How do you seperate your personal values from the impersonal?
As we see that a typical problem for an NT is believing that everything is impersonal and therefore objective criticism can be applied to anything.
And for an NF, believing that everything is personal and therefore all is immune to criticism.
NFs, how do you manage to distinguish between the two, despite that the personal is almost always preponderous over the impersonal in your lives?
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're asking but I'll try to answer. I need to know how you're defining personal, impersonal, and values. I don't think values are immune to criticism, nor do I think that the personal trumps impersonal
all the time.
I have my core values and beliefs, things that I strongly believe in. Those are the things that make me me and I can't go shifting those around or I'll lose who I am. I'm very sensitive to these values. If I didn't have them what would I have? Just thinking about it now makes a big DOES NOT COMPUTE sign flash in my mind. I've learned not to express them because I don't want them to be criticized, it's like an attack on me and I have to defend myself. I also realize that it's good to evaluate why you believe what you believe. If you don't you'll become stagnant. Criticism to this area must be done in such a way that won't put me on the defensive.
An example: Something that is a reoccurring event lately is my boss editing something I wrote. It gets rewritten in such a way that there is no meaningful difference between what I wrote and what she wrote, like the difference between "Audio symposium with slides" and "Audio and slide symposium." I wonder does she feel a need to always edit my documents? Yes, I'm beginning to take this personally even if it's not meant as such. I may be being sensitive, but I don't care. I take pride in my writing abilities. When niggling and arbitrary changes are made, I get upset. I link it to her having a problem with my writing style. Now someone else may be like, what does it matter, but it's important to me.
Then there are the values of others. Others deem them important to maintain their own identity and since they're important to someone else, they're important to me, even if I don't hold those same values. I wouldn't want anyone to violate their values either, so I understand that those aren't as open to criticism either (but not immune).
How can you tell someone that something's not important to them? That's inherently personal. And then to poke and dissect someone's feelings and reduce it to a pile of nothing is difficult to handle. It's not that it can't be impersonally looked at, it's just that values are like an exposed nerve, they're sensitive. The area must be numbed and you have to soothe. Throw me into an ice cold lake and I'm going to go into shock. That's what being impersonal is like.