Experience Other People

Do INFJs experience other people's emotions as their own?

I cannot speak for other INFJ personality type people but I can speak for myself.I do experience the emotions of others as clearly as my own. Distance does not seem to matter. Even death does not present a barrier to feeling others. Often it is difficult to discern which are my emotions and which are the emotions of others. It made my young life extremely difficult. In my middle age I finally realized that not all emotions were mine. But I still could not turn off the hyper-empathy. I still cannot turn it off.What finally solved the issue for me was experiencing spiritual enlightenment. I am now able to rise above all emotions and to look at them objectively and with understanding and discernment. I can usually feel where each emotion comes from and from whom.Quite often I can feel emotions and beliefs inside someone that they are not even aware of yet. But I have never been wrong about what I feel inside someone. I have been wrong about many things in life but never that.I hope that answers your questions. I have written some about all of this and posted this at my blog, www.lifesanswers.org.Feel free to contact me if you feel inspired and have further questions.I am listening.Take careJon

Do we experience other people's lives in dreams?

I have been able to experience the lives of characters in my dreams, but I can’t be sure they are real persons. Most likely, they are just dream characters.For instance, in my dream I am walking near a lake. I notice an orb of light in the grass, and realize that the orb is a person’s soul. The orb touches me, and immediately I am experiencing another person’s life. I am now a girl, a girl swimming in a lake with a boy. I know the boy is my boyfriend, and I feel safe around him. However he starts holding my head under water. He is trying to kill me and I am confused about why. I trusted him, and he’s my friend, but for unknown reasons he kills me. Then I am outside the orb, and am myself again. The orb is still there, looking for answers. I leave the area.

Is it important to experience other peoples culture?

Yes, I’ve never met a single person who has gone to another country who didn’t learn something, even if they had a bad time there.I didn’t really understand the attitudes of the American deep south until I spent a lot of time working there.Note that you don’t have to agree with everything involved in another culture to benefit from being there. Probably the place that I learned most about was India when I was there. I hadn’t appreciated the huge numbers of people and the crowding and huge social range and the devotion to religion in some places. Indian culture and attitudes to life in general make sense now. You also learn things that you don’t easily find out from a distance e.g did you know that there are five times as many Muslims in India as there are in Iraq?

Why do people want to experience different things that aren't part of their normal life?

Because living life doing the same things over and over again, without trying to expand, to grow and to experience new things, is a waste of time.There are thousands of things in this life that can be experienced, and that will make you feel different emotions. You can feel afraid while climbing a mountain and excited while jumping out of a plane.The thing is that you only have one life, at least as far as we know. Who knows, maybe after you die you’ll live another life, but until you find out, you have around 70–80 years on this planet. If you waste those years doing the same things over and over again, then you miss the best part of life.It’s the same things as you getting a new gadget. If you get a new phone or a new laptop, all you do for the entire day is play with it. See what apps are installed, delete the ones you don’t need, install new ones, see what the gadget can do, etc etc etc.Well, you should treat life the same way. It’s like a gadget. You need to delete the people you don’t want in your life, and bring new people, you need to try and learn new things, to do better things, you need to go to different places, to visit, to experience and to feel.If you think about it in terms of logic, there’s no reason for anyone to try and experience something more than they already experienced in the past. But it’s not all about logic. You don’t have to see every little thing through your brain. Some things deserve to be seen in different ways, and those ways will help you find things in life you never knew you like.

How can I "shut off" constantly absorbing other people’s experiences and emotions (all the time)?

This is a real difficult one to deal with.I try to determine who I should listen to based on their knowledge, skills and experience, then try to block out the others. For example if an expert in a field is giving you negative feedback then you probably should listen and learn from it.  You don't necessarily have to be depressed by it but possibly motivated by it, they might be telling you exactly what you need to know to succeed! If someone who has no knowledge, skills or experience in the field they are commenting on is telling you negative things then most likely you can simply ignore their opinion. A similar thing is true for positive opinions as well.  Having a family member tell you how great your business idea is when they have no business knowledge at all is almost useless, it's nice to hear but of no real value. Emotions are similar in that you need to determine if the individuals emotions are valid in this situation or not.  In families it is common for many people to get emotional about an issue that really is just between two people.  However some of the other family members may have good advice on how to resolve the issue. The steps I believe are basically:Listen to what they have to sayDetermine if what they are saying is valid due to them either having knowledge, skills or experience in the topic, OR if they are someone who you respect their opinion OR they seem to be saying something of valueDetermine what to do with the good informationDiscard the bad information You are really just trying to make a conscious decision to review and place a value on the information, emotions and feedback you get from people.

Is your perception of reality akin to other people’s experience of reality?

Is your perception of reality akin to other people’s experience of reality?I believe that many, many people don’t have a solid grasp on reality as they get ‘surprised’ so often by things I and others consider evident and inevitable. So I believe that MANY people’s perception of reality not only doesn’t match my version of reality, it doesn’t match reality at all.Like ‘where’s the surprise?’Dude picks up a girl in a bar, she puts out the first night, she’s flirting with his friends as they hang out, and he marries her, but he’s shocked, shocked I tell you that she cheats on him when he’s on a military deployment.How can he be shocked? For him to be shocked, his grasp of reality must be different than mine.A kid goes to college. He takes out student loans and works up a debt of $78,000 for a Sociology degree. Then he’s upset he can’t find a job that will pay it off rapidly. Meanwhile, his girlfriend, who took ‘art appreciation and primitive life skills’ is still working in 7–11 and wondering why she can’t find a $200,000 job with a requirement for her basketweaving education.How could they not have anticipated this? Their version of reality must be different than mine, because I could see that coming.

Do all people with narcissistic personality disorder experience other people as extensions of themselves?

Those with narcissistic personality disorder, as a result of early childhood trauma, have difficulties with such areas asSplittingLack of object constancyLack of ambivalenceInability to repair shameThe question of seeing others as an extension of themselves is sort of related to the above. One thing to bear in mind is the difficulties are psychological and emotional in nature. Narcissists understand intellectually, for example, that an object continues to exist once it leaves their field of vision; a lack of object constancy needs to be understood in s nuanced way.Similarly when discussing that narcissists see others as an extension of themselves, they intellectually understand that other person are not extensions of themselves, but on an emotional and psychological level they have a lot of difficulties recognizing boundaries that others take for granted.Here’s an example of the sort of confusion narcissists may experience. The narcissist I know best has a mother who has severe dementia. She cannot express her desires or needs. The narcissist will say things like “Mom and I like Chicago; we don’t like New York,” even thought this is utter nonsense. She is projecting her own likes and dislikes onto her mother, who would respond to the question,”Do you like Chicago?” with “I don’t know,” which is correct, as she doesn’t know.The narcissist says,”My mother and I have the same spiritual interests.” And so on.She realizes saying her mother wants such and such gives her cover to ask for things she wants, and manages to convince herself that what she is saying is true, even though she is just expressing her own desires. She sees her mother as an extension of herself, not on the sense of a literal extension, but in the sense of conflating the two people.Narcissists will do things like tell you how you feel. You say something like,”You said such and such, which made me angry,” and they’ll reply,”That’s not true; you’re not angry.” They’ll actually disagree with you about how you’re feeling, and correct you, and tell you how you’re really feeling. This is another example of their conflating themselves and their feelings with another person, and another example of how they view others as an extension of themselves.Narcissists are also solipsistic, which is another way in which others become an extension of themselves.