You posted a relatively long OP this morning, and have just deleted the majority of it. This post was written in response to your longer post, and I'm going to leave this one unchopped under the assumption that my responses to your
longer version will at least be relevant to you.
First, I agree with you that "you don't have to have a dominant N function to be spiritual," and that it would be "absolutely crazy and ridiculous" for somebody to claim that. But you know what? I've never heard anybody claim that. Have you?
The MBTI is about
tendencies and probabilities, so it's pretty much always inappropriate to say "this type
always does that" or "this type
never does that." As I understand it, there's now quite a bit of respectable data that shows that,
on average, N's and F's are significantly more likely to have religion or some other kind of spirituality play a relatively major role in their lives than S's and T's, respectively — and that means that somebody can respectably assert that an N is
more likely to be spiritual than an S, but not that "you have to be an N to be spiritual" (as you put it).
Second, just so you know, ISFP's only have "Ni" if you subscribe to the goofy Harold Grant function stack — a function stack that has
no respectable validity, wasn't Jung's or Myers's function model, and has never been endorsed by the official MBTI folks — and if you're interested, you can read more about that in
this post.
And third, I've been posting at MBTI forums for over six years now, and one of the more headshake-inducing but, unfortunately, not-that-uncommon experiences I've had in those years is encountering somebody who pretty consistently comes out N on the official MBTI and/or other dichotomy-based sources (because they
are an N), but who has soaked up a bunch of internet-based donkey dookie and been (mis)led to believe that Jungian/MBTI type is basically
all about the functions, and that the dichotomies mostly just deal with superficial stuff, and you should think of them primarily as "letter codes" that need to be
decoded to lead you to the deeper stuff — and who has concluded that they're
really an S based on misguided cognitive function analysis, and who has then proceeded to make one or more posts where they purport to, by God, bust a bunch of those silly MBTI stereotypes about S's (or SJs or whatever), because dang, people, I'm a [
insert chosen S type] and
I'm not like that at all!
Not saying that's you, necessarily, especially since you haven't made enough TC posts for me to have any strong leans on your type — buuut I thought I felt my own pattern-spotting Ni tingling mildly, so I couldn't resist throwing the possibility out there for your possible consideration. Your original post's descriptions of the multiple ways you think your "tertiary Ni" makes you, in effect,
more of an intuitive (when it comes to that "Ni" stuff) than INFPs are pretty much just HaroldGrantian hoohah, and I thought quite a bit of the self-description in your original OP was really more consistent with an INFP (or INFJ) than an ISFP.
In case you have any interest in taking it, I'd be curious to see your scores on the
official "Step I" MBTI. Hopefully needless to say, no self-report personality test is perfect, but the official MBTI is the only Jung/MBTI-related personality test with a respectable body of psychometric support behind it — and it's certainly a better source of type input than listening to someone who tells you ISFPs have "tertiary Ni."
I suspect you're either an INFJ or an INFP — and just in case you've been bamboozled into thinking that it wouldn't make sense for somebody to end up with those two possibilities as their finalists, because they're waaaaay different (onnaccounta
totally different functions), I'd recommend that you take a look at
this post.
Welcome to the forum, by the way, and rest assured that most of the INTJs here aren't quite as overbearing as I am.