Managing Emotional States With Extroverted Feeling (Fe)

I learned a long time ago that most of our behavior is largely influenced by our emotional state. This is especially true if you have Extroverted Feeling (Fe) as a dominant or supporting cognitive function. Extraverted Feeling (Fe) is the dominant function of the ENFJ and ESFJ types and the supporting/auxiliary for INFJ and ISFJ types. Like Extraverted Thinking, Fe is considered an extraverted Judging function.

Feeling types use their Feeling function to weigh, evaluate, and analyze their affective responses to the world. They generally experience greater saliency, variability, and diversity of emotion than Thinking types do. This is why many turn to poetry, music, or the arts, searching for various ways of understanding and expressing their rich emotional life.

The Feeling functions also relate to the development of various tastes. Tastes are qualitative preferences—likes and dislikes - which can also be considered our values. This is another reason Feeling types are drawn to exploring arts and culture, providing them with plenty of raw material to engage their Feeling function.

As an INFJ, I am very easily affected by other people's feelings, therefore it's especially important that I choose wisely who I surround myself with. This is true for values as well, so if the people around me did not share my values - I would often develop a separate persona when in their presence in order to adapt and maintain harmony.

This "people-pleasing" tendency heavily affects how I behave and where my focus goes. It can also have a terrible impact on my productivity levels. So much so, that if someone in the same room is angry or upset - I can't get any work done at all.

Before I started working for myself, if I was busy at work and someone in a bad mood entered the room - I would drop whatever I was doing to try and solve that person's problems, or to try to cheer them up somehow. But since I was not a trained counselor, nor am I a very good comic, this approach wasn't always successful. I realized that sometimes when people are hurting - they don't always want to be cheered up, and some people are just miserable no matter what you do.

I needed to find a better way to manage my emotions because not only did my behavior attract people with psychopathic tendencies, but it pushed away people who actually did care about me. Because by trying to help others, who didn't want or ask for my help - I would easily lose track of my own goals, and sometimes even neglect my own basic needs. Sadly whenever my friends or family would try to talk me out of it, I would door-slam them (shut them out entirely).

Other feelers might relate to this tendency to focus too much on meeting the needs of others. But over-use of this function can often leave us no time or energy to get any truly meaningful work done. I would often get caught in this trap. Until sadly, I had nothing more to give and that's when I would find myself exhausted and alone. Our moods and behaviors are influenced by so many factors. The weather, the environment, circumstances, and of course - our personality types. My whole life I have been trying to analyze, understand and predict my own and other people's behavior and its triggers.

Learning about Myers-Briggs and cognitive functions helped me a lot with this. However, and I don't know if this is true for other FE users, but nothing affects my emotional state as much as other people. No amount of money, diet, medication, food or place can ever affect my emotional state as much as other people. 

Perhaps this is what it's like to have Extroverted Feeling as an auxiliary cognitive function - because my INFP partner doesn't seem to have this problem much. Sometimes I question whether I have any feelings at all of my own. Sometimes I wonder whether I even have a personality of my own, or whether I am just acting to please people.

My habit of becoming a social chameleon often left me confused and feeling inauthentic. I realized that even my personality test results were different depending on who I surround myself with - which only further reinforced my identity crisis.

I was single and quite independent when I first typed as an INFJ, and the description seemed to fit me quite well. But then when I was in a relationship with an ISTP for 2 years - many tests I took often mistyped me as either an INTP or an ENTP.

A more comprehensive personality test then concluded that I am simply a more rational INFJ. However, now I have been in a relationship with an INFP for almost a year and these days I noticed that I get mistyped as an INFP. Not only do I seem to absorb other people's emotions it seems  - but I temporarily borrow aspects of their personalities as well.

Then the question is - how can we as empaths take responsibility for our emotions and behaviors? How do we change how we feel without having to change the emotions of the people around us? Is there some sort of off-switch for empathy? Or do we need to isolate ourselves completely to become emotionally intelligent? 

I decided that if in order to gain control of my emotional state, I needed to first separate my own feelings from the feelings of others. That's when I started avoiding people and did everything I could to keep to myself.

However, what I got from that experiment made me even more worried. I noticed that when I am by myself - the only emotions I experience are through music or watching a movie. Otherwise, I don't seem to feel much at all. Could this mean I don't have feelings?

I wondered if it's possible that I could just be a zombie or robot who simply feeds off other people's feelings? I was obviously overthinking the situation way too much, and I was upset that I couldn't find all the answers in personality tests.

I now know that our personality types are merely projections of our ego as it tries to separate us from others. By isolating ourselves from other people, we can probably avoid absorbing their negative emotions, but we also miss out on so many positive emotions too.

Without people to connect with - nothing we do or create even matters. On the other hand, sharing positive experiences with someone makes them so much more enjoyable and memorable. Therefore, I learned that there is no sure way to fully control or predict our emotions - and if there was, it wouldn't be as fun.

However, there are things that we can control. We can choose who we surround ourselves with, and we can choose how we react to people. We can choose to focus on helping people who want our help and give it to those who deserve it. We can learn to set healthy boundaries in our relationships.

We can take our desire to help others and turn it around and take care of our own needs first, because just like other people's negative emotions affect us, our emotions also affect others. Emotions are created through connection, all of need other people to feel, not just empaths. We are all much more interdependent than we think, or like to admit.