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[NF] INFPs, what do INFJs do that drives you nuts?

S

Society

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ok, thank you for clarifying.
Whoever has the most "restrictions" is going to in some way define the parameters of the relationship.

yes there's the resulting power-play, and i understand that having being on it's other side you have an experience to draw from towards approaching it with empathy (as apposed to mere sympathy). on that tone, i think we are all doing the same thing from different directions - trying to get a better grasp of what we are dealing with here, what kind of "animal" are we facing.

but i think that in going to the generalized principle (freedom of interaction), your missing what - at least to the extent that i am identifying - the described sense of disillusionment described by the INFPs here is attributed to.

the conversations that brought that about, describing INFP needs and INFJ needs, basically looked like a gridlock. in Fi world, to the extent that i can understand it, the answers they were being given kept to "vibe" of "my way or the highway" to the extreme of "everything has to be my way or the highway".

that's being said, i don't think you need Fi to understand it:
there is an apparent gridlock on a very fundamental level, where the seeds and the water are never allowed to touch.

basically, the skeleton of the messages gotten seem to be this:
  • "no, I won't accept your thoughts because they don't fit into the conclusion I am trying to make".
  • "what you think your own intentions are is irrelevant, I am right about what you think for my own purposes".
  • "you have to understand my perspective about why all your perspectives don't matter".
  • "if what you say doesn't fit with what i want to hear, you aren't credible and i don't need to hear what you have to say".
this gridlock seems to be on such a fundamental level, that any suggestion of accommodation after this as long as they accommodate these simple requests, it's sort of like you are saying "i would totally work with you on the garden once the seeds grow, as long as you agree to do so without water".
it works on the Fe level, because this way you don't look bad for not being willing to grow anything and are just standing for your rights to agree on the chemical composition of the terrain, but on the Ti level, the rationality behind it breaks down completely.

so i am trying to understand whether the skeletal messages sharing the common theme are there, or is this some sort of massive communication breakdown?

if it is, then i am wondering whether the gridlock can be broken, and i suspect it can be. my reasoning being that it looks very much like the perfect recipe for cooking the tin man. assuming that this isn't some unavoidable fate of every INFJ, then clearly there has to be ways to break it.
 

cafe

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I kind of view people as being autonomous and that relationships are almost entirely voluntary and entered into and terminated on an at-will basis. If one or the other of the participants does not find the relationship beneficial, they can take several actions. They can attempt to negotiate better terms, they can choose to take one for the team, or they can disengage. There might be others, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.

Both people have expected terms, usually not explicit and sometimes incompatible and/or misunderstood by the other party. If the terms cannot be successfully navigated, the relationship is minimized to the maximum possible level if not terminated.

Personally, I'm only willing to negotiate to a point and under certain circumstances. I think the reason is because I am a pretty linear thinker and maybe it's the J thing, I don't know. I'm forty-two years old, so my life is probably nearly half over. I have a husband, four kids, two brothers, and two parents, one of whom I am probably going to end up caring for to some degree within ten or fifteen years.

My time, energy, and resources are finite and therefore precious to me and I am just about as happy as a pig in slop just sitting around reading a book and drinking tea. Interactions with most people do not often make me as happy as a pig in slop. Other than my family and a few close friends, the interactions have to compete with reading a book in terms of return on investment. That's a pretty high bar. So I'm going to be pretty quick to walk away from the table, at least at this point in my life. Things may well be different in twenty or thirty years when my husband and mother may be dead and my children will be enmeshed in their own lives.

So that makes the terms I dictate pretty . . . draconian? But I don't have a problem with other folks waking away from the table if they don't like my terms. I expect them to do exactly that. Sometimes it makes me sad and hurts my feelings, but I respect their right to do what they feel is right for them. Things don't always work out, but there really are seven billion people on the planet and I'm not so much of a special little snowflake that I can't be replaced under most circumstances.

INFJs are squishy in some ways, but I get the impression that we are also often highly pragmatic and prize efficiency especially when it comes to relationships. The older we get, the more likely we are to withhold the benefit of the doubt because we've just seen, heard, and smelled too many damn ducks not to trust our judgement when we see something waddling our way. Sometimes that means that we will think something is a duck when it's totally not a duck, but frankly, waiting around until we're sure is just not worth the effort. There are just things we'd rather be doing. Like reading a book or poking ourselves in the eye with sticks.
 
S

Society

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So that makes the terms I dictate pretty . . . draconian?

that depends what they are. is in this in the context of the 4 terms (or possible misunderstandings) i wrote in the post above?

as in this:
  • "no, I won't accept your thoughts because they don't fit into the conclusion I am trying to make".
  • "what you think your own intentions are is irrelevant, I am right about what you think for my own purposes".
  • "you have to understand my perspective about why all your perspectives don't matter".
  • "if what you say doesn't fit with what i want to hear, you aren't credible and i don't need to hear what you have to say".

?
 

cafe

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that depends what they are. is in this in the context of the 4 terms (or possible misunderstandings) i wrote in the post above?
Well, lemme see. It probably depends on how you look at it.
basically, the skeleton of the messages gotten seem to be this:
"no, I won't accept your thoughts because they don't fit into the conclusion I am trying to make".
I will listen to your thoughts up to a point if I believe doing so is constructive. I may or may not agree with your conclusions, especially if they are in an area that is subjective. I mean, I will accept that they are your thoughts and you have a right to think them, but they may or may not influence me in any way.
"what you think your own intentions are is irrelevant, I am right about what you think for my own purposes".
If it appears to me that your stated intentions are not confirmed by your actions as I have observed them, I reserve the right to believe you are full of shit. I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time, but seriously, I could be reading a book right now.
"you have to understand my perspective about why all your perspectives don't matter".
If we're going to do this, we should probably try to understand each other's perspectives. Just because I listen to your perspective does not mean I am obligated in any way to change my perspective. And I might decide not to listen to your perspective for a handful of reasons, including but not limited to my believing you are a dick.
"if what you say doesn't fit with what i want to hear, you aren't credible and i don't need to hear what you have to say".
You can be perfectly credible and say stuff I don't want to hear. But do I have a good reason to endure hearing things from you that I don't want to hear? Because there are easier ways to experience unpleasantness than listening to you. Like poking myself in the eye with a stick. You have to be more useful than poking myself in the eye with a stick if you want me to listen to you. That's your competition.
 
S

Society

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huh, sorry; i thought you might have being referring to your "draconian terms" in the context of the few posts above the one you made. misunderstood that. though thumbs up for them not applying.

regarding one thing, that initially i thought you where making a point in good humor regarding such situations in general and had a good laugh, but then i considered whether your serious given the repetitiveness of that theme in this thread, i might as well ask:
but seriously, I could be reading a book right now.
how could i possibly be preventing you from doing so? how your choice to write a post rather then read a book can be considered as anything other then your own choice? :huh:
 

Lexicon

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Well, lemme see. It probably depends on how you look at it.

"no, I won't accept your thoughts because they don't fit into the conclusion I am trying to make".
I will listen to your thoughts up to a point if I believe doing so is constructive. I may or may not agree with your conclusions, especially if they are in an area that is subjective. I mean, I will accept that they are your thoughts and you have a right to think them, but they may or may not influence me in any way.
"what you think your own intentions are is irrelevant, I am right about what you think for my own purposes".
If it appears to me that your stated intentions are not confirmed by your actions as I have observed them, I reserve the right to believe you are full of shit. I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time, but seriously, I could be reading a book right now.
"you have to understand my perspective about why all your perspectives don't matter".
If we're going to do this, we should probably try to understand each other's perspectives. Just because I listen to your perspective does not mean I am obligated in any way to change my perspective. And I might decide not to listen to your perspective for a handful of reasons, including but not limited to my believing you are a dick.
"if what you say doesn't fit with what i want to hear, you aren't credible and i don't need to hear what you have to say".
You can be perfectly credible and say stuff I don't want to hear. But do I have a good reason to endure hearing things from you that I don't want to hear? Because there are easier ways to experience unpleasantness than listening to you. Like poking myself in the eye with a stick. You have to be more useful than poking myself in the eye with a stick if you want me to listen to you. That's your competition.

100% :yes:

Sometimes it's not worth the time or emotional expenditure to sit there, debating ad infinitem.
 

cafe

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huh, sorry; i thought you might have being referring to your "draconian terms" in the context of the few posts above the one you made. misunderstood that. though thumbs up for them not applying.

regarding one thing, that initially i thought you where making a point in good humor regarding such situations in general and had a good laugh, but then i considered whether your serious given the repetitiveness of that theme in this thread, i might as well ask:

how could i possibly be preventing you from doing so? how your choice to write a post rather then read a book can be considered as anything other then your own choice? :huh:
I was not speaking to you personally in that instance. It was hypothetical like everything else in that post.

My point there is that if by my perception, I think there is at least a 70% chance that someone is full of shit, I'm probably not going to wait around to gather more information. I don't need to know with 100% certainty. The 30% odds of possibly missing out on something good generally do not exceed the 80%+ odds I have of gaining pleasure from reading a book. That is roughly the level of risk/benefit I'm comfortable with in that setting.
 
S

Society

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I was not speaking to you personally in that instance. It was hypothetical like everything else in that post.
thought so - just me being a bit NeFe.

My point there is that if by my perception, I think there is at least a 70% chance that someone is full of shit, I'm probably not going to wait around to gather more information. I don't need to know with 100% certainty. The 30% odds of possibly missing out on something good generally do not exceed the 80%+ odds I have of gaining pleasure from reading a book. That is roughly the level of risk/benefit I'm comfortable with in that setting.

though if i might ask - and feel free to tell me to shove it off if it's too personal - how would those situations change when it is your husband and children?
 

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Tiltyred

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I'd like to think that her husband and/or children would not have a 70% chance of being full of shit, for starters. I tend to think if her husband was full of it 70% of the time, she'd have given him the boot a long time ago. I could be wrong, but since I absolutely 100% resonate to every word she said, I'm gonna take a chance on that.

Well said, Cafe, well said!
 

PeaceBaby

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Preamble for Fi or Ne types ... I woke from a dream in the middle of the night last night and I saw with a clarity the differences between our outer and inner worlds. Like many of my middle of the night revelations, it was clear as a bell when I thought the thoughts in the moment. This morning, it's more like a remembered symphony but still I want to try to share it. And [MENTION=7842]Z Buck McFate[/MENTION] & [MENTION=1206]cascadeco[/MENTION] have said some stuff like this in the past, but something really struck me last night ...

Now, I've got a deadline here in terms of writing this. So, it will be narrative, might be less structured and I request tolerance of that, apologizing in advance.

Before I went to bed, I had written out the following post but not posted it:

The best metaphor I can come up with is the sense that I am always getting my head dunked under water in the outer world.

Someone says, "Did you do that errand?" The sense I get from that for a second is total confusion, being startled. Not unlike that feeling you get when you suddenly find your head dunked under water. So I splash back up to the surface, manage to collect my thoughts enough to ask "Did I do what?" "You know, you said you would do X this week."

Someone else asks says, "Why did you do that?" Again ... for a few seconds it's *splash* a head dunk, I splutter back up and say, "What do you mean, what was wrong about it?" It's hard to sort out what the real question is ... and Fi doms can be very bad at hearing criticism where it's not intended.

It's a vantage point, it's a position, and I take total ownership of my reaction, and I know I'm the only person who can depersonalize from those questions. But for the first few seconds ... the reaction is so ingrained, it's a challenge to not get the head-dunk feeling ...

I just wish I wouldn't get head-dunked in the first place! No matter how much I ask not to be, it's especially hard for a Je dom or aux to not do it, it's like it just busts out of you guys! You don't realize the kind of impact it has.

And it feels dangerous too sometimes, like I'm getting my head held under water just a little longer than is tolerable ...​


Maybe INFJ's feel like they're getting head-dunked in the inner world, when INFP's focus on wanting the information we find pertinent ...

And perhaps you feel the same way about the inner world as I do about the outer world.

Another metaphor:

I'm not a tidy person. I am comfortable with piles of paper on my desk, messiness in general. Oh sure, I will clean it up, for a few reasons: 1.) because messiness in the outer world stresses my husband 2.) things run more smoothly when everything is in place or 3.) sometimes outer messiness adds to inner messiness and symbolically, cleaning the outer messiness helps tidy the inner world.

Where I can't tolerate messiness is in my inner world. My inner work, with all of the emotions I feel, all of that processing every day, is tantamount to cleaning house every single day. I know that the majority of folks do not keep a tidy inner house, far from it. Some people VERY far from it. So when I work so hard to keep the inner house clean so my inner messiness does not spill out into the outer world (like most people's do) I can feel frustrated when everyone else is far more interested in keeping the outer world tidy, just a veneer of structure with chaos underneath. But I feel that's what the INFJ's are more tolerable of - that the inner world can be messy as long as the outer world is in order. To me, when the inner world is tidy, so is the outer world, at least more so, since it is messy, chaotic - uncontrollable. I can tolerate a lot of outer world messiness since I have no expectation it should be a certain way. But messing with my inner world - throwing a pile of my well-organized papers in the air, not so nice.

So, for INFJ's protocols are important, social graces are important, because they keep the outer world managed ... chaos can't just pop up wherever.

I manage my inner world like you manage the outer. The reliability & continuity of the outer world brings you security, minimizes your mixed messages, brings order to your inner world I think. I was noting how [MENTION=5723]Tiltyred[/MENTION] looked at each of my posts, looking for what each one was saying, trying to manage that outer world info ... assign a motivation to it all, add a message to it all.

Z Buck talked about throwing furniture around the room. That happens for me when intention is misread, when motivation is misread, when grand stories to explain something are created, when inferences are made ... I look to how I feel about all the inner world stuff, what emotions I sense from each person, contemplate word choices, assess sincerity of expression ... all that stuff. The outer world stuff is just messy and I can deal with the fractal nature of it not seeming to make sense.

Eh, like most dreams trying to express it all here in the morning, in this post is difficult. Pick out any stuff that jumps out as relevant or resonant.
 

Tiltyred

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At the great risk of your feeling like you're being dunked again, my first reaction to your post is great curiosity at how you would feel more comfortable being approached if someone wants to know whether or not you did indeed do the errand you had mentioned last week you intended to do.
 

PeaceBaby

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Sure - if someone said, "You know that errand we talked about last week, going to the XYZstore? Did you get a chance to do it?" then I wouldn't be lost.

eta: it's about mentioning the topic before the action ... it's like the filing system in my mind is set up by topics, and yours by tasks ??
 

Tiltyred

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Honestly, not even that -- your reaction to it is the same as mine, but having that reaction doesn't disturb me. And my having that reaction will sometimes cause the other person to smile, but it doesn't seem to hurt me going forward. It happens at work with my ISTJ. "Did you do X?" and because X is just at the moment the furthest thing from my mind, my first reaction is often "Huh?" or similar, and I have to hear the question again to give me a second to focus. This seems fairly normal to me and goes across types. If you ask anyone a direct question out of the blue, it might take them a second to redirect their attention to where it's being pointed.

And p.s. (sorry, I'm so bad with the afterthoughts) -- a "normal" actual response would be "Yes," "No," "It's next on my To Do list," or "It slipped my mind! Thanks for the reminder."

I may be overstepping and I apologize in advance if so, but this concern seems to indicate a desire on your part to appear in control to an extent that might not be possible for mere humans. That's my impression. I mean, I could see a reasonableness on the part of the questioner that at least some of the time you would know right off hand what they were referring to, but expecting you to always know what they're talking about immediately, especially if you are otherwise occupied when they ask you, seems like a lot to ask.

And if somebody's giving you shit for it, they need to stop. IMO. Unless you have never done the thing you said you would, and you never know what they are talking about. But even then, there are ways to help yourself and it's not disastrous.

Also, and I say this with the hugest respect, your inner world seems to have a lot of hot spots, some of which are maybe created by unrealistic expectations of yourself or perhaps by having been treated harshly for being human, I don't know, but I just put it out there fwiw. (And I know it's true of myself as well)
 

cascadeco

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[MENTION=5999]PeaceBaby[/MENTION], Yes, my inner world is rather an unclear imprecise morphing mess, at times, until I have clarity and things come together. It's why as I mentioned earlier, I'm much more susceptible and distrustful of any nudgings or what I perceive as being forced to make my inner world more concrete/being 'rushed' to cement things. I don't work that way. And as for externals, I don't care so much about being prodded about schedules or external decision-points, because I naturally like the externals to be 'concluded' or organized, anyway.
 

Tiltyred

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Srsly!

Also, to "why did you do that?" I see "I don't know" as a perfectly valid answer. "I don't know. Why do you ask?" is particularly effective because it makes the other person answer so you have something to react to while you organize your mind to respond. At the very least, you can hear them and say No, it wasn't because of that. and then you can choose to elaborate or remain mysterious and drive them nuts wondering. :D
 

PeaceBaby

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This makes me think of my ESTJ husband asking me "Why did you buy that?" - when we were first married, I thought he was looking for a list of tangibles, why it was a good value or why we needed it.

I learned years and years ago all I had to say was, "I liked it" and that was usually a good enough answer for him!

Now, if it was something potentially expensive, the next question might be, "How much did it cost?" :laugh: THAT's a whole 'nuther discussion!
 
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