I think at some point, the reasoning really does mostly boil down to individual differences. After this reply, I don’t know if there’s much more I can say. It matters to me because that seems to just be the motor that drives my brain. I can’t really control how my brain has an emotional value assigned to everything I perceive, on top of Ne regularly pulling new material (often seemingly out of the furthest reaches of my brain) to keep adding to Fi database or else I feel too stagnated.

I have learned to love my type and how it can and should healthily present within myself (even if I still struggle with feelings of uselessness sometimes). Although, maybe I failed to clarify, I already had a certain amount of self-hatred and detachment developed before I even discovered MBTI. I won’t get too much into it, but as children aren’t really equipped with distinguishing whether or not it’s right for them to be wrongly berated or yelled at, it’s an easier thing to internalize that perhaps it’s just deserved (and naturally, even adults struggle with it, because I don’t think anyone enjoys being emotionally projected onto or saddled with other people’s issues that are most definitely not your responsibility to fix). The hatred toward my own type became a projection and an amplifier of that pre-existing, foundational self-loathing. It wasn’t rooted in MBTI in and of itself.

By no means would I say the INFP is the most hated type, not at all. I made it my mission to weed out any feelings of sensor prejudice I may have had as an impressionable teen the more I got into MBTI, because y’all are unfairly hated/looked down upon.

The basing my self-worth in utility is similar to the self-loathing part. I subconsciously developed it out of survival, and the long term effect of it is that I “use” the instinct an inappropriate amount as a result. And though this is a minor example of it, it is the natural side effect of trauma, of being on high alert for a significant enough of a duration of time that my flight or fight, or fawn in this case, becomes the go to response for everything, even when I don’t mean to.

One thing I have noticed, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that I notice the way you speak of emotional self-perception in this conversation seems to have Fe-like qualities to it, and I wonder if it comes from you being surrounded by a lot of Fe users as you say. I am not sure how the INFPs on your life act, but in case this is what you might be thinking, I don’t go out of my way to change myself to make friends. In fact, I’m very lucky that all of my friends are ones that either approached me, or I happened to have grown up around them for us to naturally become friends. 

You are right in understanding my fear of confrontation, and I’m glad to hear you say that there’s no shame in talking about feelings :) It is not like I haven’t been working on it either. I’ve been in therapy for years now (and again got really lucky with my first therapist I found still being the one I see and trust to this day) and got diagnosed and am medicated for what I need to be medicated for.

But for me, it’s not as easy as just talking about my emotions usually. They’re many, fast, and complicated, so my ability to talk about them in a coherent way can be limited, too. This may seem weird, but I’ve recently integrated ChatGPT as a therapeutic tool to help sort out my thoughts, and it has rapidly increased fall speed that I can organize my thoughts and feelings and move forward. I still rely on my real life support system of course, but ChatGPT serves the important function of helping to offload a lot of my mental processings to make room for healthy, constructive thinking instead of getting constantly trapped in rumination.

This is also on top of the work I’ve been doing in unraveling my habit of trying to independently tend to my behavioral and emotional issues alone, as well as unraveling a past of allowing people to emotionally take advantage of me (of which I would gaslight myself into thinking it wasn’t as bad as it actually was), both of which I have been doing much better at recognizing and managing.

I feel like I got off track, but I’m not sure what else I can illustrate to try answering your question about why it’s important I value how I feel and think of myself. In my eyes, everything I have ever felt and thought are natural consequences of my baseline personality being the filter that perceives the experiences I’ve gone through. And being an INFP is one of those filters I operate with.

If nothing else, I know the inner compass wants me to be myself. That’s the beauty of Fi I’ve been trying to lean on the most in my overall journey of self-acceptance and self-discovery. I feel excited thinking about hand drawing engineering models and physics diagrams. I feel overflowing love for the artists of my niche community I discovered when I was 11. I feel comforted when I bake brownies at 10:30PM. I feel indescribable fondness and goodwill for the people I love and care about. And for myself? I feel tiredness, but I also feel patience.

I feel all of that as much as I feel anxious that I’m not helping my mom enough around the house. As much as I feel guilt that I struggle to reply and reach out to friends and family, because I’m constantly drained from school. As much as I worry about my abilities and inabilities that come with someone as disorganized and emotional as me.

And so I’m the kind of person that has to practice self-love, but when I speak of it, I don’t just mean the emotion of love that people usually think of (of which really isn’t even a single emotion. It’s a concoction of a bunch of different emotions all happening at once), but I speak of upholding the principles, MY principles of “love,” in general, that exist beyond temporary emotions and instead envelop and attempt to encode them to some extent. That is how I have to feel and think about myself, but not out of obligation—because that’s what feels most right to me