Introverted. Intuitive. Feeling. Judging. These are the key traits of someone with an INFJ Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). They are considered the Advocate of the personality types. This is how they are described in the assessment:
Seek meaning and connection in ideas, relationships, and material possessions. Want to understand what motivates people and are insightful about others. Conscientious and committed to their firm values. Develop a clear vision about how best to serve the common good. Organized and decisive in implementing their vision.
While they have many positive traits, there is one that gives them a bad reputation: the door slam.
The door slam is similar to a ghosting.
The person doing the door slam abruptly shuts down in a relationship or ends it entirely. It seems sudden enough that the other person often feels blindsided by it.
We, the INFJs of the world, get a bad rap. The door slam isn’t actually sudden at all. We give plenty of warning that it’s coming. It’s just that the other person doesn’t care until it’s too late.
The door slam method happens after exhaustion or overwhelm.
When a situation pushes us to our breaking point, we tend to emotionally — and sometimes physically — disconnect. We’ve put in everything we can, and there’s just nothing left to give. It might seem like an abrupt withdrawal to someone used to us showing up for them while they take us for granted, but it’s anything but abrupt.
I have experience with the door slam. Mine always seems to come with a bit of a delay. It takes an extreme situation for me to break an attachment and be okay with it.
The first time I recognized the door slam in my life was on the heels of filing for my divorce. After years of trying to make things work and feeling like I was the only one who was, I just didn’t care anymore. In a single moment, I felt all the positive feelings leave my body. I disconnected completely, and it likely seemed strange to my former spouse that I was able to shut it all down and walk away so easily. But it was anything but easy. I just reached a point where I couldn’t see any point in fighting for someone who wasn’t fighting for me. I’d also realized that what I had been fighting for wasn’t even something I wanted anymore.
It was the first time I truly saw myself in the door slam technique — but not the last. It would happen again in friendships and in romantic relationships that soured. I would feel the sudden withdrawal and disconnection, and after that, I was fine with walking away. If the choice was between me and someone else, I chose myself.
The door slam isn’t a punishment; it’s a boundary.
When people complain about the INFJ door slam, they often villainize the person slamming the door and don’t think about the boundary the door represents. It’s a self-protective, self-caring action, and it’s also a reflection of the relationship. In a secure and healthy partnership, there’s no need to slam the door on communication or intimacy. But when we’re neglected, abused, or consistently taken for granted, it’s natural that we’ll eventually get up and shut the damn door rather than waiting any longer for the other person to make an effort.
The people who complain the loudest about the door slam are also the ones who are usually silent about the days, weeks, or months leading up to it. They don’t talk about all the signs that were there that they ignored. They don’t reminisce on the times the other person asked them to make an effort, and they didn’t. They only focus on how the door slam makes them feel — not on what they did to create all the conditions for it.
This lack of accountability is part of the problem. They wouldn’t take ownership of their part of making a relationship work, so it’s only natural that they would default into the victim role when it ends. The slammed door resonates within them as an act of injustice. They feel its finality and rail against it. But what they usually fail to see is all the missed opportunities that were present before that final slam of the metaphorical door.
It’s not called a door lock.
The truth is that it’s possible to come back from an INFJ door slam. It’s just that most people do too little, too late. By the time we get to the point of shutting down the intimacy and attachment, it’s hard to bring it back. It would take a lot of work and effort from both parties to even have a chance of reopening the door. Yet, the kind of people we tend to slam it on aren’t usually the ones interested in the hard work of relationships. They feel far more comfortable complaining about the consequences than either avoiding them or doing what it takes to repair the relationship.
That’s why there’s a bad reputation. It’s not that the door slam is wrong. It’s just that there’s a sense of entitlement that says we don’t have the right to stand up for ourselves and walk away if it makes the other person uncomfortable. They claim abandonment when the truth is that they abandoned us first. They feel betrayed because they are unwilling to truly own the ways that they betrayed the relationship by refusing to actively participate in it.
The door slam hurts feelings. That’s not the intention. Actually, it’s really not personal at all by that point. We’re just finally facing facts and making a move. It doesn’t matter if we shut the door gently behind us as we go. It will still likely feel like a slam to the person who thought we’d stick around forever to take their shit. It might feel personal because they are finally facing the reality of the relationship — something we’ve already experienced and fully processed by this point.
They say when one door closes, another one opens, right? The INFJ knows the value of closing the door behind us as we go. We move toward relationships that are capable of investing in us in the same way we invest in them. We leave the others in the rearview, and if the slam reverberates behind us, we only hope that the message finally sinks in:
Do better next time.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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