(Source: pusheen, via very-untitled)
Question Everything Or Die Ignorant.: On being an INFJ.
I abhor my extremely high ambitions and expectations. I do not only have these for myself but for everyone around me. If I am in a relationship I tend to expect a high amount of affection, if I am in a friendship I can be self righteous at times and so on and so forth. This is not something I do…
I think a lot of these sorts of problems occur for younger INFJs and for INFJs who have not developed their tertiary function (Ti) as strongly. I know my adolescent self probably up until about 21ish was a lot like you describe. Loyalty to people and affiliations past reason, and a deep set desire to be perfect. I’m an enneagram type 1w2, my motivation is heavily to be “perfect” at being useful and helpful to others. My trouble with my expectations of other people when I was younger had more to do with feeling resentful that I was the only one I knew who cared so much. I was under the mistaken impression that caring and performing those actions somewhat made me entitled to care and actions from others. That they would listen and respond. It just doesn’t work that way.
I will perform certain behaviors still, but it’s my conscious rational choice. Not to be ignorant, not to pretend I don’t see fault, but to just not care that there is fault. I won’t associate with organized groups (political or religious affiliations) that propagate ideas and behaviors I disagree with, but I’m capable of providing friendship and help to people who have ideas and behaviors I don’t always agree with. You can’t be a catalyst if you don’t interact. And if your goal is self improvement, helping others, and hoping maximize everything’s potential (that future oriented thinking of Ns), then self-awareness and openness, focusing on developing your functions, is going to not only going to make you a healthy person but help you accomplish those goals in a way that’s not hypocritical, self righteous, naive, or painful.
Ink Wants to Form Neurons, and an Artful Scientist Obliges
1. The Secret of Shimmer
Dunn has been recently been playing with iridescence, adding more colors while still allowing the metals to shine. This painting of the cerebellar lobe is an example of his newer work.
Listening to him explain iridescence, you can see how his scientific background factors into his art: “[Iridescence] is when you have small crystalline patterns at the microscopic level which break up the incoming light and distribute it a different way, and so you get light coming into your eye from different angles in just a planar surface,” he explains. Dunn gets his paintings to shimmer and change under different light with a special technique he developed—and which he keeps under his hat.
2. The Fractal Solution to the Universe
In his second year of neuroscience grad school, Greg Dunn was moonlighting with a different kind of experiment: blowing ink across pieces of paper. The neuron-like pattern it formed was instantly recognizable to him as a neuroscientist. “Ink spreads because it wants to go in the direction of less resistance, and that’s probably also the case of when branches grow or neurons grow,” he says. “The reason the technique works really well is because it’s directly related to how neurons are actually behaving.”
Dunn calls this the “fractal solution to the universe,” which he sees as the “fundamental beauty of nature.” He’s fascinated that this branching pattern holds true across orders of magnitude, whether that’s nanometers for neurons, centimeters for ink, or meters for a tree branch.
3. Asian-Inspired Art
The branching tree motif of Asian art is especially fitting for Dunn’s neuron paintings. Simplicity is key: “What I love about Asian art is that you boil away all the unnecessary crap, and you’re left with an expression of an idea that’s done with spontaneity and grace.” There is nothing extraneous here in this painting of two pyramidal cells, a type of neuron found in the cerebellum and hippocampus.
4. Artistic Creation, Scientific Method
Before he ever touches a brush, Dunn mocks up his paintings in Photoshop, setting the composition and color scheme. Paintings, like a set of experiments, must be planned through in advance. “If the silhouette isn’t great, that painting will never be great. You’ve got to build on a strong foundation,” he says. “That’s true of science as well.”
The curled structure depicted here is the hippocampus, one of the most-studied parts of the brain. It has an integral role in memory and spatial navigation. The famous patient HM, who’d had his hippocampus removed, was unable to form new memories.
(via the44sunsets)
narcissistic mothers
Originally Posted by jeffbobs
(I was asked the above on a thread about narcissistic mothers on another forum, and I thought I’d post it over here as well, just in case anyone could benefit from it on tumblr)
Where is your girlfriend’s head at, is where I’d start.
When I left, I actually didn’t fully understand what I was running away from or why. I was unhappy, I didn’t want to be around the environment I was in anymore. Yet, I was largely still wrapped in the thought processes and understandings of reality that I adopted through my childhood and adolescence.
One of the skills that allows the narcissist to do what he or she does, is their ability to manipulate your reality. The ability to make you feel like you’re the bad one, you’re the sick one, you’re the ungrateful selfish horrible one. The facade they present to everyone outside of your home, as angelic, wonderful…sets them up to appear as a victim whenever you start to balk. People outside of the situation who have no idea about what’s happening in your home support and validate your abuser, and make you think you’re crazy. After years and years of this, you blame yourself. You might every once in a while see the flaws in the logic, but even so a part of you clings to the self-deprecation that was ingrained.
Until your girlfriend fully embraces herself as a victim and her mother as an abuser, until she can really feel angry, freely angry, she’s not going to be able to really start moving forward or getting out of that situation. She has to be ready, she has to want to.
The ultimate best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with them at all. Cut them off, have no contact. If that’s not possible limited contact. If your girlfriend is not ready to move on yet, if she’s still stuck in that cycle, your best bet is to just gently support her and point out the inconsistencies, the things that don’t make sense. Use your experiences with your own mother if they’re reasonable healthy, or those of people you know, to show her that what her mother does is not normal and not OK.
You can refer her to one of the forums that exist online for victims of narcissistic parents and spouses, where she can read about the experiences of others. When she sees other people identifying as victims and their stories mirror her own she might have an easier time accepting what’s been happening. Even though I had already figured out what was going on before I ever joined one of those forum groups, it was still shocking and validating and relieving for me…though incredibly painful. I did a lot of crying and raging while I read.
So bottom line I guess is be supportive, she’s spent a good portion of her life having her own feelings and desires and needs being unmet and invalidated. Validate her, be careful of how you speak when you disagree with her. Make sure that you’re not using language that’s dismissive. She might shut up and agree with you if you do, but if you really don’t want to be damaging and want to help her it’s worth being attentive to. Encourage her to talk about it, encourage her to express her wants and needs, and when you can facilitate them. Make it a positive experience, slowly changing her emotional state while doing that away from fear and self-consciousness.
If you can be more specific, I might be able to give more specific advice as well. I hope this was even somewhat helpful.
Said by an INTP friend when we were talking about relationships. I was like “oh, man! Extraverted feeling…it’s a pain sometimes.” The desire to harmonize can be obnoxious.
I think that’s why I avoid relationships in general, whether they be platonic or romantic. I like the freedom of having an ‘IDGAF’ attitude towards others.
Being close enough to someone to care for them is easy, being close enough to care for someone’s opinion of me is like waiting to be punched in the face.
And the longer the relationship goes without it the more paranoid I become about its absence.
I’ve seen this behavior/concern in Lin. Despite our policy of honesty, which we both actually adhere to quite faithfully, she is sometimes reluctant to put voice to things that bother or worry her. I think a lot of the time she is also waiting for that punch in the face. I can hope that there’s not a paranoia build up.There’s no punch in the face coming. When it comes to her the only things I ever seem to think about are sex and how awesome she is.
(via ariellerlikespoop)
On the whole, I generally don’t mind when people are mistyped. It is a common occurrence enough across the board, and it doesn’t generally have any particular effect.
When it comes to my own type, INFJ however, it is a bit bothersome for two particular reasons.
The first reason is that I haven’t met another INFJ in my every day wanderings. When I’m feeling interested in finding someone I can deeply relate to, it’s bothersome to wade through the sea of mistyped INFPs ISFJs and whomever to find another INFJ. Then there is the difficulty of finding an INFJ either my age or my experience level, who is likely to have developed their Ti. As mentioned elsewhere, we INFJs have a lot of difficulty getting through adolescence, the high stress levels of dealing with the conflict of interpersonal drama, parental societal and peer pressures playing havoc in a brutal tug of war for our Fe loyalties. The stress of this can often cause us to display shadow functions, appearing over wrought, opinionated, rigid, and volatile. This is absolutely not our natural state.
When we are autonomous, when we’ve had the opportunity to choose for ourselves which people and duties to attend to, when we’ve developed our Ti to parse out, make sense, and reach deep understandings of the things our Ni perceives- we are calm, we are flexible, and we are extremely capable logicians. We want to avoid conflict, we want to understand everyone’s position, and we most certainly can be swayed by a logically consistent argument as easily as an emotionally loaded one (and we can figure out when someone’s trying to manipulate through emotionally loaded wording or using fallacious logical arguments that might have worked on someone less skilled or educated). We understand the difference between a good argument and ones that devolve into ad hominem attacks (even if the INFJ doesn’t specifically know the word ad hominem). We tend to just roll our eyes and throw up our hands when someone starts flinging mud around. On the whole, we’re not even overly fond of arguing in the first place.
As to being understood, we’re very intense emotionally. It’s less about sharing our views and opinions than it is being able to reach the level of intensity and depth of feeling that we experience.There’s a difference between being intense emotionally through introverted feeling and extroverted feeling. INFPs are intense emotionally in the way that they have strong feelings about good and evil, right and wrong, they have an inflamed sense of justice and morality. Those feelings are intense for them, but they’re quite different from those of an INFJ.
The kind of thing that Ni Fe makes us capable of, it’s like being an open target for everyone’s emotions. We can feel when others are sad and angry, if we’ve practiced we can tell from facial expressions and body language and the multitude of signals being given off what someone is thinking. Being attuned in this manner is like skinny dipping off a tumultuous coast, where everyone’s emotions are huge waves, giant rock to be dashed against, and kelp to become en-mired in. Most of us are never going to come across someone else like us in our every day wanderings, and so yes, there’s a level to which we’re never going to feel understood or related to. Sometimes we can feel a little prickly and resentful about that. For me personally, I tend to just shrug it off and carry on. It’s simply something that “is”.
The kinds of issues noticed by the INTJ who wrote the INFJ/INTJ compare contrast thread is the second reason the mistyping bothers me, because between the bad information about types floating around thanks to writers who ignored or didn’t understand cognitive function stacks and the behavior of mistyped INFJs, a lot of other types don’t have much of a notion of what an INFJ actually is. From a cognitive stack viewpoint or from a behavioral view point.
Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz The higher of these two numbers below indicates which side of your brain has dominance in your life. Realising your right brain/left brain tendancy will help you interact with and to understand others. Left Brain Dominance: 
(9)Right Brain Dominance: (8) Right Brain/ Left Brain Quiz
Arjen Anthony Lucassen — Pink Beatles In A Purple Zeppelin
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Arjen Anthony Lucassen - Pink Beatles in a Purple Zeppelin
I love this song so much. Every song on this album, actually, but I digress. No, not because my name is in it. …. Okay maybe.
(Source: guitarworld.com)
