Yeah that's weird. How well do you relate to Ti-Ne vs Ni-Te in LII vs ILI desc's?
Also as a possible add on to that, I see Te work within the context of my own interests as well.
For example I'm interested in Tarot cards. I'll devour tons of books of the subject and then I'll get this burning passion to test the ideas within the books out to see if they work with clarity. I'll throw down the cards only to (usually) find that it doesn't work nearly as clearly as it does theoretically. Then I'll get frustrated and start to see if there are new ways of using them to make them work more objectively. So then I'll change my perspective on how to use them and try again to see if it works. If it works better then I won't dismiss it; but consistent failures only make me more skeptical.
With typology it has been a similar process of myself getting pissed off because I'd like to be able to directly observe the theory. With MBTI I'd typed myself as INTP and I'd learned the functions, so then I wanted to "watch" those functions work in real life to see if my typing was accurate. When it didn't match up perfectly I dismissed INTP and then moved on to dismiss most of MBTI only to come to Socionics, which appears to be a little bit more clear. For me to truly know that something is right, I have to be able to see it work; that's why LII doesn't really resonate with me....my logic doesn't really work within a vacuum, I always have to go outside of myself to find out what's correct. If I can't directly observe something working I'll do tons and tons of research on it and then try and see a application of it to see if it works.
This is why romance is difficult for me btw. I don't really believe anything that I say myself and I often need things proved to me before I'll take something. For example today in class I had a girl make a concentrated effort to look specifically at me and then turn away when I looked back. That's relatively strange looking at how we were in a lecture hall with about 50-60 people. The way my thought process works, I can always say what she
may have been thinking, but until I see something else to leads me in a different direction, I can only speculate. I'll probably find myself creating an elaborate fantasy (Ni?) but I won't take it seriously unless something happens in reality that conforms with it.
Going back to the topic of Tarot, that seems to show this weird Ni/Te relationship. Ni loves looking at all of the symbols and using it to interpret trends and see patterns, but my Te always requires that those patterns have enough outward evidence to back them up. I'll read things in Tarot and then take them with a grain of salt because I can't be sure that what I'm seeing is true. I'm plagued by self doubt because I need things proven to me. I'll spend hours, days, months obsessively gathering information and then testing them (through observing them) to see if they're accurate. Thus I spend a great deal of time doing absolutely nothing practical
Up above I mentioned how I'm not warm and friendly unless people show me that they want me to be. I need objective evidence or information from outside of myself to justify my behaviors. That's also why I keep going to type forums asking people what they think my type is; I can't figure it out myself because of all of the subjective factors and I'm trying to get information from others (while simultaneously doubting it).
To take yet another shot at my Fe usage (I've been observing myself today) I've come to the conclusion that I see people as an annoyance, but still care as to how they feel. Paradox? I don't think so.
What I realized is that the essential thing that I crave from other people is respect. I want to be admired, I want to be told by other people how awesome I am, and I want to accomplish things that other people can see and enjoy. I often beat myself up when I compare myself with other people because they seem to have visible accomplishments while I don't; thus I feel like I don't deserve attention or respect, something that I desperately crave. Thus there's this awkward love hate relationship with people; I like people to pay attention to me but after an extended period of time I find myself annoyed, spiteful, and jealous. It's nothing that I'm proud of, but that's how it is
What's more is that most of my fear from other people comes from me not wanting other people to think ill of me. I want them to look up to me and like me...and I think that I'm (willingly?) misinterpreting that as genuine empathy. This often manifests as me wanting people around, but having an inner lack of concern with them or their personal concerns as long as they aren't thinking ill of me or hurting my feelings. I'm not very proud of this, but in the past I've found it very easy to lie to people and play two sides of a conflict. Fe creatives probably would explode from doing something like that. The only time when I'll actually feel bad for lying to someone or the people that I actually care the most about are my closest contacts; parents, sister, close family members, long time friends...and even then the difference in warmth and empathy is a small one.
I guess what makes it hard for me to type myself is that my psyche seems to have worked extremely hard to obscure the main aspects of my personality....probably out of guilt.