# Which cognitive function causes bursts of anger?



## Noir (Jun 20, 2014)

olias said:


> Are you the kind of guy who is generally not a hugs and kisses kind of person? You don't get mad, but when you do it's BLAMMO! That sounds like Fi.
> 
> Assuming you're ISTJ, then you've got tertiary Fi, not inferior Fi. Still fits with bursts of anger. Tertiary Fi is anger rooted in more of a childish psychological space. Something didn't go your way, someone didn't follow the rules, someone didn't follow your instructions, etc. Inferior Fi is a full blown meltdown, out of control rage preceded by an extended period of stress. It doesn't just blow up randomly.
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This is really helpful. It kind of makes sense. From what I've deduced, ISTP's don't get this problem as often as I do. Maybe I should just try to be more passive.
Could I also be... conflicting with my type, in a way? After reading the descriptions, I've decided to reconsider and follow only the rules that _I_ think deserve it, I've made a resolve to try and think for myself and not do things mechanically. I do not want to be a simple guy who just follows the plan and sticks to the rules. So I wish to think for myself and analyze the world. Could that make my functions conflict or something?


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## olias (Jul 19, 2014)

HGM said:


> This is really helpful. It kind of makes sense. From what I've deduced, ISTP's don't get this problem as often as I do. Maybe I should just try to be more passive.
> Could I also be... conflicting with my type, in a way? After reading the descriptions, I've decided to reconsider and follow only the rules that _I_ think deserve it, I've made a resolve to try and think for myself and not do things mechanically. I do not want to be a simple guy who just follows the plan and sticks to the rules. So I wish to think for myself and analyze the world. Could that make my functions conflict or something?


Not passive. Passivity in the face of sincere inner truth, whether feelings or intellectual ideas - is just as bad as blowing your lid. You won't make as many people upset, but you probably do more harm to yourself in the long run. Remember that the goal in everything is always *balance*. Nothing more, nothing less. Over reacting to small inconveniences or minor thoughtlessness isn't healthy, and you recognize that. Sitting silent and swallowing your true feelings about something that is genuinely troubling to you is equally, if not more unhealthy.

One of the truisms of Jungian typology is that the harder you try to stuff something away inside of you in order to keep other people from seeing it, the the louder and more aggressive and more painful it will be when it does finally come out. And do not be fooled - it will come out. Your true, authentic self always comes out. Your psyche is too powerful for something like self pity or social embarrassment to stop it for long. Better to get it out now and deal with it than push it away and deal with the bigger mess later. 

At the end of the day, only YOU can tell yourself how to deal with an angry episode. You have to figure it out for yourself. But as far as I'm concerned, your answer is brilliant, you are 110% right in my opinion. It is time for you to start thinking for yourself. Stop slavishly following every rule you run into. Use your powers of observation and intellect to figure out which rules are good and helpful and are worth speaking up for. Other rules, you see why they're here and you genuinely believe in them, but you can also understand how someone might genuinely come to a different conclusion. You can follow those rules on your own, and let others make their own decisions for themselves. And sometimes, there are rules that are genuinely bad or harmful, and no one should follow them. Just because something is a law or a rule doesn't make it moral or ethical. These rules you have a duty to stand up against, just like you have a duty to defend the rules that are moral and ethical. 

That sort of solution to finding your life or your thinking unbalanced is very healthy. Using the struggle that arises from the immaturity of our functions to strive, through trial and error and courage, to make ourselves more balanced, more whole, more at peace with both ourselves and others is a great human triumph. And, most importantly, it makes you more authentically YOU. 

Losing your shit over small frustrations was not reflective of all the good things you have to share with the world. And stuffing genuine feeling also hides the good and (no joke) heroic work your community needs you to do as well. But when you slowly learn how to exercise your dominant function (Si) without it constantly getting too big and too dominant all the time, you'll be happier and you'll be a much better citizen. Dominant Si is an iron, automatic, lifelong commitment to doing your duty, doing what's right *because you know it's right* and no other reason. 

If you're an ISTJ then you have a strong sense of what's right and wrong. You can't necessarily put it into words, but you KNOW when it's time for you to step up and do the right thing. It's a truly remarkable thing to have such a reliable and forceful moral compass. Because your inner compass is so often right, you trust your personal experiences and your memories, because the times you listened honestly to your gut and did what you knew was right, it usually turned out well. When you're doing well, you are the person who stands up against the crowd and yells "stop!" before someone gets hurt. 

When you're not doing well, that strong inner sense of right and wrong becomes controlling, or small minded, or petty, or maybe even a little bit of a fascist? You might have trouble knowing when to draw the line between standing up for genuine convictions, and sometimes not recognizing that the "wrong" you're standing up against is really just an honest difference in opinion with another person. And, I would guess that this has started happening more and more lately. You've had a hard time with thinking you were doing something genuinely nice for someone, but the object of your words or actions taking it very differently than you meant it, and ending up hurt or angry. 

The reason for this is that Si is an introverted function. It looks inside of you to get information from your memories, your past experiences, your own moral compass. But like anyone who isn't watching where they're going, your Si can end up missing the mark without ever seeing it coming. That's why your aux functions is extroverted thinking. The aux function is there *in order to feed good information and provide guidance to your inward looking Si* Te is about sitting back, observing, paying attention to the world around you, taking in information and educating yourself about the world. THEN you can apply your introverted Si to know whether everything is ok, or if something's wrong. Instead of trying to relate to the world with an outwardly blind introverted dominant function, now you can engage people through the eyes and logic of Te and have a much truer sense of what you should do. 

What you've been experiencing hasn't been an inward conflict in your type. It's the natural consequence of having an unbalanced temperament! Your dominant introverted sensing has always needed to be informed by your auxiliary extroverted thinking. What you were experiencing was not an unhealthy conflict within yourself, but an absence of healthy conflict between your aux and your dom. Your dom was too big, too strong, and maybe a little bit too big for its britches! When aux Te isn't working, your dom Si going from knowing right from wrong, to being a bossy know it all that forces its opinions on everyone around it. 

This is natural! This is how temperaments work. If you keep doing the work set out before you in life, you will slowly run into this kind of imbalance over and over again. You have lots to do, so focus on learning how to use your aux Te, but someday you will end up imbalanced again because the Si/Te combo gets too big for its britches. Then, it'll be time for your tertiary function to provide correction and balance, and bring you back into being your true self.

Good luck! You've got lots of practice, but I know you'll do well. I also have aux Te and it was in my early twenties, right around 21 too, when I started learning how to use it to balance my dominant Ni. I can tell you from personal experience, it works!


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## XZ9 (Nov 16, 2013)

Are you guys sure inferior feelings does causes anger? INFP have the description to having great angry with bad temper. I should know because I have an INFP sister.

INFP Personal Growth


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## Chiaroscuro (Jul 10, 2012)

No obvious answer here... 
I think Se dominants are prone to anger and annoyance easily. That's my perspective though. As a previous poster mentioned, inferior and tertiary functions are often causing a lot of problems which can make someone angry.


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## olias (Jul 19, 2014)

Great_Thinker said:


> Are you guys sure inferior feelings does causes anger? INFP have the description to having great angry with bad temper. I should know because I have an INFP sister.
> 
> INFP Personal Growth


I grew up with an INFP mom, I'm aware of what a rageful person they can be. Remember that Jugnian typology isn't predictive, only descriptive. There can be many, many ways to get angry, and many states of mind to express anger through. The key is *why* they're doing it, how they got there, and what they're thinking/feeling as they're expressing it in the present moment. Inferior Fi isn't the only way for an inferior function to resort to anger or self destructive cognitions. 

Inferior Fi, inferior Fe, inferior ANYTHING can provoke a person to anger. The point being that the inferior function will undermine and disconcert the person in a way that fits for how the function thinks about itself. Inferior Se might mindless binge eat to shut off the exhausted brain, then end up feeling badly about the self and being fat. This become a circle of self recrimination, and add the right interpersonal spark and the INTJ or INFJ will explode with anger and rage when in the grip. 

This is still very different from the inferior anger fro ISFP or ISTJ. The ISTJ feels childish, intemperate, overly sensitive, maybe pouty and full of self pity, as their tertiary Fi begins to express. Because they feel so uncertain, so unsettled, to childish they lose the ability to trust their own judgements on things and they become overwhelmed and collapse or freeze in the face of the catastraphizing of inferior Ne. Their judgements about what's really happening get more and more paranoid and unreliable and histrionic, all the while downplaying and dismissing and failing to appraciate important evidence that might help them escape this circle of error they loathe so much. They run to people to be saved, like a child, but the ISTJ's judgement of character is awful right now and so they run to people who make them worse off. They become cold, spiteful, and resistant to friends and allies who truly would help, and the ISTJ refuses to believe that these allies are doing anything other than trying to destroy them. The ISTJ in the grip sees enemies everywhere and attacks them with a level of rage and vitriol which matches the unshakeable degree of calm an othewise healthy ISTJ will experinece as they go about the mindane parts of their day. "


See how that works? Childish feeling states contribute to make decision making, wile theorizing and paranoia with conspiracy theories, even worse, and the ISTJ attacks people he identifies as enemies, people who are wolves in sheep's clothing. His weakened Si speaks up and informs his thinking with a sense of betrayal at their disloyalty, and negative judgements about friends. Normally, the ISTJ's Si provides a bulwark against the emotionality of the moment, allowing him to maintain a steady, forward, optimistic commitment to coming back and trying again tomorrow. , while th

With the ISFP, tertiary Ni is childish, immature, bratty. They indulge the silliest ideas, fill their head with the worst kind of reasoning, chase any line of thinking or reasoning no matter how paranoid, delusional, or disconnected these thoughts are. Worst of all, the ISFP is absolutely dogmatic and cruelly unkind about how correct the conclusions brought by their newly found two bit insight and powers of insight. 

These crazed, unhinged patterns of thinking, fantasizing about how they deserve so much better but failing to grasp how their own thoughts are unremitting them, the ISFP becomes hurt, then wounded, then angry, then resentful and eventually actively vengeful. They are the unquestionable victim, attacked and held back by people around them, and this betrayal provokes them to an fearsome rage (which tertiary Ne also fails to correctly anticipate how their words will undermine them in the future).


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## olias (Jul 19, 2014)

ferroequinologist said:


> All introverts tend to extrovert their anger, and stress causes anger, so that inferior function would be where to look. Also, the auxiliary function seems to be a key to anger/stress, so if your aux. function is Te, the opposite would be Fe, so other's expressions of Fe would be particularly troublesome for you, and one who has aux Fe would be the most troublesome.
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