I am kinda curious what it is that I'm supposed to understand, though. Try to put it in coldly logical terms?
OK this sentence is enough to bring me back in. After all, I truly do want you and I to understand each other, at least a little better.
First, I have re-read this whole thread. (Gaa I know). I wanted to personally answer a question you asked through the thread over and over again:
Actually, as I and others have pointed out several times now, the only people I even addressed were paranoid Fi doms. If you're not paranoid, I dunno why you think this applies to you.
My first motivation was to protect people I felt were vulnerable to what I perceived as an attack. I have some hot buttons to push in that area especially and react to shield anyone I feel is being persecuted. Hence my entry. And at that point, I did not realize the extent of your desire to entertain yourself. It seemed incomprehensible to me too that you would push away the very thing you couldn't understand.
^ I think I understand to a higher degree than you think, but am still annoyed and irritated by it, so I make threads like this to take out my frustration. This is what looks to you like "forgetting what I already understand"--I'm not forgetting; I'm just trolling you because it pisses me off when Fi-ers expect the whole world to bend over backward to accommodate their arbitrary feelings. (You're damn right this is Fe at work.)
What annoys me most is that society expects Thinkers to develop some manner of Feeling as they grow and develop, and we're ostracized if we don't...but many Feelers (specifically FPs) seem to have this sense of entitlement that their feelings can never be questioned and that they have no responsibility to learn any Thinking to balance them out. It's childish and one-sided. "I mean, that's how I feel about it--you can't question that or you'd be asking me to go against the very fabric of my identity!"
Well, what if ignoring what seems logical to me and listening to your feelings is going against the very fabric of my identity?
Frankly I find this double standard unfair and I resent it. It's apparently okay for Fi-ers to "just be who they are" and operate in nonstop Fi mode, ignoring Thinking; in fact, this attitude is glorified and encouraged by popular media--but it's not okay for Ti-ers to "just be who we are" and ignore Feeling because that makes us insensitive assholes.
I find it unreasonable that our cultural standards expect more Feeling out of T types than Thinking out of F types, and if the only place I can get away with fighting it sans significant negative consequence is on an internet forum, then that's what I'm gonna do.
Finally, this post above is getting somewhere, FINALLY. Thank you very much for this unvarnished honesty. I appreciate seeing YOU here. I have already told you here and in PM I think you have so much to offer and I wanted to dig in and see some of the real you. Your intelligence is obscured, especially to Fi types, when you cloak it in pejoratives. Man, just let it shine! To cloak your frustration in hostility may give you a laugh or two, but it won't help anyone help you understand that which puzzles you most.
Some thoughts: I believe you may feel frustrated with Fi at this point in your life because you
will find many Fi users who are simply struggling to understand that part of themselves too, and will express it badly in the outer world. Being an Fi dominant in one's teens /early 20's is not easy - no excuse naturally for any negative attributes the trait is guilty of. But I know I struggled, albeit mine was a very private one. You just feel like "the world is cruel and harsh and why doesn't anyone care about anyone else and why don't the secret tears I shed for it matter or the things I try to do in the outer world fix the world?". SO many FEELINGS. And yes, I can see selfishness and self-centeredness in there, and the mistaken assignment of emotional states not relevant to oneself on oneself. Reading emotion into situations where it may not play as large a role as imagined. For example, in the first part of my 20's, anytime someone was angry, I had a hard time realizing that they weren't mad at me, that it wasn't personal or directed at me. Anger anywhere in my vicinity made me feel very vulnerable. Not until my 30's that I was able to do a better job appreciating the value and limitations of anger and at owning my own feelings, not the feelings of others too.
So my point is that as you get older this will start to even out. For you feelings will come more naturally. For Fi users, thinking will carry more weight. So although you struggle both to accept and understand now, it will just come along for the ride. Your awareness and questioning now will almost assuredly make it so.
I am 42, years past the time of not knowing what to attribute all these feelings I was sensing to. Years beyond feeling defective for having feelings. And years beyond believing YOU have no emotional motivation to make all these posts in the first place. Ironically, I am learning more and more how to use my feelings and actually trust them too. Another journey.
SO much to learn.
I appreciate that from your vantage point it seems unfair that thinkers have to develop feelings. Of course the opposite is true. From a introverted feeler's vantage point, they've had to learn from a very young age that feelings expressed on the outside world can be exploited and ridiculed. I learned early on that my world did not value my strengths.
To rail against that though is to deny the very fact that our lives are meant to be an evolution of understanding and growth. Over many years; a lifetime's worth.
I get that you're venting. I'm pretty sure other NFPs here do the same as they too feel that pressure from society irl. From my personal pov: I'd prefer it if all those Fi-thread things died already coz they give me a migraine and make me feel like I'm not able to get away from the real world again. It's more miscommunication, false judgements and more people misunderstanding and getting the wrong idea. And yeah, you could say, you can ignore them. But as I stated before...that annoying rekindling of hope that *someone* will get it, doesn't wanna die
A post full of insight; thank you amaragith, and I'm grateful that neither you nor I wish for the gap in understanding to remain.
I don't think everything appreciated in the real world is logic and cold hard facts at all. I think if you actually spent a day as a strong Thinking type you'd run into a lot of problems with Feelers guilt tripping you and pushing you to be something you're not, and that you don't realize how many conditions in the "real world" favor Feeling because you're naturally fluent in it.
I see how this works both ways, of course, but I don't see the same sense of entitlement in most Ts that I do in so very many Fs. And really, it's rarely even FJs, as they tend to see the world in much more realistic terms--I have to be honest, it's almost exclusively FPs who didn't get the memo that the world doesn't revolve around their feelings.
I think there's a reason you see so many threads asking if Fi is associated with selfishness--because for many people, it is. The strong, balanced Fi-ers that I know have all learned to balance it out with Se/Ne, recognizing that sometimes you need to just go with the flow and adapt to changing conditions instead of sticking rigidly to your feelings.
As a Ti-er, I've had to learn a lot of that, mostly through building Fe-related skills. When I was younger I completely ignored/refused to deal with anything I considered illogical that couldn't be explained in precisely impersonal terms, and it didn't get me very far. In American society, you can't get away with ignoring the idea of emotion.
And yet, somehow, based on lots of evidence I see from selfish Fi-ers around me every day, you can get away with ignoring logic, if only you make a big enough scene about how people are hurting your feelings. Guilt tripping works far, far better on the basis of "You're being meeeean!" than it does on the basis of "You're being illogical." Ti-ers are forced to learn Fe to a much greater extent than Fi-ers are forced to learn Te. It's much more accepted to err on the side of too personal than it is to err on the side of too impersonal, and I find that really unfair.
P.S., you're the only Fi-er that's come even remotely close to accurately assessing my feelings. It's doubly irritating when others try to attach emotional motivation to everything, and do it inaccurately at that.
Again, excellent post. I would contend that there's equal challenge for us both. We are both expected to become fluent at a language that isn't our first and strongest.
amar's posts are wonderful, but I think even she would tell you that she hasn't "assessed" your feelings because you are really only expressing some of them for the first time, at least in this thread. If I attribute "emotional states" to you that doesn't mean I believe that to be your true feeling. It's to try to FIND your true feelings. It's to test out little theories here and there. I accept or reject them according to your responses. When Fi users don't know your emotional motivation, we have to poke around a bit to find it. Using a variety of angles and strategies and tactics, so shame on me for that; much easier to do IRL than online.
And I admire your candid expressions in these latest posts. You believe that thinkers have the harder go, and of course feeling like that would make you feel angry and resentful!
^ Good point in that there is probably a gender component to this as well.
F-type women are going to get away with ignoring Thinking much moreso than F-type men (for whom I genuinely feel sorry.)
This I have to disagree with. After all, I'm a computer programmer, and well, have to use that part of me all the time, and I work with a lot of NT's. I will talk more about that later. But I do agree that gender may give women a "free-pass" as it were to be more emotionally expressive without as much negative judgement.
Good alternative explanation. I can see that being possible if the INFP is a bit more balanced, and recognizes that invalidating the emotions isn't going to be effective. Of course, they may just be an Fi-monster.
I agree that there's a gender component to all this as well. I know that my experiences as an F-dom male did NOT involve society giving me more of a pass because I was an F. In fact, very much the opposite. Whereas I've noticed that F women are usually not pushed to develop that more objective side... and in fact my receive resistance if they do.
I can see how that may be true if the Fi dominant woman learns early that tears work for the purposes of manipulation. Heck, I fell down the basement stairs when I was five and with a huge lump on my head and tears streaming down my cheeks, my dad said to me "Get up, you're fine, quit your bawling." And hey, in retrospect I thought that was a great reason to shed a tear or two! But tears never held much water in my household and hence I had to develop other tools. Very early.
This is where I will state that at least for me, it was no advantage being a girl and Fi dominant. My dad expected as much from me as my brothers, and even moreso, he expected me to be a "man" about it.
Actually the ultimate slap is for you to tell me I am being illogical. I have to work hard every day to fit our "logical" world and I do take a certain pride, however misplaced, in being to operate within a system that doesn't favor or nurture me at all.
If Fi users are forced by their circumstances to balance their Fi with perception, then that implies that it is not 'okay' for them to just be stuck in Fi mode. It is as you say; the world will smack them down eventually as a consequence of this, and they will have to adapt.
This is by no means a pity party on the part of an Fi user. Because it is also as you said before; thinkers users will have to balance their thinking tendency, as the world will smack them down in other ways if they don't.
The world smacks us all down in different ways and relishes in all of our strengths in different ways, too; we all have to learn balance to cope with circumstances that don't jive with our natural skillset.
Anything that doesn't conform to a societal majority will naturally find itself being brought into the center rather than being allowed to exist at a fringe. Whether justified or not. Good post.
Theoretically you're right; unfortunately it doesn't always work that way in practice.
Categorizing people doesn't imply that the categorization describes everything about the person. It's just a label to denote that you show some general similarities to others. This is what the OP is complaining about--Fi being so threatened by "dehumanization" that it loses the practical value in generalized categorization and even insists that such categorization is impossible/useless by imagining that it must purport to completely describe everything about an individual.
If you know what typology actually does, you know that it doesn't pretend to be able to completely summarize a unique individual's personality in four letters--it's mostly just Fi doms who pretend that it's supposed to do that and hold it to an unrealistic standard. If you take it for what it's supposed to be--a very generalized observation of broad similarities in cognitive processes--then it works just fine, no matter how super special and unique you are.
I commend you for being able to admit that this oversensitivity even exists. (Not that I expect anyone to notice when I say something positive to/about INFPs.)
They're not forced to balance themselves; they just do it because some of them are wise people who recognize the value in doing so. I know more unbalanced Fi-ers who are rarely expected to pay attention to Thinking because people just accept that they're going to emo their way to getting whatever they want and deal with it.
A very well-expressed post; it presents your idea without reaching for dramatic impact.
Fun thread.
Sim, I don't disagree with your observation on many DomFi's, only why they do what they do. You've kind of made yourself into a figurehead in this thread, trolling or not, on what makes DomFi's insecure into the first place, which is why there is a negative response from them. It's an indignant respnse to life channeled at the one person in a forum that appears to be pushing that mindset. .......
Well articulated post too!
And as for what I want you to understand, that which I claimed you just didn't understand - it's easy, that I want to see the real you. I want to know what you really think. I want to see your truth.
