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Pretentious Fi

teslashock

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Does anybody feel like strong Fi users are really pretentious when it comes to understanding emotions? It seems like Fi people constantly think they know how other people are feeling but are wrong many times. In my experience, Fi users seem to feel the overwhelming urge to convince me that I'm feeling a certain way. It can be kind of annoying at times, but maybe it's some times helpful?

Why do you Fi users do this? Or is this not an Fi thing and just something I made up in my head?

Perhaps Fi users hear another person's perspective and think in terms of how their own mind would manifest that perspective and automatically assume that the rest of the world would express it the same way, leading to flaws in their emotional analyses.

I feel like NFJs are so much better than NFPs at interpreting feelings and thinking about human behavior in terms of the feelings that guide such behaviors, but NFPs simply think they absolutely rock the world of emotional analysis. It's obnoxiously arrogant. SFPs are also more accurate than NFPs (maybe it's the Ni?). I don't know about SFJs. I think they just don't really try to overanalyze other people's heartfelt issues as much as other F types.

Is this an Fi thing, or am I giving Fi a bad rap? Thoughts?

I see the value in Fi when it's used more realistically, but it seems to me like oftentimes it's just completely out of control.

Now before you Fi types start declaring how arrogant Ti is, I'm alread acknowledging this. I pretend/think that I know/understand a lot more about logical systems than the average Joe, so if you bring up arrogant Ti, please make it relevant to the issue at hand rather than a tool for bashing the NTP who started this thread, k?
 

demimondaine

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i try to avoid making presumptions, i've had other Fi-users pull this on me. not a lot makes me fume like someone who is positive they have my emotions (which i take very seriously, thanks) completely figured out. especially when they're unflappable and will not take no for an answer..
 

OrangeAppled

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I experience this more with Fe people, who love to tell me how I should feel. I might actually welcome someone trying to understand me than to tell me what I feel is wrong.

I make no pretense of automatically knowing what other people feel and I rarely judge their feeling when they express it (even if it's very different from what I would feel). I also don't claim to "read" people well. I can empathize once they express themselves, but I don't assume I know until they do. When I listen to people, I am really listening and trying to understand them, not drawing quick conclusions.

As far as Fi empathizing works, you do draw upon your own feeling but you universalize it by applying it metaphorically, at least with Ne-aux you do. There's no linear, direct connection of your own feeling to theirs. It's more of a grasping than a knowing, and you cannot do that without input from the other person. I don't like to jump to conclusions - all possibilities will usually be considered and I need the person to narrow them down by confirming what they feel.
 

Amargith

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You're ENTP..NFJs are more naturally going to be capable of reading you and not rubbing you the wrong way..

Aside from that, there are ime 4 prerequisites to do correctly what you noticed Fi does. If one of those prerequisites is not fulfilled, one cannot make an accurate feeling analysis. However, under pressure, Fi-users may make 'educated guesses' without having all the info (pressure being 'showing what I can do', 'being convinced of being right and tehrefore corrupting the analysis accordingly', 'wishful thinking', etc). The less info you have, the fewer prerequisites are fulfilled, the more room for error in your educated guess. However, gathering all the info and fulfilling all 4 prerequisites takes time. The main prerequisite I'm educatingly guessing now that you're going to encounter not being fulfilled, is the one where we have to step away from our own emotions, in order not to let those influence the analysis. In debate, with, say, ENTPs, who can frustrate us and make us defensive easily due to their style of going about it, it kinda becomes impossible to step far enough away to seperate your own emotions from the other person's...or rather, you start making the wrong interpretations in what you read as it gets coloured by your own input....resulting in a false judgement due to stress.


Just guessing though ;)
 

BlackCat

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Do you experience this with exclusively NFPs or is it SFPs too? Most complains I hear are about NFPs. My Fi is mostly realistic, unless it's purely about me.
 

teslashock

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You're ENTP..NFJs are more naturally going to be capable of reading you and not rubbing you the wrong way..

Heh, agreed. But is this really an NTP/NFJ thing, or are Fe people better at this in general?

Aside from that, there are ime 4 prerequisites to do correctly what you noticed Fi does. If one of those prerequisites is not fulfilled, one cannot make an accurate feeling analysis.

What are these 4?


The main prerequisite I'm educatingly guessing now that you're going to encounter not being fulfilled, is the one where we have to step away from our own emotions, in order not to let those influence the analysis. In debate, with, say, ENTPs, who can frustrate us and make us defensive easily due to their style of going about it, it kinda becomes impossible to step far enough away to seperate your own emotions from the other person's...or rather, you start making the wrong interpretations in what you read as it gets coloured by your own input....resulting in a false judgement due to stress.

Agreed. How can Ti/Fi get along in arguments/discussions then? It seems like Fi users could be more productive if they were willing to admit that their own feelings are not inherently correct and/or universally felt. But what can Ti do?

Maybe we just all need the Ni to see that Ti and Fi are rather arbitrary standards for governing our values and should not be dogmatically impressed upon all situations regardless of context...
 

teslashock

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Do you experience this with exclusively NFPs or is it SFPs too? Most complains I hear are about NFPs. My Fi is mostly realistic, unless it's purely about me.

I think it's mostly an NFP thing. SFPs don't seem to blow emotions completely out of proportion as much as NFPs. I think the Ni in ISFPs really helps with this.

However, I have an ISFP friend who can be convinced by an INFP that Fi-driven values are of the utmost importance. Then the ISFP puts the INFP's Fi into an appropriate context and uses it against me in an argument (not productively or what I find to be convincingly, but nontheless, the two of them think they are the shit). It's really not fun to get in an argument with those two bouncing off of each other, needless to say. There's just no getting through to them.
 

Wild horses

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I don't know if I'm a good example of an NFP as I am a self-confessed emotional retard! :(
 

BlackCat

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I think it's mostly an NFP thing. SFPs don't seem to blow emotions completely out of proportion as much as NFPs. I think the Ni in ISFPs really helps with this.

Yeah I usually try to get some concrete evidence as to how someone is feeling. Usually I simply ask "What's wrong?" then leading to "Why?" Then I deal with it and try to help them. Keep in mind SPs function by experience, so when an SFP employs some sort of Ni with an Se signal, they can read people quite well. When someone has felt a certain way, I analyze the event that took place before that. What their connection to things could be, and what could have possibly caused it. Then once I notice these trends again, I know that they are feeling a particular way. If there is ANYTHING off though, I usually ask. That's how my Fi works with Se, at least.

However, I have an ISFP friend who can be convinced by an INFP that Fi-driven values are of the utmost importance. Then the ISFP puts the INFP's Fi into an appropriate context and uses it against me in an argument (not productively or what I find to be convincingly, but nontheless, the two of them think they are the shit). It's really not fun to get in an argument with those two bouncing off of each other, needless to say. There's just no getting through to them.

That's interesting... Got any examples? Like, of the subject matter that this Fi is brought into play with.

Other than that, good luck with NF pretentiousness. It really irks me too, since most of the time they're wrong (thus it doesn't really help, and they are still convinced that they are right).
 

JocktheMotie

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Agreed. How can Ti/Fi get along in arguments/discussions then? It seems like Fi users could be more productive if they were willing to admit that their own feelings are not inherently correct and/or universally felt. But what can Ti do?

Maybe we just all need the Ni to see that Ti and Fi are rather arbitrary standards for governing our values and should not be dogmatically impressed upon all situations regardless of context...

Ti needs to understand nearly the same thing: that the principles it uses for operational definitions are just as subjective and specific to the individual as Fi values are to Fi users.

As to your OP, I do find this more common with Fi users than Fe, but my evidence is purely anecdotal.
 

OrangeAppled

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It seems like Fi users could be more productive if they were willing to admit that their own feelings are not inherently correct and/or universally felt.

I don't see how this is an NFP trait, and I explained that what you assume is not the case, or at least with myself and many other NFPs. I think YOU are the one trying to tell us what we feel and how we think now.
 

Amargith

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Heh, agreed. But is this really an NTP/NFJ thing, or are Fe people better at this in general?



What are these 4?




Agreed. How can Ti/Fi get along in arguments/discussions then? It seems like Fi users could be more productive if they were willing to admit that their own feelings are not inherently correct and/or universally felt. But what can Ti do?

Maybe we just all need the Ni to see that Ti and Fi are rather arbitrary standards for governing our values and should not be dogmatically impressed upon all situations regardless of context...

The first is the hardest, and mentionned already: being emotionally stable yourself and able to detach. Second is asking questions to verify your reading, making sure you're in sync with the person, potentially recapping what's going on to make sure you got it right. Third is knowing the backstory and applying it to your analysis (aka, if a person is feeling anger, the backstory will tell you how that will make them react, whereas you as the interpreter might do something else in that situation), fourth is using the bodylanguage of the person to verify your reading, and back up the questions, steer them. Together, they will often give you a very acurate pic of what's happening.

What can you do? Don't get defensive :)
Much like ENTPs wanna know what's inside your head and logically verify everything and question stuff (which to us feels like you're not believing us, questionning our morals and values and makes us go all porcupine on ya and btw makes us paranoid and read into your emotions to see wtf is wrong with you that you feel like you need to torture us :alttongue:), we're the same on feelings.

We wanna know what's going on in your soul. And ENTPs are usually reluctant to share that. When you start getting defensive, we feel, much like yourself in a Ti situation, that you're hiding something..so we'll start digging. If you don't cooperate= no information= guessing is the only option= likely to be very inaccurate. It's pretty much what you guys do to get ideas out of people's heads and verify them. We do the same on the emotional level. Realize that. It helps. We're not trying to emotionally rape you, or tell you how you feel. We want you to tell us. If you don't however, we'll guess.

Also, in our defense....T's seem to often not realize that they *are* in fact emoting. If you vibe frustration and anger at us because you're getting frustrated at not finding the answer you seek, often it's misinterpreted by us as..omg, she's frustrated and angry at me..but why??? Then we ask...and you tell us that there's no anger or frustration. We get confused coz we clearly see it, and try to point it out, whereas to you that anger and frustration is minimal and irrelevant (so I've been told). To us however, anger and frustration is to be avoided and leaves a big imprint, so we don't wanna be responsible for that in others. Meanwhile you can see how both sides would go porcupine and how the thing would escalate. (you'll also notice that in this description the NF did *not* fulfill the 4 prerequisites as the situation didn't allow them to, and yet he/she needed to make a value judgement to try and resolve the conflict...which only made it worse).

/end rant.

Ps: this is my personal experience, if yours is different, feel free to share.
 

BlackCat

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Good luck with the incoming NF shitstorm, tesla!

ZOMG Ti vs Fi! ZOMG that NTP is telling me how I function, and that's not true! But I don't realize that they are just analyzing it, and they are an ENTP, and need to verbalize to come to an understanding! I also don't know that they need to provoke to get more information!

zomg.jpg
 

Quinlan

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This thread needs concrete examples.
 

OrangeAppled

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Good luck with the incoming NF shitstorm, tesla!

ZOMG Ti vs Fi! ZOMG that NTP is telling me how I function, and that's not true! But I don't realize that they are just analyzing it, and they are an ENTP, and need to verbalize to come to an understanding! I also don't know that they need to provoke to get more information!

It's the double standard that pisses us off. We're supposed to accept their provoking, their probing, their analyzing of us (as if they know us better than ourselves), but we get written off as pretentious know-it-alls when we do the same because then we are supposedly making assumptions about people's emotions.
 

poppy

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I've seen this happen with both NFJs and NFPs. There is, I think, an inherent gap in communication between Fi and Fe, because each wants to assume that the other works the way that it does.
 

Snuggletron

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I've had this crap pulled on me by a fellow male INFP. Although it was more of him trying to make me feel guilty over something I asked about another friend. He is pretentious in general though, and he's sometimes a prick in general too. I'm not sure if that applies here.

As for me, I've assumed how others feel, but I don't tell them. In my experience, that hunch is often wrong so I keep it in the bag until I'm sure.
 
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