I am interested to hear more about this. Can you expand on it?
In response to me writing:
As an INFJ in a relationship with an INFP, I find the above quite accurate to my experience with Fi-dom in many ways.
At first I didn't realize what was going on but by now I can sense it for what it is: It feels like this ongoing quietly (subtly) aggressive push push push push and it can be really disorienting and draining for me. The worst of it is when that push if for me to see my own self, my actions, etc through their eyes - a profound disorientation for me.
So hmmm, expand on it. I can try. I've been thinking about it a lot lately inside myself. This turned out to be really long.
I have a concrete example that's been on my mind because it happened recently. This is part of a much broader/larger pattern in our lives and interactions. And I'm much more self-aware now about this stuff than I was at the start of this relationship.
Context: One ongoing struggle in my life is to really trust the information my perception gives me. Call it Ni-Se perception, with Se in service to Ni. I get a LOT of really really good "underneath consciousness" information about the reality around me via this perception. I have a lot of analytical data showing the accuracy of this perception because over and over it happens that what my Ni-Se picks up shows itself visibly in the external world in a way others can easily see. But that comes later. In me, Ni-Se often picks up what is, at the time, relatively well hidden). Anyway, despite knowing the accuracy of this Ni-Se information, I still struggle to trust it when it happens.
Ni-Se transmits information to my consciousness in a particular language and the cognitive meaning isn't always obvious to my conscious mind. I often get Ni-Se information in body-gut sense, in general metaphor, in visual images, and occasionally even in sense-based metaphor.
Example: Last week, my partner came home and my Ni-Se perception told me there was something wrong that she was bringing into the shared space. I didn't know that at the time, I just had perception with no analytical consciousness of what it meant. I responded physically, according to her - apparently I had a "look on my face" - that's what she told me.
My own internal experience of the situation was a faint feel of off-ness when she came through the door and I was in the other room, then a moderately strong feeling of repulsion from a smell on her clothing when she came in. In itself, the smell wasn't so bad, but I was repelled. Later, I realized that this was a sense-metaphor: "Something doesn't smell right here." At the time, I was just receiving this information.
Her response to whatever was going on was to say that there was
something wrong in the dynamic between us. If we were going to discuss it, she wanted us both to discuss what was wrong in our lives and/or inner selves that could be contributing to what she said was a mutual dynamic. She then focused, as she very often does, on what might be wrong in/with
me that was creating this. I had to push back to get her to talk about what was going on with her (and there was a very obvious source of off-ness in her experience that day but she wanted me to focus on what was supposedly wrong in/with me because in her framework, her this was a mutual dynamic). The whole discussion and situation felt increasingly more and more unpleasant and painfully off to me.
In this discussion, she told me that the minute she saw the "look on my face" she knew things were bad between us. I scanned my internal landscape and tried to pinpoint what that look may have been about. I homed in on the smell. That wasn't the source, but it is a clear clue to my perception. I mentioned the smell.
She just brushed it aside. She said that wasn't relevant (paraphrasing here). She said she already knew what that look on my face was about and it wasn't a smell or whatever I was trying to talk about. When I said that it felt to me like she was dismissing something important for me, she said that whatever I might be feeling inside, I can't see my own face and I don't know what I was projecting with my expression.
She brought this situation up again the other day, the "look on my face" in that interaction and her supposed correct knowledge of what it was really about (not what it was really about for me). She brought this up as part of a communication to me that I should adjust my perception and response in an upcoming situation that she thought might invoke the same response from me.
Again I protested that she was dismissing what had actually been going on. And again, this time even more strongly, she said that I don't see my own face and don't know what I project because I can't see it.
She presented her experience of the look on my face as if she can directly see an objective truth that I can't see. But that's not accurate. She
interprets what she sees on my face through her filters. This is just how her info-processing system works, she has Fi-Si filters. We've discussed it. But in interactions like this, the subjective nature of her interpretation goes invisible in the discussion and she presents her subjective assessments and conclusions as if she has direct access to some objective truth that I (in this case literally)
cannot see.
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In the past (and still a part of me does this), I would have initially accepted her analysis. In this case, based on the true fact that I certainly cannot see my own face in times like this. I would have assumed she was onto something that I was unaware of, and looked critically at myself, asking myself what I project into the world and looking to her for more "information" about what this is so I could be more "aware" of what I do.
But I now know enough about this pattern that I don't
all the way go there anymore. It's a big struggle for me, though.
She has a practice of stating her assessments and conclusions with a great deal of force and confidence. Push push push. Even when she's incorrectly "connecting the dots" (her phrase) based on Fi-Si or Fi-Si-Te, even when she's wrong, she still does this. We've actually talked about it. At the time, she believes she's correct, believes it wholeheartedly at the time, and if she later learns she was incorrect, she just pivots to that as if nothing happened. And continues forcefully pushing her assessments and perceptions as correct the next time around.
She has consistently misunderstood me. We've talked about that as well. She says she has a database of experiences (Si) that tells her how people act and what things mean when people say or do them. It's based on an accumulation of past experiences in her life. It's a more efficient way of understanding reality than the perception-heavy, multi-layered, information and context-rich approach I take to understanding any situation.
When she's correct, she can be stunningly correct. She can conclude accurate facts based on what I see as minimal information. But she can also jump to stunningly incorrect assessments and conclusions. And she does that a
lot with me. This has been obvious from the start. I don't quite fit into the Si map from the rest of her life. And she takes close to forever to actually incorporate each little tiny piece of how I don't fit her existing database of meaning,, and adjust her understanding accordingly. And I'm beginning to see that some of her Si map about me specifically is distorted as well, and so begins to build on itself in that distortion.
In the meantime, she pushes her assessments and conclusions - including assessments and conclusions about me, about what I am doing etc - as truth even when she's wrong. And when I object, she calls on Te-inf to find some plausible argument to support what she says is happening.
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This may actually connect to another part of your post in a discussion with someone else.
It does seem to me that Fe types get very good though at bouncing blame all around to everyone else, to varying degrees of course.
I have a particular pattern with this that may illuminate somehow. I think it's specific to Ni-Fe-Ti in me. Think of it as a series of steps or phases in my response:
1. When something feels "off" and there is a clash between my Ni perceptual landscape (or Ni-Se perception) and the external material Fe legitimizes in my consciousness, my first move is to take in the external Fe material, assume it's correct, and hold myself responsible for whatever is not right. This phase can last hours, days, weeks, months, even years.
2. As I hold this external material deeply inside myself over time, it often begins to feel really bad - feel in the sense of gut-level, visceral, sense-perception kind of "feel" (
not emotion.)
3. Things that feel this way do so because they de-center me from Ni and Ni-Se perception - my own organic perceptual field.
4. In response to the visceral feel (again,
not emotion, but rather sense-perception feel) that develops as I hold the Fe-legitimized material inside myself, Ti activates. Ti begins to deconstruct the external material using my Ni perceptual field as a reference point. It's a painstaking process requiring a LOT of data and fine-grained analysis.
At stage 4, you might well see me "
bouncing blame all around to everyone else." This is a corrective, a balance, to what I have already done, which is take on way too much responsibility for everything given the Fe dynamic.