She did accept them. It was beautiful moment.
And I learned something, myself. Infjs have this reputation of coming off as arrogant and stubborn when they KNOW they are right. And I can see where this perception comes from now. It's because of how intuition works. How can someone be stubborn when they are readily acceptance of change and growth? How do you resolve this contradiction?
Well, I get a piece of data. It lands on the desk of my consciousness. I look at it, under hellishly bright fluorescent light, and throw it into the back room of my subconscious, completely confident that little magical gnomes there will sort it within a constantly changing kaleidoscope of data evaluation and pattern recognition. Everything anyone does, says, every external action anyone ever takes is a reflection of the internal self. Emotion is rational, logical, bound by causality, just like everything else. If you absorb this data and place it inside a constantly evolving framework of pattern recognition and action prediction you eventually end up with a working model of a personality and the ability to predict them. The ability to really know them, deeply.
A previous relationship of mine evolved into these constant explosions of passion where I was seen as immovably stubborn. "THERE IS NOTHING THAT I CAN SAY TO YOU!" is a phrase that comes to mind when she gave up getting through to me, trying to convince me of something, giving up the fight. But I always thought, of course there is, there is tons you can say to sway me. An infinite possibility of words that would make me change my stance in a second, if you would step outside of your pattern and give me new data. The reason I do not seemingly accept what you are saying is because you aren't saying anything that I haven't expected of you, and already accept as part of your internal system that expresses itself outward in every expression that you make, and is as such part of the problem on a whole that is leading you down the path that you are on. I wasn't this harshly self aware back then, nor did I really understand how someone could perceive differently. I was amazed that they could not see what I saw, how they were unaware of the dynamics playing themselves out over and over on an infinite loop. Can you not see the future? It is right in front of you. IN YOUR FACE!
I gave up the fight with this one. I didn't know how to communicate what I saw in a way that she could see it. For 8 years I tried to convince her of her self destructive ways and did what I could to hold her up. As expected, she hit rock bottom after I left. She was a fighter, nicknamed by family and friends as The Tank. Never gave up, never surrendered, always self sacrificing for others. She was taken for granted and somehow nobody could see how it consumed her. As expected she ended up having a breakdown because of it. She ended in the hospital because of it. Burnt out psychologically, and physically. Her body simply shut down, saying enough is enough. No more, not ever.
She changed, then. At an unimaginable cost that she'll never recover from. And after her part in our dynamic tore us apart.
How I am not supposed to fight this when I see it, I don't know.
Now I have an understanding of sensing. What I had to do, was go into this back room of my subconscious and drag out individual pieces that shaped the changing states of the kaleidoscope of interconnected data for pattern recognition. That was really difficult for me. There is no light switch in there. And those little gremlins of my subconscious don't know how to organize for shit. My memory is mainly emotional, reconstructing events by impacts and changes in concepts rather than specific details. It's like trying to put paint back into a container after the picture has already been painted with it. If god is in the details, I'm doomed to burn in hell.
But I managed. Sitting down, taking notes, wracking my brain, enough specific examples to get through to her. Enough for her to draw from the past to the present. And I did it within an atmosphere of acceptance.
"If you don't stop being so understanding I'm never going to stop crying"
We're not at change yet. But she accepted that yes, there is a problem, and yes, I MIGHT be right about where it is heading, because enough of the course has been reconstructed with specific details outlining a linear progression, causality, for her to be able to see it, now, too. And because her body told her I was right even when she was still unbelieving. She said that if I wasn't hitting bullseyes all over the place, she wouldn't feel like this. Which is interesting... and sort of alien to me. I have a distant memory of what that used to be like. There is something soothing about the thought of being only aware of ones surface expressions of the subconscious. How it makes one feel physically. The jaw that clenches as a sign that something is up. The tip of the iceberg. It's much less complicated to deal with. And it's easy to understand how, with only that perception, one can fall into a pattern of avoidance. She doesn't want to accept it yet, that she has to seek help to do something about it, but accepting that she is on a self destructive path is a big first step, and one that makes me hopeful.
If you think you can never know someone like that... I'm going to tell the story of another infj I've met in another thread. One without values that I can see. A nihilist, perhaps. One with a deeper understanding than myself. Who didn't work with dynamics on an individual basis alone, but with groups. One much more... effective.