shame and self-deprecating doubt questioning self and God while carrying the weight of the entire world inside? James 1:6 Jesus is the only One able and intended to do so to the point of experiencing rare hematidrosis the night before His crucifixion, “and being in anguish he prayed more earnestly and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Luke 22:44 Intensely Feeling has often felt a total, abysmal, life sucking curse. It leaves one doing everything the Scriptures admonish us not to do. Despair.
Here’s the kicker: these energy exchanges can be like a thief in the night stealing your joy while blaming you for your stolen joy. The enemy is sly. The irony is most of our encounters if you are on a wound and truth seeking mission will not be positive to positive exchanges. We emotional Empaths naturally seek and are drawn to the one person in the room most negative, most hurting, most languishing, most lost with buried traumas so deep they emanate ~ right into us and we carry them and hold space for them inside our very being long after the physical person leaves our presence.
You feel on a cellular level you were not made for this world. This is not your home. You don’t belong. It is too hard. Too destructive. Too devastating. Too rejecting. Too inhumane. Too unjust. Too hopeless. Too sad.
Then a whisper, “Take heart dear loved one. Jesus did not fit either.” He carried the world on the cross, and He can help us not to do the same. We must begin to differentiate what is ours to carry and what we must pass to the Lord activating this passing off other’s emotional energy sooner so it does not stay contained creating a toxic wasteland inside us. We must learn to set our own boundaries on what we can not let in ie. for me turning off the news; removing social media where there is no control over what next sad traumatic event occurred to a stranger God did not specifically put in your life. I have even had to limit what TV shows and movies I watch because I will over empathize with fictional characters and their griefs, struggles.
It sucks to be this sensitive where you have to limit even the fictional world, but it is a form of self-care so we can have space for ourselves to be grounded in knowing what actually is our own emotional baggage, novel. And, space for the actual human beings God places in our lives for whom to care while learning not to completely absorb them through our pores.
For me, this goes for groups too. I led for a year a recovery small group. With emotions naturally high each time, I left recovery group feeling and owning all the emotions shared along with their potential and progress. I love real and raw recovery groups. I believe in them. My hope is to heal and learn to balance my own empathic ways enough to facilitate in the future. We can not sidestep the tenuous work of helping ourself first, and so it is one more thing I’ve had to let go. For now. Healing is full of losses, but gaining thy Self while leaning on God. Priceless.
With Love,
Raya
The Gentle Rise 