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What happens when someone with no emotional awareness suddenly gains it?

Bush

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Then came the T.M.S. With my newfound ability I imagined myself joyfully shedding a cloak of disability. I thought she would be happy, but instead she said matter of factly, “You won’t need me anymore.” My heart hurt, and I felt unspeakably sad. Later, people at work told me they’d liked me better the way I was before.
Well, there's a pretty good chunk of the problem. Needing one another isn't really a good foundation for a relationship.

Emotional awareness is just data.

You can choose to shut out that data and steer a straight course through life on an even keel. But you'll never really understand or connect with other people. You can't even connect with your own emotions, so happiness will elude you. You'll just have stability and predictability, but not much more. On the plus side, you can probably be more productive, since you can tune out a lot of the irritations of daily life and people.

Alternatively, you can input that data. Your course will then become a lot more erratic with a lot more collisions and crises. You may feel overwhelmed by data at time and exhaust yourself trying to balance competing agendas and needs (yours and theirs). But ultimately your connections with others will be stronger, and you'll be "handling" both yourself and others better. Happiness will become a possibility.

With the extra data provided by emotional awareness, you'll be more reactive to your environment. The extra data may be overwhelming at times, but with practice you get used to processing it. You work out systems (probably Fi) for prioritizing and dealing with that extra data and incorporating it into your life.

this
 

Coriolis

Si vis pacem, para bellum
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What's more fascinating is a lot of T's reaction to the concept of emotional awareness. For me, other people's emotions are just more information. It helps me understand them better and therefore helps me connect with them better. It's not the emotions themselves that facilitate the connection, it's the understanding. Of course there's that 'glimpsing their humanity' through perceiving their emotions kind of artistic moment, but it's not what I mainly do. This is probably due to my Fe-Ti lens. I suspect Fi-Te will be different.
T types might be more open to emotional awareness if we could gain that sort of understanding of others from it, instead of having it come across as mostly noise.

Emotional awareness is just data.

You can choose to shut out that data and steer a straight course through life on an even keel. But you'll never really understand or connect with other people. You can't even connect with your own emotions, so happiness will elude you. You'll just have stability and predictability, but not much more. On the plus side, you can probably be more productive, since you can tune out a lot of the irritations of daily life and people.

Alternatively, you can input that data. Your course will then become a lot more erratic with a lot more collisions and crises. You may feel overwhelmed by data at time and exhaust yourself trying to balance competing agendas and needs (yours and theirs). But ultimately your connections with others will be stronger, and you'll be "handling" both yourself and others better. Happiness will become a possibility.
Emotions are just data. Emotional awareness is the ability to take in such data. But taking it in is not the same as having the ability to process it into meaningful insights. It is possible to connect with people on other than an emotional basis. Moreover, it is possible to experience far more than stability and predictability without those sorts of connections. In fact, I'm not sure predictablity or stability are guaranteed, though greater productivity from tuning out the noise is a given.
 

Tennessee Jed

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[...] It is possible to connect with people on other than an emotional basis. Moreover, it is possible to experience far more than stability and predictability without those sorts of connections. [...]

So? Spell it out. Don't just disagree with me. Tell me what additional connections or benefits you get from filtering out (or being unable to process) emotional data, as a hard-core T. I honestly want to know.
 

Coriolis

Si vis pacem, para bellum
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So? Spell it out. Don't just disagree with me. Tell me what additional connections or benefits you get from filtering out (or being unable to process) emotional data, as a hard-core T. I honestly want to know.
The answer to this question is not straightforward, but here goes.

First, the benefits of this reality (I don't call it an approach, as it is not usually deliberate) is more in what it enables me to avoid than what it brings in beyond what others might experience. I should emphasize at the outset that I really can't know what others experience, only what I do, which limits my ability to speak comparatively.

Considering part of your earlier post:
You can choose to shut out that data and steer a straight course through life on an even keel. But you'll never really understand or connect with other people. You can't even connect with your own emotions, so happiness will elude you. You'll just have stability and predictability, but not much more. On the plus side, you can probably be more productive, since you can tune out a lot of the irritations of daily life and people.
I do understand and connect with people, but more on an intellectual or mental level than emotional. We connect through sharing ideas, insights, speculations, even arguments. I cannot connect with that many people this way, but when I do, it is just amazing. Exhilarating even. It can be like flying at the speed of light through a mental landscape. I work with many wonderful colleagues, and our interactions frequently dip into this territory.

Moreover, I do experience happiness and even joy, though I do not expressly seek either. I find them to be by-products of accomplishment, learning/growth, creativity, and doing the things I enjoy. So as an aside, I certainly do experience emotions, I just consider them personal rather than the stuff of everyday interactions, and similarly do not intrude on or make assumptions about the emotions of others. I also don't dwell on them overmuch. The experience I described above about mental connection obviously has a significant emotional component. It might for the other person as well, but if it is part of what we are sharing together, it is a very minor part.

Alternatively, you can input that data. Your course will then become a lot more erratic with a lot more collisions and crises. You may feel overwhelmed by data at time and exhaust yourself trying to balance competing agendas and needs (yours and theirs). But ultimately your connections with others will be stronger, and you'll be "handling" both yourself and others better. Happiness will become a possibility.
The effects of these irritations, collisions, and crises cannot be overestimated. They can consume significant energy and attention if I attend to them. This may be in large part because I am not good at attending to them. As you wrote later, if I were more practiced at it I might be able to manage them better. At this point, though, the cost of doing so is usually too high. I have read the advice that effort spent developing your strengths pays richer dividends than that spent working on your weaknesses, and I believe it.

As it is, I do feel I have a significant amount of personal stability, in that I feel very grounded in my life - like I can handle whatever comes along. I wouldn't say it is predictable, though. The stability gives me a firm base from which to take risks and try new things, which can seem unpredictable to others, and sometimes to me. I always have a plan, but it is almost as if its very existence gives me the confidence to depart from it to chase opportunities or try something out. I'm not sure this part is related to emotional processing or lack thereof, but you mentioned it so it seemed worth clarifying.

Does this answer your question?
 

á´…eparted

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This is really interesting to me. I saw this story a few days ago, and it's fascinating. It's speculation on my end, but I suspect a large part of this stems from the fact that while he now sees and sense emotions in others, he has absolutely no training or experience in his life to know what to do with it. He will have to spend time understand all this new information. It's a parallel to learning a language. He's suddenly been given the alphabet and a few basic phrases, but has to take the time to bring it all together and learn how to use it.
 

uumlau

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This is really interesting to me. I saw this story a few days ago, and it's fascinating. It's speculation on my end, but I suspect a large part of this stems from the fact that while he now sees and sense emotions in others, he has absolutely no training or experience in his life to know what to do with it. He will have to spend time understand all this new information. It's a parallel to learning a language. He's suddenly been given the alphabet and a few basic phrases, but has to take the time to bring it all together and learn how to use it.

Yeah, he's got the English/Hungarian dictionary, and it's not a very good one ...

 

Reborn Relic

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I've switched between extremes of emotion and having little or no emotion for some time. I've honestly preferred being highly emotional when it's happened. It makes a richer experience of life, even if you aren't doing as well in it by objective metrics.

However...you need to put up the shields sometimes to survive. Acting on, among other things, my anger would've been really bad for me once upon a time. And sometimes it can hurt too much.

But getting some form of treatment...I don't like it. I'd want to know what the costs were to the rest of the brain.
 

ZNP-TBA

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What happens when someone with no emotional awareness suddenly gains it?

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