Everyone has good days and bad days; every type enjoys successes and suffers through failures. Yet we each react to those same successes and failures differently, depending on our cognition. The things we value most, and the things we focus on most, determine how we subconsciously interpret everything that happens to us. While our Type Specialization reflects what we most desire out of life, every cognitive type also has a Type Angst, a reaction to our deepest fears, worries, and insecurities.
Of course, anyone can be afraid of anything. And anyone, of any type, can suffer from any weakness. In fact, it’s much easier to gain the unique weaknesses of other types than it is to gain their unique strengths! When we attempt to adopt the strengths of another type before mastering our own, usually all we end up with is the weaknesses of both and the strengths of neither. Yet each cognitive type has one deepest, most fundamental worry, resulting from their unique order of cognition steps.
As an ENFP Standard Bearer, your central fear, beneath all others, is that your feelings, desires, and emotions don’t matter. That they’re not valid. That everything you’ve ever been through, everything that’s ever mattered to you, is foolish, pointless, and ultimately ridiculous. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Standard Bearers, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ENFPs’ weakest cognition step being Action via Sensing, Standard Bearers naturally fear that their actions, and their understanding of the resulting consequences, are especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their actions lack all-important meaning and significance (F), in an experiential way (S). You fear that your thoughts and feelings about your experiences lack importance. This unconscious worry that your thoughts and feelings are not SF enough results in the fear that everything you’ve been through, everything you’ve ever felt, all your hopes and ideals and the passions that make you yourself, are pointless and invalid.
This is almost certainly false, but that doesn’t make the fear any less persistent.
Since these worries come from our cognition, we might not even realize that not everyone has them, just as we sometimes forget that not everyone has our same Type Specialization. And since these fears come from our cognition, they’ve been with each of us for as long as we’ve been thinking. They can be overcome, entirely, but only by understanding how they work. Yet when each of us is young, we inadvertently react to every scare or disappointment through the lens of our own type’s central fear. The things that leave the deepest scars are the ones that hit us right in this most vulnerable place.
But since our minds therefore associate these fears with the earliest experiences of childhood, we ironically tend to run to these fears as if they were a place of safety. Childhood usually feels warm, safe, and right in our minds, even if in reality it was nothing of the sort. So when life gets hard, when disappointment strikes, whenever we feel insecure, overwhelmed, or uncomfortable at all, our minds naturally and inadvertently rush back to these deeply ingrained childhood fears. The coping behaviors that result are our unique Type Angsts.
As a Standard Bearer, whenever you feel or experience anything stressful or negative in any way, your mind tries to rush back to the supposed safety of childhood. This causes a surge of your central fear that your feelings, thoughts, opinions and experiences are all foolish and invalid. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in the ENFP McFly Conviction.
The McFly Conviction is the burning desire to prove that your feelings and thoughts are valid. This is good, but in your eagerness to prove it, it’s all too easy to end up pushing down others’ feelings in order to assert your own. If you feel stupid, you might find yourself treating others as stupid in an effort to prove your own validity. If you feel irresponsible, unworthy, unenlightened, or any other negative feeling, you might be surprised to realize that you start treating others that way as an attempt to build yourself up. McFly Conviction causes Standard Bearers to sabotage their own treasured specialization, pushing down the validity of other people instead of building them up.
Particularly unhealthy ENFPs expend tireless effort seeking out ways to make others feel invalid. It never helps the ENFP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only more ridiculous and invalid after the high of bullying passes. An unhealthy ENFP’s entire reason for being becomes making others feel of less worth, in direct opposition to their Type Specialization. This ultimate contradiction, desperately fighting against one’s own deepest, most treasured desire, is miserable to say the least.
Yet even healthy Standard Bearers tend to indulge in McFly Conviction when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Standard Bearer may make others feel like they need to compete with them for the validity of their feelings, as if only one person can be valid. These unintentional slips into ENFP’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. Beating yourself up may make you feel safer from the accusations of others, but in truth it will usually make you feel even less valid, making the cycle worse.
All types can be tempted to declare that they or their loved ones are already everything they’d like to be, even if it means ignoring glaring truths or putting others down. Our Type Angsts tempt us to feel entitled, like we deserve to already be at our goal, rather than being willing to learn and grow patiently, gaining successes for real. This sense of entitlement is a harmful twisting of the good desire to be special. In reality, everyone can be equally special in ways that are different from one another, allowing all to be unique in unique, diverse ways.
As you surround yourself with the loving support of people who care, as you seek out others who try to understand you and accept you, you can grow less and less vulnerable to the self-sabotage of McFly Conviction. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Standard Bearer with a vengeance, and your mind will retreat less and less into the fears and scars that result in your Type Angst. And even when no one else is around, perhaps the best, most effective, and most fulfilling way to gradually eliminate your Type Angst for good, is to get in touch with your Paradoxitype.
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