The INFJ Healing Series - Part I

Reconnecting with the intuition you once learned to ignore

Sorry for being a day late. The heat wave in Germany took its toll on me. It’s still tropical warm, but at least the fan next to me helps me cool down again.

As announced on Tuesday, I am starting a new healing series. This time it’s about the INFJ personality type from the MBTI framework. No worries, you don’t need to know any of the specifics.

INFJs are basically introverts, with high levels of inwardly directed intuition and a very empathic nature. You could also call them sensitive souls, but then you would have to add their dominant intuitive nature.

So now that we have that, let me start the series with the biggest item, the introverted intuition. It’s the very core of the INFJ personality, yet many of them experience this gift often as a curse, until they learn to embrace and reconnect with it.

Image by Steve A Johnson on Pexels

What Intuition Is Really About

Intuition is often described as knowing without really knowing. Like it’s some kind of magic. But it is not. It’s actually something INFJs learn so well that it becomes second nature.

INFJs often wonder why others cannot see the obvious. They simply are not aware that the things they pick up are some kind of superpower.

Again, it’s not magic.

Intuition, at its core, is picking up patterns and making sense of them. The more you have to deal with such patterns, the better you get at recognising and interpreting them. As sensitive souls, INFJs have kind of a head start in that regard.

Due to their higher levels of sensitivity, INFJs pick up signals more intensely than most people around them. And when they additionally grow up in a somewhat challenging environment, they have to read the room and pick up other people’s emotions all the time.

This may sound a bit abstract, so let me give you a more relatable example.

My grandfather loved to repair engines. It was his job, and even in his spare time he couldn’t live long without machine oil on his fingers. Sometimes, when a car passed by, he told me something like this:

“Tim, this car has a problem with the ignition.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“You need to listen closely,” he answered with a warm smile.

Well, I didn’t hear anything other than normal car noise. But I trusted that my grandfather knew what he was talking about. Because everyone in the neighborhood asked him for advice whenever they had problems with a machine. He always knew how to fix things like he had X-ray vision or whatever.

No trial and error. Just opening the damn thing, doing something, and it worked right away.

Magic for bystanders. For him, just doing the obvious.

INFJs have similar abilities when it’s about people and social dynamics.

Why Intuition Often Feels Like a Curse

We live in a world that doesn’t value sensitivity too much. Especially when you grow up and yet have to learn to stand on your own two feet, you are taught to be tough, swallow your tears, and move on.

I’m oversimplifying a bit. Things have changed a bit over the last 10 to 20 years. Currently, it feels like the pendulum is swinging a bit back again, though.

When times are getting tougher, you often cannot afford to be too sensitive. Because it will simply overwhelm you. That’s also why we try to push away our feelings when the going gets too tough, just to remain somewhat functional.

Sensitivity is the foundation for the INFJs’ intuition. When we learn to suppress our feelings, we also learn to ignore when something feels off. But that’s often exactly what the voice of intuition sounds like. An odd feeling. Something we don’t really want when we are already overwhelmed by what is going on around us.

The far bigger reason why intuition can feel like a curse is that it is often invalidated by others. When those close to you constantly tell you that you are too sensitive, or make stuff up, you begin to see your intuition as something flawed.

The third reason is that intuition and hypervigilance are close neighbors. When your environment feels unsafe, your brain is constantly checking for potential dangers and threats.

Better safe than sorry is the program that runs in the background. And that can actually lead to catastrophizing and confusing a rope in the dark with a snake. But that’s not intuition, though it can very much feel like it.

The point I want to make here is that we also learn that what we think is intuition causes us a lot of drama and thus is something undesirable.

The Problems With Neglecting Your Intuition

When you silence your intuition, you basically abandon a wonderful inner guidance system. This can actually work well for quite a long time. You still have your brain and can get very far with rationalising everything.

But by doing so, we become a bit like logic-driven machines. Being all in your head is a much nicer description. It gives you an intellectual touch and is socially far more acceptable than being all in your feelings. Of course, neither one-sidedness is any good in the long run.

When we abandon parts of ourselves, we simply cannot feel whole.

It’s much like pretending that one of your arms doesn’t exist. You can get very far using only your dominant arm. But life is so much better when you use both, and one supports the other...

Of course, if you never had that strong intuition, you wouldn’t miss it. But the thing is, it doesn’t go away when you have it. You carry it with you, much like the arm you pretend not to have.

The abandoned arm doesn’t disappear. You will feel its weight; sometimes it might feel cold, give you a tingling sensation, or send other signals to show you it’s still there. And it’s the very same thing with your intuition that wants to be heard.

So this was the explanation for logical minds. But there is more.

A squirrel will only have a happy life when they can collect nuts, climb trees, and make people smile with their cuteness. Yes, their cuteness, because they have personality and are not just things.

Okay, this point is optional in terms of their happiness.

The point I want to make is that our lives tend to be most pleasant when we are allowed to fully be who we naturally are. And when you are a very intuitive person, you want to use that intuition in daily life. It’s your gift from Mother Nature, and she wants you to use it. In other words, the world needs it. Already too many machine-like people or tough guys out there...

Of course, you can decide to abandon your unique gift as an INFJ and accept living a life that somehow never feels really connected.

I know, I know... this may sound a little bit dire. But look around and see how many people numb themselves and are scared of getting in touch with themselves. And then look at the squirrel who fully accepts who they are.

Then make a choice if you still want to abandon parts of yourself...

Reconnecting With Your Intuition

This one sounds bigger than it actually will be. The thing is that you have never lost your intuition. You don’t have to build it up to get it back. You simply have to stop neglecting it.

But simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it is easy.

Back then, when I tried to get it back, I tried to test it. So I listened to what was coming up, noted it down, and checked whether it had spoken the truth or not.

However, that’s not how intuition works. It’s not an omniscient oracle.

Nevertheless, this exercise can still help you to separate hypervigilance and the underlying anxiety from intuition. Because it helps you become more aware of when your mind machine makes things up. And that part is not your intuition.

Intuition in its simplest form is that something feels off, odd, or somehow strange. Something that you don’t really have a word for.

Maybe you notice how a person walks differently, that the modulation in someone’s voice has changed, something so subtle that if you mentioned it wouldn’t be believed. Something that makes you wonder whether it is really there or just made up by your mind.

Don’t dismiss that. It’s a valuable cue.

Just listen to what is coming up inside. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just let it be there. Drop your resistance. That’s all you need for the start.

The more you allow this to happen, the more you will notice.

Opening up for your intuition is only one part. The next one is to get a deeper understand why you once abandoned it. And for this, it makes sense to take a closer look at your childhood. How would you describe the dynamics you see in your family system today? Were you really too sensitive back then, or did you simply speak out the obvious that others wanted to hide?

Was there really any reason to dismiss how you felt back then and what you observed?

This exercise can take quite a while. Because we were often made to believe the family story and kind of accept that there was something wrong with us. Some family systems need such alternative realities to stay at least somewhat functional.

The biggest breakthrough for me was to finally allow myself to feel my feelings. Out of the head into the body, so to speak. In the beginning, this can be very overwhelming. Because once you allow yourself to feel again, all those bottled emotions will come to the surface again, much like poking a high-pressure tube...

You don’t need to do this all alone. There are many courses that help to connect with your body and feelings again. Search for somatic exercises or try Reiki or choose from the variety of yoga offered.

Some of these courses come with a spiritual touch. In mild doses, this can help create an overall pleasant experience. Then it’s a bit like putting on a nice perfume. But when it’s all spiritual, I would take a closer look and check whether this is really something you resonate with.

So these are the three main things you can do. Another important element is to give the whole process time. Things will find their way the less you resist the process.

As mentioned before, none of your parts want to be suppressed or abandoned. There are mechanisms that will help you reconnect with yourself. Much like the body heals its own wounds, sometimes with help from the outside when they are too big. But in the end, the body does the healing.

Your main job in the whole process is to get out of your own way.

And that’s basically it. For today, of course. More will follow.

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