Many INFJs and other very sensitive people feel like they don’t belong.
From the outside, everything may look very normal. They have friends, seem to have no problems socialising, and don’t really look like outsiders.
Yet, that’s how they often feel. Like outsiders. Not really connected to the people around them. More like a bystander who is not a part of the group.
One common reason for that?
They have learned that they need to adjust to somehow fit in. Because their authentic self wasn't appreciated by their environment. At least they were made to believe they were either unwanted or of little value.
That’s the mild version.
The harder version is when you are born into a family that never wanted you and has no understanding of your levels of sensitivity at all. They see your sensitivity as a weakness, as something that needs to be fixed. And it gets even worse when you start seeing things they are trying to hide.
If only you knew they couldn’t let the truth be seen. But that’s something many sensitive souls learned in many painful lessons. And that’s why they adjusted. To avoid the pain inflicted on them and ending up all alone.
But all this adjusting came at a price...
The obvious point is that playing a role is very exhausting. The less obvious is that this role is giving you nothing back. People may like your role and might even praise you for it. But you know it’s just a role and not who you really are.
The story would be very different if people praised you for how well you have played your role. And when they do, and tell you that they admire how you made it through all the hardship, kept your smile, were always nice, supportive, and fun to be around; you may end up sobbing and crying your eyes out.
That’s when you get an idea of how painful hearing the truth can be. A truth you knew all the time but tried to push away so hard . Because after all, you wanted to belong and somehow fit in...
Maybe you have tried to reveal your true self here and there and again found that people did not really get you. Almost as if you spoke a different language and just couldn’t find the right words for them to understand you.
The thing is that the longer you experience not being understood, the more you may end up trying to explain yourself. And somehow this also doesn’t work well. At least from my experience.
For many years I tried to improve my communication. Phrase things more clearly. Simplify things, try to explain in pictures... you name it. I even took voice training, as I thought something with my intonation was wrong or that I just sounded too boring.
Didn’t help... But people who hardly spoke my languages understood me pretty well whenever I explained technical things to them. That’s when it dawned on me that mere communication was not the actual problem...
Maybe the simple reason for feeling like you don’t belong is that you actually don’t belong where you currently are.
Yes, that’s very simplified, maybe even a bit too much.
But somewhere we have to start...
INFJs and highly sensitive people make up only a relatively small part of the overall population. INFJs are estimated at around 1-3%, while the numbers for highly sensitive people vary quite a lot depending on the definition.
Additionally, many cultures do not really encourage being sensitive. It’s often seen as a weakness.
As a result, in many places, very sensitive people are just too unusual to be understood or seen for who they are.
As we get older, many of us get softer around the edges and start to value sensitivity as something that may actually have been missing from our lives.
But you don’t want to wait that long to finally feel like you belong...
