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[NF] NFs how often do you think about relativity of emotions ?

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
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Jun 6, 2008
Messages
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I am wondering how often NFs (and SFs) think about how much their emotions are realtive.

My this I means that in a situations when you are really happy you start analysing the entire thing by looking at the facts and thinking about why did that make you happy ?
Does the same applys when something makes you unhappy ?



Also I am wondering how often do you think about things but you don't attach any emotional value to it? Which leads into situation that you understand that something will make you feel good or bad but there is nothing more to it is since this is only your emotional reaction while that thing or situation just is.


I hope that the questions make sense to you.
 
P

Phantonym

Guest
When I'm happy, I just feel the feeling and let the positive emotion take over me. Not much analyzing there.
When I'm unhappy, the negative emotion still overwhelms me but I instantly start to analyze it. Taking it all apart and analyzing, analyzing, analyzing...until I'm done or numb.

As to the second question, if the things have some personal meaning to me, I care for them or find them important, there's always some emotional value involved. I let these things through my emotional filter.
But if the things have no mentionable significance to me, then sure, no emotional attachment whatsoever, obviously. Neutral.
 

BlueScreen

Fail 2.0
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Nov 8, 2008
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YMCA
I am wondering how often NFs (and SFs) think about how much their emotions are realtive.

My this I means that in a situations when you are really happy you start analysing the entire thing by looking at the facts and thinking about why did that make you happy ?
Does the same applys when something makes you unhappy ?



Also I am wondering how often do you think about things but you don't attach any emotional value to it? Which leads into situation that you understand that something will make you feel good or bad but there is nothing more to it is since this is only your emotional reaction while that thing or situation just is.


I hope that the questions make sense to you.

I know for ENFPs we tend to analyse everything. For me I don't analyse this one that often though because happiness seems to lie on a more superficial level than most of my goals. Like targeting happiness without mapping anything else into the situation tends to undermine a lot of higher goals. Long term more idealistic happiness is something I question a bit though, but it is more like forming a perfect picture than saying this works and this doesn't for specific things.

I suppose in the times when I really find perfection I like to question why though. It isn't really a stop and think moment. Most things just become clear when they become clear, and are questioned when I want to know. ie. when I have an interest in it for some reason, or else I need it.
 

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
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Jun 6, 2008
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When I'm happy, I just feel the feeling and let the positive emotion take over me. Not much analyzing there.
When I'm unhappy, the negative emotion still overwhelms me but I instantly start to analyze it. Taking it all apart and analyzing, analyzing, analyzing...until I'm done or numb.


It is interesting that you don't do it in the case of happiness.
 

BlackCat

Shaman
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Nov 19, 2008
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I tend to weed out the bad emotions by determining what causes them and let the other ones free flow. If it's easy to reproduce positive ones then I do.
 

raindancing

actinomycetes
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Feb 28, 2008
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I tend to analyse all of my emotions.

I think I do this to better understand myself. As soon as I recognize that I'm experiencing an emotion, I try to understand what caused it, why do I feel this way. Not a superficial, easy answer, but the real reason. There are often many layers to go through before I find what seems to be the underlying motivation.

I find it fascinating how well the mind is able to deceive. It is probably my goal to always see the truth of myself. I hate the idea of self deception.

Sometimes I will attempt to turn this process off, to be more in the moment, but it's not very easy to do... alcohol helps :yes:

Do you have any other specific questions?
I'm very happy to answer them, this is one of my favourite subjects after all ;)
 

Wild horses

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There seems to be a big gap between my head and my heart sometimes. Most noticably when experiencing negative emotions... Suddenly I will feel really low and I don't even know why.. I can't connect it to a set of events. This has happened for a large part of my life and so I have just stopped trying to analyse it because it always proves unsuccessful. The other thing is that I often 'absrob' the emotions of those around me so alot of the time to truely understand how I feel I would have to understand the emotional states of those around me and why they are feeling the way they are feeling. Needle in a haystack me thinks
 

Virtual ghost

Complex paradigm
Joined
Jun 6, 2008
Messages
19,723
I tend to analyse all of my emotions.

I think I do this to better understand myself. As soon as I recognize that I'm experiencing an emotion, I try to understand what caused it, why do I feel this way. Not a superficial, easy answer, but the real reason. There are often many layers to go through before I find what seems to be the underlying motivation.

I find it fascinating how well the mind is able to deceive. It is probably my goal to always see the truth of myself. I hate the idea of self deception.

Sometimes I will attempt to turn this process off, to be more in the moment, but it's not very easy to do... alcohol helps :yes:

Do you have any other specific questions?
I'm very happy to answer them, this is one of my favourite subjects after all ;)

In other threads yes but not here.

The reason why I have opend this thread is because to me it looks like that people are much more likely to analyze their negative emotion than good ones. What in a way makes sense but I still wonder why.
 

raindancing

actinomycetes
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Oops didn't pay enough attention to your questions in the OP

\

My this I means that in a situations when you are really happy you start analysing the entire thing by looking at the facts and thinking about why did that make you happy ?
Does the same applys when something makes you unhappy ?

Yes I do this, for all emotions. I have found that doing this normally causes me to: decide the anger that I'm feeling is irrational and so I stop feeling it, to realize why I am feeling depressed and what I need to do to change the situation, why something made me very happy and how to bring about that feeling again, etc.

Also I am wondering how often do you think about things but you don't attach any emotional value to it? Which leads into situation that you understand that something will make you feel good or bad but there is nothing more to it is since this is only your emotional reaction while that thing or situation just is.

I'm not sure if you're talking about things I think, situations I am in, or both...

Thinking about things (and discussing things with people): Depends entirely on what I'm thinking about. Most things I would say that I don't attach emotional value to. However when I am writing, painting, designing gardens, etc, emotions are right at the top and are highly important. In these situation I trust my feelings implicitly. With these it isn't so much that I am experiencing an emotion, it is more that I am trying to create something that will elicit a specific emotion. To do this, I have feelings that sort of guide me in what feels right to accomplish what I want to achieve.

With more normal thinking, such as ideas or understanding of things or people, I don't attach emotional value to it. I actually actively watch myself to make sure I am not attaching any emotions to it because I feel that this would make it more unlikely that I would find the truth.

When thinking about things like this, I do have feelings (not emotions) that one area of the idea or one branch of it is closer to the truth. It is more of an intuitive feeling of rightness. I never dismiss this feeling, and generally trust it, however I still analyse it in an attempt to find if it is as true as it seems to be.


As far as situations go... letting myself be affected by emotions in any situation is usually a conscious decision. What I mean by this is that I can choose to be strongly affected in just about any situation purely by opening myself up and viewing it from the right perspective, conversely I can keep myself from being affected by emotions as well. Different situation are obviously more congruent to different states, for example: walking through the woods, I can close off emotional reaction if I want to, if I allow emotions I could change the emotion if I desired (joy to sorrow); walking through a nondescript part of the city, could become affected by emotions from shifting my perspective, (see the way sunlight highlights the ridges in concrete, the intricacies of a leaf, the flow of people with their individual lives and joys and sorrows...)

Probably a roughly equal (or slightly more) amount of time I find myself analysing situations dispassionately (walking through the supermarket and analysing the packaging, the location of items in the store, the patterns that people shop in, why children find it irresistible to swing on the metal bars at the checkout... it is endless) I don't know if this is a normal INFP thing or not?



Occasionally events happen that affect me very strongly in a negative emotional way, they are normally things that I find extremely stressful, the emotions I get from these kinds of situations are very difficult/impossible for me to change.


I don't know if this answered your questions or not... :thinking:
 

cascadeco

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I am wondering how often NFs (and SFs) think about how much their emotions are realtive.

My this I means that in a situations when you are really happy you start analysing the entire thing by looking at the facts and thinking about why did that make you happy ?
Does the same applys when something makes you unhappy ?

Hmm. First off, I want to say that as a child and into my teens, I wasn't terribly emotionally aware. I mean, I know I was sensitive and I experienced emotions, but I don't know that I ever dissected them, or even could have labelled myself as 'happy' or 'nervous' or 'fearful' or whatever. They just existed, I wasn't preoccupied with them, I was mostly preoccupied with observing the randomness and contradictions and pettiness of the world and people around me. It's only in retrospect that I can throw labels onto my emotional states back then.

By my mid-20's, I became more in tune with my emotions, and decided it was necessary to delve into emotion-land. And that was hard. For a while I was almost panicky, and despairing, at the simple fact that emotions by nature are more transitory and of-the-moment, that I was doomed to face decades of ups-and-downs, happiness and depression, a never-ending, always-changing emotional state. The thought of future-downs, and the hardships of life at times, made me exhausted and not even wanting to bother with this thing called life, and my emotional nature - the nebulous nature of it - was something I protested against and viewed as 'bad', and I was highly annoyed with, well, the relativity of emotions. I thought, what an annoying, cumbersome, difficult way to go through life. But through more analysis and trying to dig deep, I came to accept the nature of myself.

I won't analyze to an intense degree every time I feel sad, or angry, or even happy or joyful, anymore, because I feel like it's almost like I spent those couple of yrs of analyzing- hardcore analyzing - myself and the nature of my emotions, such that there's almost no point these days in pure analysis-- as I've already done it. Don't get me wrong, the 'why's' as to why I'm feeling the way I am are always important to me, and new situations or twists always arise so analysis will never fully go away - ha! :laugh: - but I've spent so much of my life introspecting that I already know the 'why's' of a lot of these things.

I typically analyze now only when said emotion or thought-pattern is dramatically impacting my ability to navigate through life, or through a certain problem, or if the emotion is a lasting one, that lasts for weeks. But in terms of everday sorta emotions, I'm more like: 'Oh yay, here's Mr. Annoyance stepping in for a while. Nice to see ya again, I know you won't be around for long so I'll just let you have your couple of hours here and then I'll see you off.' ;) It's just old hat, I already know what sets me off, and how if I'm suddenly feeling insecure it's because of reason X, at root - not the minor reason Y which triggered it.


Also I am wondering how often do you think about things but you don't attach any emotional value to it? Which leads into situation that you understand that something will make you feel good or bad but there is nothing more to it is since this is only your emotional reaction while that thing or situation just is.

I'm editing what I originally wrote because I was totally thinking of something else initially (and making your question more convoluted than it actually is!), and actually this is a pretty straightforward question.

I'm 'neutral' about many elements of life, so emotion isn't always there and in real life I come across much more detached and unemotional than many; and there are many aspects of life, and certain decisions, that require a lack of emotion. Some things are quite objective. And, as I've posted before, with 'big issues', I often become almost agnostic and don't feel one way or another about something, because of how complicated it is.
 

OrangeAppled

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My this I means that in a situations when you are really happy you start analyzing the entire thing by looking at the facts and thinking about why did that make you happy ?
Does the same apply when something makes you unhappy ?

There's a process of understanding the feeling and deciding if it's valid in light of the facts, but just looking at facts doesn't tell the whole story.

It's like, I don't feel bad because I am out of work. It's just a small piece of the puzzle and often times it's just symbolic for a greater void or fear. To try and boil it down to a fact is over-simplifying things. Facts are kind of just clues.

I'd compare the process of analyzing emotion more to an artistic one. Maybe like sculpting. You feel as you go, and it takes shape into something identifiable. Sometimes it takes a lot of time. Then it feels like there's this little lump inside you, and you don't know what to do with it. One day, you realize it has a face and you can finally move on.

That's why I can be in a mostly "happy" situation and have fleeting moments of bad mood because there may be some little lump in my stomach that I haven't worked out yet. This often makes me seem and feel detached from the current moment's events.

Now, forming my values is more of a rational reasoning process. It's much different for me than understanding my emotion. Once I process the emotion, I often have an evaluation of my values to go through also. It's exhausting being in my head :tongue:

Oh and yes, positive emotions are often easier to process, or at least it's a more pleasant process. Sometimes, when I'm very happy, I want to be alone to savor it and analyze it.

Also I am wondering how often do you think about things but you don't attach any emotional value to it? Which leads into situation that you understand that something will make you feel good or bad but there is nothing more to it is since this is only your emotional reaction while that thing or situation just is.

Everyday. It's called going to work, and other mundane things I'd rather not do but logically know I need to. Most of the value I attach to things is not emotional anyway. I separate my emotion from my values a LOT. The INFP inner conflict is often related to opposing emotional desire and ethical values.
 

Goodewitch

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Oct 4, 2009
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I think I'm a very instinctive NF, Im not very good at even understanding what self awareness is.. I function almost totally instinctually,.. but yes, I do understand that emotional responses are relative, fleeting, for the most part, and I tend not to think about it too much, does that make me an unevolved NF? Probably.
I tend to analyse the negative emotions more than the positive ones, seems pretty self evident to me that anyone, whatever their type, is going to analyse and try to avoid situations where negative emotions are brought to the fore.
I think the whole point of being an NF is that feelings or emotions are important , and its how I filter all experience, even the most mundane things go through that filter to some degree, so what may seem relartive, to me personally, is all important. its quintessentially who i am.
Thinking and philosophising can get you stuck in a place of non action, if its taken to the extremes, where everything, even life itself is relevant, or irrelevant, depending on how apathetic you've become by over thinking.
Its not that i can't see the relativity of emotions, its that i actually like my NF filter. I like who i am, and have no real wish for more balance. Meh, shoot me:shock:
 

TopherRed

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1. As a Fe lead, I find it necessary to act independently of my emotions when I know my emotions to be leading me into a direction my will doesn't want to go. The more attached I am to something, the harder it is to follow my will, and not let my will follow my feelings.

It's not like I listen to every emotional whim I have, either. But some things are easier to break away from than others.

I think the more mature the NF, the easier it is to do things seperately from Feeling, but I wouldn't recommend shutting it out completely; there is such a thing as neglecting yourself. Long term abuse/neglect to Feeling from the outside, or by your actions, from the inside will cause one to lapse into depression.

2. I think the N-Leads probably have a ton of things they don't place emotional value on. As for me, that's a hard question to answer. Emotion permeates, like it's in the air, over everything I do, everyone I encounter, every object I look at. Anything may trigger an emotional response, but not everything has emotional value.
 
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