The INFJ Writer: Cracking the Creative Genius of the World's Rarest Type

By Lauren Sapala

After years of coaching writers who struggled with procrastination issues, high sensitivity to criticism, and crippling self doubt, Lauren Sapala realized that almost every one of her clients was an INFJ or INFP.

Using the insights gleaned from these clients, as well as her own personal story, Sapala shows us how the experience of the intu

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lauren Sapala
• Release date: May 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780692702123

Lauren Sapala

Lauren Sapala is the author of The INFJ Writer, a guide for sensitive intuitive writers, and Firefly Magic: Heart Powered Marketing for Highly Sensitive Writers, as well as The West Coast Trilogy, an autobiographical fiction series. She is also a writing coach for writers of the INFJ and INFP personality type, and blogs about writing, creativity, and personality theory at laurensapala.com. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Book preview

Foreword

Part 1

INFJ Writing: Best Practices

CHAPTER 1

Every Healing Begins in Crisis

The Body in Revolt against Creative Stagnation: Getting Help and Support

CHAPTER 2

Writing Is Not the Same as Editing

Working the Right and Left Sides of the Brain for Writing Success

CHAPTER 3

Artistic Vision Is Not the Same as Artistic Reality

Practicing Acceptance of What Is: Letting Go of Expectations

CHAPTER 4

INFJ Psychic Ability and Character Development

The Practice of Channeling

CHAPTER 5

Writing Memoir: INFJs as the Great Rememberers

Dealing with Emotional Challenges and Using Mosaic Method

CHAPTER 6

Writing Honestly: Doing the Deep Emotional Work

Finding Your Unique Writing Voice

Part 2:

INFJ Creativity: the Inner World

CHAPTER 7

You’re Not Weird, You’re Gifted

Dabrowski’s Overexcitabilities: How the Gifted and Sensitive Intuitive Population Are Linked

CHAPTER 8

INFJ Paralysis and Perfectionism

The Dangers of the Introverted Thinking Loop

CHAPTER 9

INFJ Addiction and the Shadow Self

The Addict Mythology of Writer Icons; Becoming Healthy and Whole Again

CHAPTER 10

The INFJ Intuitive Antenna

Toxic People and Healthy Boundaries

CHAPTER 11

Finding a Way out of Sensitive Intuitive Self-Doubt

Workaholism in the INFJ: Shifting Perspective on Human Worth and Value

CHAPTER 12

The INFJ World Theory

Building Our Knowledge of the Energetic Theme and Pattern of People

CHAPTER 13

Consciously Working Your Life Purpose

Discovering our INFJ-ness: Why We Exist

Part 3:

INFJ Strategies: the Outer World

CHAPTER 14

The Starving Artist Myth and a New Way to Think about Making Money

How to Meet Your Financial and Energetic Needs

CHAPTER 15

If It’s Not Intrinsic Motivation, It’s No Motivation at All

Making an Offer to the Universe

CHAPTER 16

Writers’ Conferences and Networking

Using Our Extraverted Feeling as an Advantage

CHAPTER 17

One Silent Hour: A Writing Group Just for Sensitive Intuitives

Format and Intention of AA-based Writing Groups

Part 4:

Other NF Type Writers

CHAPTER 18

The ENFP Writer

CHAPTER 19

The INFP Writer

CHAPTER 20

The ENFJ Writer

AFTERWORD

RECOMMENDED READING AND RESOURCES

Part 1

INFJ Writing: Best Practices

FOREWORD

I wrote this book for two reasons. The first being that my life changed in every way after I found out I was an INFJ. I’m assuming yours did, too. But after I read every bit of information I could find on the internet about INFJs it still wasn’t enough. My most important questions weren’t answered. Discovering I was an INFJ went hand-in-hand with understanding myself as a writer, and help with being a writer of my unique temperament was what I most urgently needed. Because the more I learned about what it meant to be an INFJ, the more I saw how my INFJ-ness infused my challenges, talents, and creative growth in the realm of writing.

Suddenly, the way I wrote made sense. I was an intuitive soul and I wrote in an intuitive way. No wonder so many of the standard tips and tricks (and classes and rules) for writers had never worked for me. But through a process of trial and error, and much study of my INFJ type, I found methods that did work for me. When I saw them work in the exact same way for the other intuitive types in my writing groups, and for the clients I coached through my writing coach practice, I knew I was onto something. And I knew I needed to share that something with the rest of the INFJs out there in the world.

That was the first reason. The second reason is because I am an unabashed self-help junkie. I say this so proudly because I can look back over the last decade of my life and see how far I’ve come as a person and so much of that progress I owe to reading self-help books. I have thoroughly transformed my emotional, creative, physical and financial life with the assistance of self-help books. I have stayed sober for over ten years, started my own successful business, established and maintained a loving marriage, and gone through the amazing birth and first year of my son without losing my mind or letting fear take over, and all of those things I owe to practices I learned from self-help books.

Since I’ve read so many self-help books, too, I know there’s a secret to getting the absolute best benefit of their teachings: You have to actually do the exercises. I know, I know. You’re already feeling resistance show up just from reading that. It happens. I’ve read dozens of self-help books and when I see the exercises at the end of the chapters I still don’t really want to do them. It’s so much more fun to just skip them and go on to the next chapter. And sometimes I do, but only when I know I’m going to go back and reread the book specifically to complete all the exercises I missed.

Yes, doing these exercises takes time and energy. It makes a breezy read into something more like work. But doing the exercises is the part that will actually transform your life. It’s the thing that will get the energy unstuck and moving and bring the changes you’re so intent on seeking. Doing the exercises is oftentimes uncomfortable, but it’s not impossible, and it doesn’t take as much willpower as you think it does. Just start with one of the questions at the end of a chapter. One little question. Answer that question and see where it takes you. I think you’ll be surprised at how much things start to change for you.

Since this is an e-book I recommend readers get a notebook, a pad of paper, or open up a place to write on their computer and record their answers in that separate space. I also recommend readers save their answers so that they can go back and revisit them at a later time. I’ve learned astonishing things about myself after rereading answers I gave to self-help exercises months or even years later.

Finally, if you like this book or it helped you in some way feel free to reach out to me at [e-mail]. I try to answer as many emails as I can and I love to hear from writers and other creative people. If you’re so inclined, leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads is also very much appreciated.

Happy writing!

CHAPTER 1

Every Healing Begins in Crisis

I stopped writing for seven years after I graduated from college because I had a horrible experience with creative writing classes, and a professor who suggested I give up writing and move onto other things. I started writing again in 2006 after I joined a writing program I found on Craigslist. At the time it seemed like a random choice I was making. Since then I’ve realized it was anything but that.

By 2006 I was desperate. I was miserably unhappy, and at the bottom of it, I knew it was because I had lost all the creativity out of my life. I had always written poems and stories, from the time I was six years old until my young adult years. But then I stopped and it seemed that everything in my life boiled over. My relationships were a mess, I was scared to open my heart even the teeniest little bit, and I hid the true person I was from everyone.

The really scary thing was that I was willing to limp along like this, possibly forever. But then my body went into total revolt.

In 2005 I started noticing that I seemed to get sick a lot. In fact, I was sick all the time. I had always had rotten tonsils, but in recent years it was like they were actively attacking me and trying to take down my whole body. I would get severe bouts of tonsillitis that came with sky-high fevers and a swollen throat that wouldn’t allow me to talk and made it so that I could barely eat. When I was sick like this I couldn’t express myself or take in nourishment. Hmmm…this got me thinking. Wasn’t the same thing sort of happening due to the fact that I wasn’t writing?

The other side effect of these extreme tonsillitis attacks was that I was down and out for at least five days, sometimes a week. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t go out to see friends. I couldn’t participate in life.

I grew up in a family of doctors. My dad is a surgeon and his father before him was a surgeon. And they were old school doctors. They believed the body was the body and the mind was the mind and there was no link between the two. And the soul? Forget the soul. No one knew if that even existed. And whether it did or not, well, people surely didn’t talk about it.

So when I started doing some deep thinking about why I was getting sick all the time, and then I quit drinking and did a bunch of 12-step group inner work, and then I dug deeper and started learning about chakras, the body-spirit connection and energetic fields, I felt like I might be half crazy. Everything I had learned growing up in super-rational Western culture had taught me that this stuff wasn’t real and only naïve, foolish people believed in it. But everything my intuition was telling me felt right and true. I felt strongly that I was on the right track.

I knew I had to change something. And then I joined that writing program, which changed my life and maybe saved it. Because after I started writing again everything turned around. Simply everything. And yeah, it was a slow process. In fact, it took about three years for the ball to really get rolling on my own personal growth train, but roll it did. And now, ten years later, I’m a different person. I never get sick anymore. I haven’t had to deal with tonsillitis in over nine years—and I still have my tonsils. I didn’t have to have them out because they took a chill pill on their own.

I now know from working with my clients that my story is not unique. I’ve talked with quite a few INFJs and INFPs who experienced severe health issues that acted as a sort of wake-up call for their creative life. Sometimes it was centered at the throat (as in the case of thyroid issues, or with my tonsils), manifesting right at that Vishuddi Chakra, which is the energetic center for self-expression in the body. Sometimes it showed up as migraines or tension headaches, gripping the person in a vise that let them feel the full pressure of a valve that is badly in need of release. Or sometimes it appeared as a heart or immune disorder, symbolizing that it was time to open the heart center and live in an authentic way that would let them feel protected and also let them feel that it was safe to be themselves.

These are just a few examples that I’ve come across through hearing stories from my clients and writer friends. Your story might be radically different, or you may not have suffered the extremity of some of the health issues outlined here. But if you’re a Sensitive Intuitive—especially an INFJ or INFP—chances are that you’ve experienced something like this if you’ve ever gone for long periods in your life without writing.

The true definition of a healing crisis is the experience of ill-health in reaction to some type of detoxification program. For instance, an alcoholic might check himself into rehab and end up severely ill after going cold turkey for a few days. Part of this is withdrawal, yes, but most of it is the body trying to cleanse itself of the poisonous residue that comes from a constant influx of whisky. This can happen in personal growth work too. You might start a therapy program in order to delve into your childhood issues and after a week or two you feel more awful than ever before. I refer to this phenomenon as stirring the fish tank, and I’ve observed that it seems to happen whenever you try to change up your inner status quo—whether that’s by shifting your belief systems or examining deeply buried emotions.

I believe that a healing crisis can also occur for Sensitive Intuitives before they actually take that first step. Before they join the writing program, or call the writing coach, or even just take up the pen and try to write one line of poetry after having been absent from the page for years. The creative soul can only take so much deprivation before it goes into revolt and seeks help from the body in making its needs known and understood. In the case of INFJs and INFPs the need to create is so strong—it’s such an integral part of what we are and why we are here—that health issues are most likely to come from a drought of creative striving more than anything else.

The only exception to this is the unfortunate situation of discordant relationships. If an INFJ or an INFP is trapped in an ugly, demoralizing emotional relationship with a toxic person, their health runs the same risk as it does if they’re not creating. But there is a somewhat twisted upside to this. If the INFJ or INFP is in this sort of relationship but is also making art out of it in some way, they will be able to go on with it much longer without experiencing the healing crisis, than if they were making no art at all. This is not an awesome truth, but it is a truth nonetheless. We can get through almost anything—and stay with it—if we’re able to create art in the midst of it.

So what can an INFJ or an INFP do when they believe they’re experiencing a healing crisis before any healing has even really begun? They have to do something that might be one of the biggest challenges for Sensitive Intuitives.

They have to take action.

Of course, the best action to take is to start writing again. Or start creating in some other way. Painting, sculpting, singing—any emotional creative act will begin the healing process immediately. But this is not as simple as it sounds. Believe me, I know. It took me seven years to start writing again after one professor shut me down. INFJs and INFPs are super-crazy sensitive and our thin skins are like a flimsy paper that covers our gigantic, messy, vulnerable hearts. Committing to a personal creative act can be terrifying and it can also seem impossible. Where do you begin? How do you begin? And maybe the most important question for INFJs and INFPs: Are you all alone in this or have others gone through it before?

This is why it’s most helpful for INFJs and INFPs to enlist support. This is one of the roles I fulfill as a writing coach, but you don’t have to hire a coach to get the support you need. Joining a community group or an online program will work too. When I was going through my own healing journey I joined an AA group in the neighborhood I worked in during that

Reviews for The INFJ Writer

[bemislibrary · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Introverted Intuitive Feeling Judging (INFJ) personality type is rare, making up less than one percent of the population. This book looks how characteristics assigned to INFJ can be used to incorporate writing tasks into their daily activities. Several chapters end with questions to answer in search of self-reflection. The author’s says the best piece of advice is to stop thinking and do. While she gives a brief review of Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving (ENFP), Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving (INFP), and Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Judging (EMFJ) personalities at the end, she does not provide background on Meyers Briggs personality tests. Goodreads Giveaway randomly chose me to receive this book. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.