Reddit mentions of Was That Really Me?: How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality

> exes can be friends

I believe this too.

Getting back to your original post, my biggest insight for co-habitation and making things work, under the context of MBTI and Jungian psychology, is to identify and understand each others Inferior Functions and be able to consciously recognize when the other is influenced by it and have some method to mitigate the situation.

My last relationship, ENFJ & INTJ pair bond, there would often be a flair-up surrounding her Inferior Thinking (Ti) and my sometimes overbearing Extraverted Thinking (Te) that would cause her to feel overwhelmed and panic. Things that require zero effort for me would often cause her enormous stress, taxes, money, debts, things that require careful thought and consideration can be easily swept under the rug and ignored. Meanwhile, I succumb to Extraverted Sensing (Se) influences and can get incredible overwhelmed in new social settings which she absolutely adored being a dominant Extraverted Feeler, connecting with everyone around her. I would often feel burnt out from what I felt was frivolous social conversation.

Surprisingly my tertiary feeling (Fi) was not as big an impediment to a relationship as was when I was younger when I felt no one understood me. Fe dominant types can pull those feels out of you, and I am grateful for everything I have learned from her over the last three years in that regard.


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To that end, I highly recommend this book OP : Was That Really Me - How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality

Not shadow functions, inferior functions. Stimuli that go with your inferior function can be very stressful or very soothing during times of stress, and when you're "not yourself" you tend to act more like your inferior function is your dominant one.

Example: I'm an INTJ--NiTeFiSe. When physical things in my external environment are out of sorts, I get really uneasy, irritable, and easily upset. This can be anything from my desk being out of order to having eaten badly. Things I find oddly soothing include cleaning, anything that gives me an adrenaline rush, and good food. Out of character inferior function outbursts for me are things like wanting to scream or break things, or being very impulsive.

If you're an ESFP, your stack is SeFiTeNi--basically the exact opposite of me. Ni as an inferior function means you probably get stressed out by random ideas that pop into your head that may seem to border on paranoid or conspiracy theory-ish. You may get a lot of pleasure when you have "Aha!" moments and come to correct conclusions that are the culmination of thought processes that you're not totally aware of. Because Ni is an introverted function, you probably spend a lot of time when you're stressed just pondering things, rather than experiencing them. Acting more like INFP when you're stressed points at FiNe as the functions you're picking up on, and Ni can be tough to tell apart from Ne (but you've still got your secondary Fi acting in conjunction with it.) Ne would be more like seeing a thousand reasons someone might hate you, where Ni would be more like seeing a thousand people hate you in the same ways.

This book goes into way more detail about how inferior functions manifest when you're stressed out!

Read Was that Really Me?. You can also read each chapter online at Personality Cafe, here's INFJ

Hehe all of these stuff are Si rechargers to help balance out Ne / Si stuff. This is normal, this is natural, and almost is always a universal rule for ENPs for you need to do 4th function things to help re-establish the proper place between the 1st and 4th function. Note certain types of 4th function things for certain Si activities are draining, but other Si activites are restorative such as exercise, hygiene, cleaning your room, and so on. Bringing order to your chaos.

The only stuff that are not healthy Si related are the stuff involving people, and that is is because Fi / Te stuff are the ENFPs 2nd and 3rd function. While the 1st and 4th function are about your identity and re-establishing your identity within the world at self, your 2nd and 3rd function are about how creating relationships with the people in the world around you and how you want to be treated in this world and how you help others in this world, aka the 2nd and 3rd function are about relationships while the 1st and 4th function are about identity.

Aka this picture from Susan Storm (Susan Storm is a real life person and not a marvel character, she is an INFJ so she is your natural counterpart for an ENFP for all your shadow functions are her main functions and in the same function order, and her shadows are your main functions.)

https://i2.wp.com/www.psychologyjunkie.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/axes-of-personality.jpg?ssl=1

I have told you in the past you should read this book. I even sent you a pdf of this book before ;-)

https://www.amazon.com/Was-That-Really-Me-Personality/dp/0891061703

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Remember your INTJ friend is allowed to tease you gently, for I am as a big of a mess as you are, but my mess is different =P It is an INTJ mess and thus it has its own form of epicNESS \^\^

Was That Really Me by Naomi Quenk describes the ways each type can get triggered, and what the thinking tends to look like when we get "in the grip". Her explanations helped me understand and anticipate circumstances that lead to uncharacteristic outbursts.

If you've got the time, you'll get the best understanding of the concept by reading Naomi Quenk's Book Was That Really Me?

https://www.amazon.com/Was-That-Really-Me-Personality/dp/0891061703/

...of which you can read an excerpt here:

http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/135-MBTI-Form-of-the-Inferior-Functions

The core idea is that when you get stressed out or stuck in a rut, you may find yourself stuck in the behavior patterns of your inferior function, but in a clumsy or maladjusted way. Basically what redditingfromthevoid said.

You might find this book useful: https://www.amazon.com/Was-That-Really-Me-Personality/dp/0891061703

When an INTJ friend was getting divorced she began to act a bit like a negative-version of an SFP: Making numerous impulsive purchases, sleeping with men she barely knew, obsessing over her appearance, acting unusually emotionally volatile and needy, etc. That's an example of what you're referring to.

Inferior Fi users "in the grip"/under extreme stress can be highly emotional, irrational, and prone to blow-ups. Basically, the opposite of what they consider to be normal behavior. I can relate.

When I was younger I had a lot of stress things happening and would blow up at people that were close to me all the time. I changed my diet (long story - it's related to sugar intake, etc) and realized that I was so on edge all the time, I didn't even know I could feel "normal". I didn't even know what normal was.

This book, Was That Really Me? by Naomi Quenk (here's the amazon link), does a great job of discussing inferior functions and their role in extreme stress situations. It definitely made a lot of sense to what I was feeling.

So it's possible he may just be an ENTJ in the grip. of course, he could also just be an asshole :(

Edit: link formatting and extra commentary

Yes. This site will make your eyes cross at first, but is a simple primer into the functions and basic typing info. Naomi Quenk also does a good job describing inferior functions. Here's the chapter that talks about Extraverted Sensing as an inferior function in INTJs. I found the function abbreviations cumbersome at first, but once I learned them, it was a whole new world of nerdiness.

This book talks about OP's question.

You can find the ebook download if you look around. I've skimmed the book and I've found it useful.