yeah, and worst of all, i don't know what's valuable until i realize how others interpret value. i need the context in order to understand how something is purposeful for others, because i need other meanings in order to synthesize them and find my own understanding. the actual position i take is still difficult.
For me, I’m not sure it’s a matter of not knowing what’s valuable so much as being able to estimate what’s valuable to other people. And I guess by ‘valuable’, I mean that which ‘seems true’ to other people. I can come up with a lot of stuff that feels valuable and seems true to me alone, but I can’t stand the feeling of having it accumulate without effectively being able to share it. I need to mix it with others’ perceptions and opinions or it just starts feeling stale. I need that synthesis (of my ideas/opinions with that of others) to make the value of my ideas/opinions more solid.
Also, I think the sheer volume of *stuff* that occurs to me gets overwhelming. Some of it is great, some of it is crap. If I can’t trust someone enough to bounce my stream-of-conscious off of them, then I’ve got to let Ti shave off all the possible crap first- and that gets exhausting.
So as it pertains to the op: I only bounce the goofy/paranoid/nonsensical stuff off of people I trust to not take it the wrong way or blow it out of proportion. I also agree with what fidelia & others said about sharing critical thoughts being an indication that someone is ‘in’; we don’t invite conflict with someone unless we can trust they won’t overreact.
For the same reason, I think it is unlikely that you will hear about raw unprocessed thoughts from most Ti users.
I've been thinking about this for a little while since Ergophobe asked why we can't trust enough to talk about something until it's safely been dealt with or settled in our own minds. I think this is the reason.
If I'm embroiled in a difficult thought or feeling, my capacity to communicate goes horribly wrong. I start using a very limited emotional vocabulary (thank you to Protean for that wonderful phrase) and THEN I can wear Jaye's patience thin when she'd trying to get to the source of what's confounding me. It's like a robot going haywire - what made sense before no longer makes sense and it comes out of me in nonsensical bursts.
^this is why I think people who can listen without having some strong reaction are invaluable. That stuff just won’t leave our heads if there’s any chance the person is going to take it the wrong way or mistake it for finished product. If I can’t spew whatever comes to mind- and some of it is flat out embarrassing- without having the person get judgmental (over me simply having those thoughts in the first place) then I clam up. It isn't even a conscious decision, I just freeze like a deer in headlights and can't even articulate the raw fragments. I really can only get those fragments out around people who can remain calm and simply listen without getting worked up by it.
It's kind of like the difference between trying things on in front of a regular mirror (deadpan, still, calm surface) vs a funhouse mirror (getting a distorted reflection back from things I say). Trying things on in front of a funhouse mirror gives us no indication of how they really look and only further confuses us (gives us even MORE to process)- so we clam up.
My Ni *swears* to me that purple has a flavor.
Exactly.
I don’t know how much of this^ most ENFJs can relate to, but I do see some of it going on in my ENFJ mother. There are very few people who see her true colors. She does, however, seem to have more stamina than I do for dealing with people who aren’t necessarily ‘in’- it doesn’t seem to wear her out as easily.
All of my unfinished thoughts get directed at LadyJaye and even then I do it with piles of kneejerk disclaimers attached.
That is awesome. Maybe at some point it the future, it’ll be available for INFJs everywhere to acquire ENP clones of themselves. That would totally rock. Someone should get on that.
Also: I, too, am a serial dispatcher of knee-jerk disclaimers.