[This post was taken from something I posted on Reddit earlier today, so the format might be confusing in the context of this website]

My name is Cameron, and I know that I am an INFJ.

My own understanding goes as follows, because I spent a decent amount of time in a similar phase of questioning (that was always followed by an underlying certainty that I was INFJ, that I just hadn’t proved to myself yet):

Ni tends to be focused on a grander goal that serves the greater good of ourselves and those around us. No need to serve our own interests if it does not benefit the majority, which of course is the interference of Fe. This grander goal has probably existed intuitively with you your entire life, and over time you’ve widdled down the confusion surrounding it, making it a lot more obvious to your conscious self. It breaks into subgoals, into further subgoals, into further subgoals, which are all connected to the main one but exist as manifestations of said grand goal via a combination of things (actions, decisions, communication styles, choices, etc). Everything has this connectivity to something central, which can be challenging to identify unless you sit yourself down and write or talk through (with somebody who also has intuition, preferrably) what your current life experience is comprised of. I really started to understand how my introverted intuition works when I was going through the process of a breakup from a “toxic ex” (for lack of better terminology) and self educating on MBTI subsequently. What I mean by this is that I started to identify it’s presence in my life when I began to trust my gut instincts about this individual who was causing me issues, and I noticed how their actions really did come from a core of negativity and self-servitude which I had picked up on but quieted much earlier on. This process isn’t easy to fully describe without writing a lot more than I already have, so I’ll save you the reading time and just tell you this: look into your own thought process via writing, and see how you describe the challenges you face. Are you consistently attempting to break down these situations until they’re entirely barebones and originating from a singular cause? Furthermore, do you feel centralized as an individual (calm, sure of your perspective of reality, not in a loop of self-questioning) when this singular cause ties into that original broad understanding of how people/life operate you’ve held onto since youth? I guess a final summary would be that you are practically addicted to minimizing and minimizing, but in turn revealing the true nature or depth of an issue(s), and through adequate action in servitude of that desire, you aren’t depressed or scared but rather confident and find it easier to tackle the issue at hand (or at the very least emotionally regulate yourself through it).

I hate when people isolate the cognitive functions and describe how they look in the thought process of any given personality type, because they work together to form the thought, though for an INFJ it all begins with that Ni. The Ni is fed by the other components of your stack, meaning that your means of accessing mental clarity within the personality composition of an Ni-dom occurs firstly through Fe extroverted feeling assisted by Ti and Se.

Other little things I’ve noticed about myself that make it apparent to me that I am INFJ:

-I kind of just *know* some shit before I’ve researched it, and then when I research it I’m mostly looking for (and often uncovering) confirmation of the bias I lead with. Though this bias is never an impenetrable, senseless or ego-centric bias, rather it’s a whole microcosm of information I’ve gathered from other experiences I’ve participated in. For example, in researching narcissism, I already could intuitively piece together the fact that most personality disorders originate from unhealthy relationships with a maternal figure. This was something I felt was obvious because I presumably understood how formative it is for somebody to be educated and identified and unconditionally loved by a mother, though I needed to research so that I could qualitatively explain this gut feeling to my conscious mind. In short, I have intuitive inflammation that picks up on certain things and can make conclusions as to why something is the way it is (appears in the form of: an *odd feeling* when meeting somebody or doing something, and a brief notion of “oh yeah this is this way because this pattern existed in the past” at the rear of my mind), and I then search for confirmation from somebody who also *gets it* (usually persons who are also heavily reliant on Ni, such as ENFJs or INTJs)

-You get along with healthy ENFJs, INFPs, and INTJs

-You consistently feel an urge to “make connections” with other people, which sometimes leads to you being a therapist to an unhealthy “friend” or two in order to heal their wounds so that you may grow the community around you. This will be much more important to you than filtering people in and out of your life based on whether or not they possess values similar to your own (i.e “I refuse to befriend a Trump supporter” is not an INFJ statement. “I want to help them understand why being a Trump supporter is regressive to their own belief system, assuming that they aren’t an egomaniac to begin with. I sense that this person, despite their different beliefs, is capable of learning how to change to develop a more effective route to becoming good in society” IS an INFJ statement.

-You enjoy working in cafe environments, surrounded by people having conversation, but you don’t wish to actively pay attention to their conversations for too long. You’d much rather just be surrounded by life and positive interactions, or motivated persons getting their stuff done, as it creates an Fe environment around you that is so tolerable that you’re practically separated from any chance at falling into an Ni-Ti cycle. It’s important to you to feel like you’re part of a community, but this doesn’t have to always be through participation, as it can come from fulfillment absorbed through the external love of strangers engaging with their friends/family.

-You enjoy going for walks in nature by yourself, but you also like walking around busy cities and watching the night life unfold. Both are interesting because it gives you a sense of connection to the past, present, and future of humanity. Furthermore, you value the concept of “humanity” and are greatly pleased to see people existing together in harmony. When you walk around places with outdoor dining and couples engaging in invested conversation, and you recognize the “vibe” of a particular space to be collaborative/constructive/pleasant, and you see people playing with things that are relevant to a specific culture, you FEEL for a moment how wonderful it is to be alive and to be a part of any timeline at all. Isn’t it great that we have a chance to exist in this world, around all of these people, and just pick up on the behaviors and whatever else those who have died or haven’t been born yet could only wish to experience?

-Life almost feels like a movie. You tend to forget to communicate with your eyes, rather they work as a vessel to absorb information. You get deeply involved in the information you absorbed, and the connections that are being made between the essences of people/places/things and the grand ideas that generally float around your cranium. It feels awkward when you get that meta-awareness of the fact that you’re supposed to indicate that you’re listening to something with how your eyes rest or appear, likely because you somewhat dissociate from yourself for a moment and exist in an intuitive space of idea/viewpoint/etc sharing with the person you’re having a conversation with. It’s like you’re viewing the world around you primarily with your intuition, and because of this you prefer to connect with this natural intuitive floodgate-release rather than with signals or implication.

-You’ve experienced childhood trauma or parentification.

-You can write and write and write without overthinking. There’s always something to dig into and explain, every little detail has connectivity to something much grander.

-You feel an obligation to finish things. It’s frustrating to be met with new ideas when you haven’t assured yourself that you’ve reached the endpoint of one. For example, in conversation with an Ne-dom who repeatedly changes the subject, you’re the one to reel it back in and get back to the heart and meat of it all which will be much more significant for the relationship and for your own perspective than little tidbits that bounce along as a result of other tidbits.

There’s so much more I could write about, but I promised myself I would get other work done, so I’ll leave what I’ve written here for now.