I think on another thread someone pointed out that you might "think" you have an opinion, then get into a sticky situation and find out how you really feel (one guy bravely exampled that he was anti-abortion up until getting his gf preggers. ha).
Personally, using abortion as an example because it does seem rather polarizing, I used to be anti, thanks to religious up-bringing. Once I lost religiosity, I had no external frame so I became ambivalent (it might be right in some cases, wrong in others). Now I would say I'm pro-choice, because I don't feel wrong about the idea in general. So perhaps that is an Fi-based judgment.
I guess my prevailing assumption has been that I have feelings, but do not know them. Is it valid to say, because I did action X I must feel this way? This seems like using Ti again.
Another thread asked if there were any beliefs you would die for (trying to get at someone's core beliefs). Of course, one of my favorite quotes for years was Russell's "I would never die for my beliefs, because I might be wrong"
Part of my fear of Fi judgments is because (perhaps this is P nature) I am concerned that they are either fickle, or ill-judged. I like person A one minute, the next I don't. I want this outcome, wait, no I don't.
The fickleness annoys Fi users, too. However, the fickleness is
not Fi. Fi, rather, learns how to process the fickleness into something coherent.
Meditating - I have been trying this, and I feel like I'm getting closer. But it's SLOW. Holy hell is it slow.
Yes, very slow. Fi is slow. The way to focus it is to think in terms of what you
really feel, not in terms of what you feel on the surface level.
it's the surface-level feelings that have all of the fickleness, because they seem to react randomly to whatever is right there in front of you, or to whatever is going on in your life. What is really going on is that they're often triggering a deeper truth, in Fi terms. The purpose is to find those deeper truths. Once you know they're there, and what they are, you can
shape those truths. This is not the same as controlling feelings, but rather is a case of
understanding feelings.
For example, you might feel jealous w/r to someone else getting more attention than you. You feel an instinctive reaction, you are tempted to correct the apparent situation. As an INTP (and me as an INTJ), we usually back off from those feelings and just kind of ignore them. We feel them, they hurt, but rather than process the feeling, we ignore it and choose to apply objectivity to make our choices.
A deeper Fi understanding might note that your emotions
really mean that you like someone a lot ... or they might
really mean, "Oh, this is just the petty jealousy, where you're bored and want some attention, you don't really like the person."
That is, you learn which emotions are important, by identifying them properly with Fi in the scheme of things.
Fe does the "same thing", except that it uses other people to figure out which emotions are important, by a sophisticated compare/contrast in an "objective" rather than "subjective" manner. The main difference in understanding is that with Fe, you can readily give "because" reasons for why an emotion is good or bad or important or unimportant, but with Fi, you "just know" what an emotion is, but can't really verbalize it without it sounding like random nonsense, but you can sortofkindof say that you "feel strongly" about something and you can't just accept someone else's say-so differently, for example.