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 ISTP Weapons Specialist, your central fear, beneath all others, is that you are an outsider, never really part of the group of “normal” people. Your experiences are your own, and so you worry that you cannot ever really identify with everyone else. Again, anyone can have this fear. But for Weapons Specialists, this worry is at the root of them all.
With ISTPs’ weakest cognition step being Principles via Feeling, Weapons Specialists naturally fear that their understanding of the trends of the world at large is especially lacking. Specifically, they worry that their understanding of universal principles lacks meaningful insights (F) in an experiential way (S). You fear that your understanding of the way the world works in practice is too cold and mundane. This unconscious worry that your worldview is not SF enough results in the fear that you won’t be good company for anyone else. You may be good at what you do, very good even, but when it comes to being a friend and bringing a smile to others’ faces, you feel out of step, separate, and too cold or utilitarian. You want to be a friend, you want to be able to have fun with everyone else, but you fear that in reality you only hurt people, let them down, or even scare them.
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 Weapons Specialist, 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 you are too hard and strange to really ever fit in with everyone else. As a result, you then feel the tempting pull to indulge in ISTP Snape Superiority.
Snape Superiority is the assertion that the reason you’re not part of the group is because your unique experiences make you better than them. Wiser, cleverer, more practical, even more social; in whatever way you justify it, Snape Superiority tells you that others just aren’t up to your high standards. This leads to the attitude that your experiences and knowhow are more important than your relationships with others. That you don’t need to have friends, and you certainly don’t need to be concerned with being liked; your superior knowledge, skill, and experience are far more useful.
As an ISTP, you naturally focus on getting the most use (T) out of all the details of every situation (IP) you’ve ever experienced in your past (S). This means that your own experiences are and should be among the most important and personal things for you, as some of your most powerful tools. Yet Snape Superiority becomes a problem when it causes you to act as if you’ve experienced more than everyone else, implying that others’ experiences are shallow, common, or nonexistent. It can make you uncomfortable when you meet someone who’s experienced things that you are entirely unfamiliar with, and might lead you to imply that you still out-experience them, even when you know almost nothing about their area of expertise.
Likewise, Snape Superiority can tempt you to act as if your personal area of expertise is the best, most useful, most practical or even the most meaningful, and that anyone without sufficient skill at it must be stupid, lazy, or worthless. There is nothing wrong with you specializing; specialization is your unique Type Specialization! But beware of oversimplifying the wide complexity of the world by implying that everyone must specialize, or even that they must specialize in what you specialize in.
With your weakest cognition step being universal Principles, you may have trouble fully realizing just how diverse the world is, how enormous and complex a machine it is, needing so many different outlooks and specialties. You may have trouble really seeing how others’ very different experiences and skills can add to yours. Snape Superiority robs you of others’ perspective, insights, and also their friendship and assistance, which makes life unnecessarily harder. It causes Weapons Specialists to sabotage their own treasured specialization, getting less and less use out of each situation because they’re too busy ignoring others’ insights and declaring their own superiority.
Particularly unhealthy ISTPs expend so much effort trying to prove their own superiority by competing, arguing, and showboating, that they end up wasting their lives rather than actually applying their experiences. This waste causes them to compensate by acting as if they’ve experienced a little of every possible type of experience, that they’ve seen it all and done it all, and that anything outside their knowledge must be worthless, stupid, or fake. None of this ever helps the ISTP feel any better about themselves for more than a moment, and then they feel only more separate and alone after the high of rivalry passes. An unhealthy ISTP’s entire reason for being becomes proving that they’re the best at everything, 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 Weapons Specialists tend to indulge in Snape Superiority when things get hard. As a natural and unintentional way of guarding themselves, a Weapons Specialist may look down on knowledge or skills outside their own, as if enjoying their own specialization requires refusing to learn from anything or anyone else. These unintentional slips into ISTP’s Type Angst are nothing to beat yourself up about; after all, they’re unintentional. And you don’t need to feel uncomfortable at all about things you’re unfamiliar with. The overwhelmingly diverse complexity of the world means that there’s always a new adventure waiting for you, always a new way for you to put your skills, knowledge, and experience to the test!
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 Snape Superiority. Look to your Type Specialization, be a Weapons Specialist 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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