What would the world do without Fe?

[garbage]

I don't think it's "just out to protect our own egos." I'm sure that comes into play fairly often, but nearly as often (if not more often) I see people just reading things in their own perspectives, and dismissing other points not because to do so would be to acknowledge "defeat", but because the other point doesn't really make sense to them.

I usually have this experience only if the other person is making a key unspoken assumption that I have not been able to pinpoint. My points get dismissed over and over again, for no obvious reason, but if I should happen to find that unspoken point, I get an "Oh, why didn't you say so in the first place?!" and the conversation is back on track. Both sides have unspoken points which they believe to be "so obvious," they get left unsaid, and the other person's points just don't make sense when taken together with the "obvious" "unspoken" critical point that one assumes in one's own frame of reference.

Okay, good. I like the clarification, especially because it wasn't exactly the first interpretation of the phenomenon that I had in mind.

If the motives are pure, we'd be well-served to figure out what the other person's assumptions are in order to keep the conversation going.

Sometimes, though, we don't even know how to phrase the question of "What do you mean by x?" because we don't even know how to define x.

Often, a simple "What do you mean?" or "Can you rephrase that?" or "Can you boil down that huge freakin' wall of text?" () might actually suffice.


I'm not exactly advocating that every single person reply to every single post in a particular thread. However, if something is dismissed as irrelevant, it's often exploring why it's dismissed as relevant.

This is all, of course, assuming that most of the point of these sorts of discussions is to understand people and perspectives in the first place. In other contexts, my opinion would be different.

In almost any discussion, I tend toward really, really wanting to ensure that my perspectives end up coming across in an understandable manner and that I understand others' as well. It's definitely a priority for me. I bend toward others' mode of communication a lot. It's kind of how I'm hardwired. So, take my opinion for whatever it's worth.

 

[PeaceBaby]

You can try Active Listening ...

I'll paraphrase you below:

 

[PeaceBaby]

Ooooh here it comes:

What I hear you saying bologna is that you still aren't sure how to bridge the gaps in communication. That you feel very compelled to try to understand people and where they are coming from in order to more effectively share your thoughts. So even if people agree, demonstrated by perhaps a comment, to ensure the conversation is still on track would be helpful to you. Is that right?

(And now you may agree or disagree; I've been a little vague to see how "wrong" I am so we can refine and clarify ...)

 

[skylights]

Well, if we talk about reasons... I'm not really convinced that the feelings even have a reason... Do something because you "feel like doing it?" this sounds irrational to me! And if you do something to get something else in return, then that would be better accomplished by Te, or something that actually has a reason to act...

Yeah, I probably am in the wrong place, but feelings seem to be too shallow... Not having a real logic reason to act.

haha, well, theories about emotion do abound. but here is one paradigm that i like...

think about it this way: when you need to defend something - in the past it used to be like, defend your body from a tiger - well, you have a lot going on in your body that really isn't useful for that, but it's pretty necessary to your survival that you do something about that tiger.

so quite a few bodily functions take a breather and shoot their energy (be it chemical or cognitive - and i suspect at base level these are one in the same) to somewhere it's gonna be more useful during fleeing or fighting. your pulse rises, your senses seem keener, your mind is more one-track, your muscles are at ready - the physical stress response, also "fear" or, once one has decided to fight, "anger". it's an adaptive state for physical defense. of course, because we're not cavemen anymore, we typically experience this now in places like... oh... internet forums.

so, decisions made in that emotional state - probably not rational, no, because they don't take all things into account - when you're looking a tiger in the eye, there's not really enough time for it - but what they do take into account is what is most important at the moment to a certain goal - generally protection/survival.

of course, logic is useful in those kinds of situations, especially now, because most threats are not actually dangerous to our survival. but i would propose that perhaps emotion tunes us in to a kind of subjective importance - anger helping us to defend something, fear helping us protect ourselves/avoid something (we'd have a lot more falling deaths if we didn't have an emotional fear of heights... lol...), sadness helping us slow down and attend to something important (empathizing with someone who is hurt, stopping to reanalyze the meaning and purpose of life when someone dies), and so on.

i like to think of my emotions as a personal thermometer of sorts... my feelings aren't just obstacles, they tell me something. just like a thermometer gives a temperature, my emotions give me important information about my state of being too, and what i need to attend to. i can override them if i choose (kinda like medicating to dull pain), but generally, i think they're important enough that i want to let them do their thing until i'm sure a certain emotion isn't useful anymore.

anyway, no reason you shouldn't stay here and express your thoughts! but probably better off to not come from a viewpoint of 100% assurance

 

[garbage]

Ooooh here it comes:

What I hear you saying bologna is that you still aren't sure how to bridge the gaps in communication. That you feel very compelled to try to understand people and where they are coming from in order to more effectively share your thoughts. So even if people agree, demonstrated by perhaps a comment, to ensure the conversation is still on track would be helpful to you. Is that right?

(And now you may agree or disagree; I've been a little vague to see how "wrong" I am so we can refine and clarify ...)

hooray active listening :hi:

I've got others' assumptions and interpretations wrong at times, but I think most of the communication I've had with others here has been pretty clear. I'm glad to have received some clarification where the motivations I've seen hadn't been correct.

I'm compelled to try to understand people, yeah, and an acknowledgment of the sort you describe tends to ensure that I've been understood and that I understood them.

However, I'm also not going to force others to adopt my communication style.

Now that I know another reason why comments aren't always left, I understand the tendency a bit better and can 'work around it' in my own mind, so to speak. If a particular 'sub-thread' of discussion ends, fine--maybe we've gotten all we can out of it.

 

[skylights]

had to come back and catch up with all of this stuff

Active Listening Skills

yeah, good link. i took a class on this, i feel like it was really useful and actually way harder than any of us expected. agree about the eyes though, god, it's really freaky to have someone keep constant eye contact with you.

That isn't to say that we never get into crosstalk issues with these same people, but that that there is an overall pattern of easy vs. difficult communication that appears to be based on certain shared functions. In fact, the purpose of correlating such phenomena with shared (or unshared) functions is to help determine whether the cause of misunderstanding is "different frames" or "they're only trying to protect their ego" (or whatever other assumption one would make based on one's own frame of reference).

well put.

 

[Sesshoumaru]

Then you feelers are strange, because those "feelings" tell you something, and then I have no feelings, only logic. What you mean is gut instinct, right? Then I have none of that either... Just be aware that those feelings may be very wrong!

Oh, and about that thing about the reflexes, wouldn't other functions be needed before your gut instinct to act? For example an Se? If you ask me why I don't throw myself from a building, there's nothing that tells me not to, but a logical explanation of what could happen to me if I did so, and that would be the reason for not doing it... Not instinct (which I seem to lack almost completely) LOL!

 

[Glycerine]

Feeling =/= emotions. So you must be a robot if ALL you have is logic.

 

[Sesshoumaru]

Very close to being one...

 

[skylights]

Then you feelers are strange, because those "feelings" tell you something, and then I have no feelings, only logic. What you mean is gut instinct, right? Then I have none of that either... Just be aware that those feelings may be very wrong!

Oh, and about that thing about the reflexes, wouldn't other functions be needed before your gut instinct to act? For example an Se? If you ask me why I don't throw myself from a building, there's nothing that tells me not to, but a logical explanation of what could happen to me if I did so, and that would be the reason for not doing it... Not instinct (which I seem to lack almost completely) LOL!

got me, i don't think i've got gut instinct either. people say that and i'm like... uh... k

maybe it's Ni

i get a tingly sensation in my feet and a desire to pull away when i look over high precipices, though

anyway i think we use all our functions all the time

 

[Sesshoumaru]

Right, even in the almost inexistent state (in my case, Se and Fe).