Existential Alienation of INFJ as explained by Renaud Contini

David Nelson

David Nelson

Permanent Fixture
MBTI
INFJ
Enneagram
1w9 possib
Ren has explained superbly in his book The Ecstatic Soul how INFJs suffer uniquely from this phenomenon. INTJs also suffer but not as much as INFJs. How about people explain how they think this relates to their INFJ lives…I’ll chip in after I hear about other people’s experiences.
 
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I think I have felt this all my life. It was particularly acute in my early/mid teens and only the music of Mike Oldfield made sense to me and comforted me. I got lost in its dreamy and inspiring nature.
I feel it is like a ghost you can never truly shake off. I used to attribute this feeling to my parents passing on their own insecurities to me, but I think it’s more this that did it. My theory is our ability to see the big picture and remain highly objective is the flip side of it. Every strength has a corresponding weakness. Only maybe at time of greatest joy and connection with other people can it go away temporarily perhaps. I find myself drawn to the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula because the Dracula character is completely alienated and seeks escape through love. I guess most of us do, but maybe this is more powerful for INFJs. The greatest gifts have the highest costs.
 
I can't say that I experience existential alienation. There are many social structures and institutions in which I don't find immediate personal value, but I do see them as valuable, meaningful, and identifiable for other people. Indirectly, social structures have meaning for me, because I identify with other people. Most people may not have my exact personal values, aspirations, or character, but I'd be bereft of the excellent way people's variety makes society capable of so much more than a society with limited abilities/interests.
 
John K said:
I had a go at this in my blog a few months ago.
https://www.infjs.com/xfa-blog-entry/alienation.8136/

I would say that it’s not a thing that ‘relates’ to my life if you know what I mean. It’s more intimate than that - as though it’s part of the very matrix of my life.
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Wow, thanks for the link. Being a newbie, I don’t know what has recently been covered. I find your words resonate with me.
I can remember this one time when I moved to live in a cottage on my own and I was taking a walk up to the local pub, and I suddenly had this feeling of freedom and excitement that was wonderful. It was as if I was in touch with reality in ways I never had been before. Sadly the feeling didn’t last long, but it was as if I had temporarily shaken off the sense of not belonging anywhere, of not feeling a valuable part of this world, of not feeling wanted.
 
David Nelson said:
Wow, thanks for the link. Being a newbie, I don’t know what has recently been covered. I find your words resonate with me.
I can remember this one time when I moved to live in a cottage on my own and I was taking a walk up to the local pub, and I suddenly had this feeling of freedom and excitement that was wonderful. It was as if I was in touch with reality in ways I never had been before. Sadly the feeling didn’t last long, but it was as if I had temporarily shaken off the sense of not belonging anywhere, of not feeling a valuable part of this world, of not feeling wanted.
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It's a strange experience for us at first when we join the forum, because we simply aren't used to being the majority type in a community. There's a lot of stuff here going back years, so take your time looking around. I recommend that the blogs in the Forums section are a really good place to get to know current members:
https://www.infjs.com/forums/member-blogs.42/
The Blog Section blogs I quoted from tend to be more formal and their structure is less interactive, so people use them like I have for expressing a complex idea as a sort of publication, rather than as a dynamic thing.

I'm pretty sure that Ren used the forum for quite a bit of his raw material for his book, and you can find INFJ alienation expressed in many ways underneath the things people post. There seems to me to be two sorts of alienation for us that can get confused with each other. The one is a disconnect with the world, a feeling of not being in it, that it's somehow unreal and shadowy. The other is social alienation: I think this comes from being of a type with function preferences that are in the shadows of most of the people we come across in the world, so their function preferences are in our shadows. That means that when we interact with them in a way that is most in line with our nature, it causes a shadow recoil in them - and so does their natural way cause us to recoil. These aren't conscious choices but simply automatic reflexes. Of course for us rare INFJs the only option other than isolation is to compromise the way we behave with others for the sake of social connection, and this becomes habitual - but it's always awkward, and we easily end up on the periphery of social groups as a result.
 
I think the character of Ricky Fitts in American Beauty is an INFJ. I think what he gets from the plastic bag video is a way to get round his feelings of alienation and daily problems. It’s not what the blown bag is literally (as a sensor would typically see) but the effect it has on some observers. Like visual poetry it can take you into a different cognitive experience and allow you to perceive more deeply, or act in a hypnotic way. If it was a ballet scene, it wouldn’t cause controversy or much criticism, but the fact it’s an ordinary bag in a mundane environment leads to the confusion, but it also is a hint that there can be hidden beauty in ordinary things, or simply benefits to perceiving them differently, like Keating getting his students to stand on their desks in Dead Poet’s Society. The bag could act as a metaphor like he feels it’s how his soul is, or it reminds him to let it be sometimes and stop worrying so much. What will be will be.
 
David Nelson said:
I think the character of Ricky Fitts in American Beauty is an INFJ. I think what he gets from the plastic bag video is a way to get round his feelings of alienation and daily problems. It’s not what the blown bag is literally (as a sensor would typically see) but the effect it has on some observers. Like visual poetry it can take you into a different cognitive experience and allow you to perceive more deeply, or act in a hypnotic way. If it was a ballet scene, it wouldn’t cause controversy or much criticism, but the fact it’s an ordinary bag in a mundane environment leads to the confusion, but it also is a hint that there can be hidden beauty in ordinary things, or simply benefits to perceiving them differently, like Keating getting his students to stand on their desks in Dead Poet’s Society. The bag could act as a metaphor like he feels it’s how his soul is, or it reminds him to let it be sometimes and stop worrying so much. What will be will be.
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I interpreted it as a visual metaphor/visualization of flow state. The state people get to when their not fighting themselves. Bruce Lee is a good example of someone who mastered this. The bag is in absolute not resistance.

Edit: I believe the term is "Wu wei" in Taoism.
 
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David Nelson said:
The bag could act as a metaphor like he feels it’s how his soul is, or it reminds him to let it be sometimes and stop worrying so much. What will be will be.
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I find photography does this for me - it blends my Ni and Se together and pulls them into the object so that we become one, just for a fraction of a second:

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