Tag: Ne running wild

Anonymous said to mbti-sorted:
Hi,
I was just wondering what quirks/type specific characteristics you’ve
noticed with ENTPs. I’ve always thought I was an INFP but started
thinking that Ne might be my Dom function and I think I use Si. I’m
leaning towards ENTP but I want to be more sure and honestly you’re my
most trusted source.

Anonymous said to mbti-sorted:
Sorry, sorry I meant Ti. I’m the one who thought they might be an ENTP.

I’m
sorry it’s taken me so long to get around to answering this.  I
would love to be able to give you a list of ENTP quirks, but
unfortunately I’m completely unable to answer that kind of thing
seriously – I never paid particular attention from the beginning of
typing people, so it’s something I recognize (third function Si), but
can’t really define and list (4th function Te).  I’d have to rewatch a
bunch of video through the lens of my Te, which sounds a lot like work
and as I’m not being paid for this, it’s just not going to happen.

As part of the attempt to give you something substantial, though, I
ended up reading up on existential crises on wikipedia:

(I’m going to cut here, because this is about to get really long.  I mean, really long.)

“An
existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very
foundations of their life: whether their life has any meaning, purpose,
or value.”

At the bottom there was a link to the spiritual crisis:

”…(also
called “spiritual emergency”) is a form of identity crisis where an
individual experiences drastic changes to their meaning system (i.e.,
their unique purposes, goals, values, attitude and beliefs, identity,
and focus) typically because of a spontaneous spiritual experience.”

and also a link to Dan Howell, which has nothing to do with this post, but I found it kind of funny.

The
existential crisis made me think of ENTPs, who like to throw that one
around a lot.  The spiritual crisis reminded me of ESTPs, many of whom
seem to have late onset spiritual epiphanies.  (I’m not trying to claim
that these are the only two types with these crises, just that a
disproportionate number of ESTPs and ENTPs talk about or seem to have
them a lot.)

Neither one is
exactly what I experienced.  I’ve been calling it an existential crisis
for years (I’ve even thrown myself down on the floor a time or two and let me tell you, letting the floor take your weight while it realigns your back actually makes you feel better in a pretty tangible way), but I’ve never actually questioned whether I’ve had any value
or what my purpose was.  My crisis focused topically on spirituality,
but nothing I believed in changed – I just figured out how to define my
beliefs.

To jump around a bit, I’ve been searching a while for how
to best explain Fi, and I think I’ve found it.  The INTJ sister
recognized herself in my analogy and infj-zen couldn’t relate at all, so
if you’re wondering whether you’re ENTP (Fe) or INFP (Fi), this might
help.

Okay, I want you to imagine that as a baby, your fairy
godmother gifts you with an object that will help you make all major
decisions in your life.  That object is…

…a mood ring!

(Yes,
I know.  Is it even reading moods?  Isn’t it reacting to your body
temperature?  One of the many things you have to deal with when you have
Fi is skepticism, both your own and whatever logic-bias everyone around you shares.  Lucky you, you’re only a baby and don’t have to worry
about it until later.  I feel extremely sorry for the 3rd and 4th
function Fis, who grow up with rationality as their guiding light and
have to confront the least rational thing possible later in their teens,
twenties and later.  More on this to come – I’m kind of thinking your
major life crisis arises from the conflict between your 1st and 4th or
2nd and 3rd function pairs.)

To start, you basically go to Fi
kindergarten.  Here is a picture of someone making a face.  This face is
angry.  When you make this face, your mood ring is red.  Do you like
being angry?  (Mood ring stays red.)  Your decision becomes: I will do
the thing to not be angry.  When other people make the face, you also
learn to avoid making them angry.

You learn your primary colours,
your secondary colours, you get some tints tones and shades.  You can
define a huge range of subtle emotions.  The problems start when you get
complicated questions that result in microscopic patterns and
textures. 

Fi is great at “how are you feeling?”  (hunter green!)

It’s not great at, “Do you believe in aliens/ghosts/God/abortion/etc., etc. etc.” (What is this… paisley?  Why are you shifting to argyle?  Are you…?  No!  Stop sparkling!!!  …Je refuse.)

It’s not even great at, “What’s your favourite colour.” (I can’t even with the fractals…)

I
want you to imagine getting a survey meme (mine was an email forward,
which is dating myself – do people even send those anymore?) that asks a
bunch of these kind of questions one after the other.  Your answer to
every single one is “I don’t know.”  This may be kind of frustrating. 
If you don’t know these things, who are you?  Are there people out there
who can actually answer these questions for themselves and why can’t
you?

The answer is that these are complicated questions with many parts, and Fi feels differently about each part – and it feels definitely about each part as well (I’ve never felt like I’ve had control over my beliefs – they’ve always just been. 
I can influence them by taking in new information, but for the large
part, they almost seem like a separate entity from me and I don’t always
like or agree with them).  You need to put your mood ring under a
microscope to catch all the subtleties.  You need to break down your big
questions into smaller questions (they had better be the right
questions, too), and see how it feels about each thing.  If you’re ever
wondering why Fi doms seem moody, well – haha.

The other
answer is that Fi actively resists categorization.  It doesn’t like
being defined, and it doesn’t see things in either/or (you are an
individual!  You can’t extrapolate useful information from a sample of
one!).  Also if you have Ne, it keeps dredging up new possibilities and
exceptions to rules, which doesn’t help.

You know what does like that kind of organization, though? 

That’s right.  Te.

Your
incredibly poorly developed 4th function is actually the thing that is
stopping you from understanding your first function, because as much as
you dislike defining and categorizing, that is exactly what you need in
order to keep using your Fi mood ring to make decisions about your life.

And there you have it – my major crisis, pretty continuously from age 10 to 18 was a vocabulary crisis
while I learned enough words and concepts for the things I felt to be true
but couldn’t explain to come to terms with myself.  And if that sounds stupid, that’s probably why
it doesn’t get its own wikipedia entry.

Back to the ENTPs and the
ESTPs.  The ESTP spiritual crisis I get – you’re used to doing, and
being able to trust implicitly the information gained through your Se,
because it’s sensory and you can verify it. 

And then
suddenly you get hit with Ni (which I jokingly call “the voice of god”,
because my 6th function Ni feels as though it’s coming from outside me
as very certain pronouncements, even though mine only kicks in about
very stupid things), which… suddenly being hit over the head with thoughts that seem to come out of nowhere and can’t really be verified??  I can definitely see late onset Ni as part of the reason for a
spiritual epiphany.  Taking some time with Ni would definitely give a
shape and purpose to a life filled with action.

I’m not
entirely sure how the ENTP existential crisis would work.  If you’re an
Ne teeming with possibilities, I guess you might well be smothered under
their weight and anxious about what to actually do.  Si is the function
that looks backwards, so maybe it helps you list out the things that
actually have given you purpose and meaning?  ??  I don’t know, this one
could use some work.  It’s hard guessing at other people’s brains from
the outside.  Anyway, ENTPs seem to contribute a lot (ENTP work output
is vast) in many, many areas, so maybe part of that is allowing your Si to tell you that you’ve followed through on a lot of your
possibilities and your legacy is secure.

Enh.  Larval theory in larval stage.  I hope any of this was helpful – it’s been interesting to think about.

Do you think that people on the autism spectrum actually don’t have an mbti, or just that it is harder/impossible to type them in video in the same way that you do others? I’m pretty sure autistic people have personality types and it just expresses differently, but curious to hear your thoughts.

To answer, I don’t know, sort of and yes.

I think you kind of are getting at it with the direction of your questioning.

1. First – and correct me if I’m wrong – my understanding of autism is that the neurons aren’t connecting the different parts of the brain (or not well, at least).  You get either a monofocus in one region, or the entire brain lighting up at once. It’s difficult to switch between using one section of the brain and another.

MBTI doesn’t really map onto what’s happening physically in the brain (no one section directly corresponds to a function), but making connections between seemingly random things (which requires the different parts of your brain to connect) is essentially a description of Ne.  Ni also deals with patterns of random things (and some people on the spectrum are highly gifted at processing patterns, but I’m not sure that Ni is the function they’d be using).

Since MBTI types rely on a specific order of function stack, if you cannot access or have limited access to one or more function, does your function stack still correspond to an MBTI type? Do your other functions become more important?  Do you end up with a type (or two) that you are most like?  Do you have something completely new?  Do you have a grant and a crack research team?

2. As for typing people behaviourally, in some cases, it becomes impossible.  In other cases, people are high-functioning enough that I would have no clue unless they were talking about it.  From the standpoint of trying to have everyone in a tag to exhibit the same behaviours – well, not everyone does anyway.  There’s a range.  

To be honest though, what’s weirder – that out of the billions of people in the world, there’s only 16 ways your brain can function, or that there are ways of functioning that MBTI doesn’t describe?

I was asking about myself -> this is about the INFP thing

Sorry I am so slow to follow up on this.  For an innocuous question,
it kind of sent me on a multiple day-long Ne spiral of doom where I
contemplated myself instead of answering your question.  I’m going to
try posting some of it now that’s it’s settled down and organized itself
a bit.

To be honest, usually I just answer variants of your
question with: go look at video in my tags and compare their behaviour
to yours (that is good advice, and you should do that!  The rest of this may have value to you at some point, but it’s
definitely tl;dr).  All I really know about people is from observing
behaviour; since I don’t actually have a range of subjects of every
type, I don’t really have a lot to add as far as what goes on in their
heads.  (Talking about MBTI stuff with infj-zen and enfjpuppettheatre
basically only makes me realize how little I actually understand about
how they think even after knowing them my entire life).  But since I am
an INFP, I should probably have some sort of insight as to what it’s
like to be an INFP.

The thing is, and I’m not sure if this is a me thing or an INFP thing, I’ve always had terrible
self-perception problems and the reason why MBTI appealed to me so
strongly is that it has helped and is continuing to help me see myself
more honestly.  I got lucky when the test worked for me and typed me
INFP right off the bat – I’m not sure that I really would have accepted
the profile otherwise.  Being kind of forced to look at it, like: “this
is your result!  This is you!” while some other people nodded and agreed
that it did in fact sound like me was pretty crucial.  Otherwise I
might have just thought “Oh, that’s nice,” and got on with my life.

I
think part of that might be about not enjoying having identity foisted
on me – INFP is a pretty individualistic type, and we resist boxes.  It
also might be that part that reads things going: “that’s me, that’s me,
that might be me sometimes, that could be me if I look at it sideways.”
Kind of splits you in two directions, being open to everything, but
wary of claiming any of it completely.  It’s okay, we’re good with
paradox (that is actually an INFP trait – I am sorry that I am
resisting giving you any others; I find that I maybe agree with half of
what’s said about INFPs on any given day and it’s hard to say what’s me
and what’s definitively INFP).

I was also wondering about how
if you’re on the cusp of one type and another, can you attribute that to
the influence people in your life who sort of pull you in another
direction?  

I never type as anything but an INFP, but my
percentages on each letter are something like 85-95% I, 55-65% N and P,
51% F on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  (Anything under 50% flips to
the opposite letter.)

This suggests to me either that I have
underdeveloped my NFP side and/or overdeveloped my STJ side.  (I think
it’s safe to say I have overdeveloped introversion.)  Having an ISTJ and
an ISFJ for parents makes this kind of make sense. I have a lot of
learned SJ values, as well as a definite push in the direction of
education over personal relationships, which (along with having few Fi
or Ne dominant role models in my life, none of whom I was super close
to) explains a lot about the T/F thing, not to mention the
introversion.  

All that to say, if you’re having problems
trying to figure out your type (and I know this is difficult if you’re
just starting in to MBTI) consider things you were taught to do vs.
things you gravitate towards naturally.  Consider if you would seek out
the same experiences if you didn’t have someone dragging you into them.
Consider what feels right for you vs. what’s supposed to feel right for
you.  Consider if the way you’re living your life now is typical for
you or more of a thing you’re trying out.  See if you can separate your
nature from your nurture – your identity from your influences (hah!).  See if
you can figure out what the test questions are really trying to measure.
 And try taking the test again in a few years… you may find yourself
closer to the version of your type that the test was based on at a
different point in your life.

But really, though, watch video.  That is best 🙂

(I’ll stick this sucker up on LJ if anyone wants to discuss.)

How can you tell if you’re infj or infp?

There’s a lot of specific INFJ and some specific INFP stuff in their respective tags, but, okay.  Let’s talk about anger.

Sure, why not.

Think of a time when you’ve been utterly furious.  Are you:

a) The Hulk.  You try and try to avoid conflict, but things build up and sometimes explode.  The trigger is the initial focus, but really your anger is very unfocused and everything that’s been even remotely irritating ever is all coming out at once. No one emerges unscathed.  Eventually it burns itself out and you limp away, assess damage and feel guilty.  Even if you had the moral high-ground when you started, it is gone, gone, gone.

b) A sniper.  Precise, targeted, patient and deadly.  Your plans are long-term and exact (planning is half the fun – we know because you can be heard cackling madly to yourself).  You feel really satisfied by enacting justice and destroying your enemies.  You’re still mad years later.

INFP is a) Fi anger, INFJ is b) Ni anger.  If you make an INFP angry enough to blow up, you will definitely know.  If you’ve made an INFJ angry enough to plot revenge, you will probably continue to do so without knowing or caring.  Eventually, though… eventually you’ll regret it.

You’ve mentioned ‘troll humor’ in a few of your posts…what is that?

So you know when you’re just minding your own business, hanging out under a bridge and some super gullible kid comes along and wants to cross to the other side, but you convince him he can’t unless he clicks on this link first?

Okay, I was having a bit of fun at your expense (sorry), but to be perfectly serious, Trolls are an awesome bit of Norwegian mythology – if you read any of the stories, they were pretty funny:

Troll humour is just referencing the Norwegian sense of humour.  Here is the King of Norway “trolling” his wife:

Haha!

And somewhere along the way, it was picked up and embraced by internet culture.  Some guy even made a song about it!

Tertiary Si.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about introverted functions… it is really hard for most people to talk about their dominant introverted function, so I’m wondering if anyone would like to participate in kind of a story exchange about either your primary (if you’re up for it!) or secondary introverted function so we can all have a better understanding of what they’re doing.

My particular overly-revealing ramble is about Si, but I need to talk a bit about Fi and Ne to set it up.

In response to the INTP earlier who was talking about his lack of feeling at his father’s murder, I was thinking about how I don’t really react with grief to the death of people I’ve known.  I feel sympathy for other people who are grieving, but I don’t particularly tend to feel much of anything for the deceased party.

I’m also aware that the socially appropriate response is to feel sad.  Other people are sad. Why not me, right?  So, through the power of Ne, I was able to kind of work myself through feeling sad as a possibility while maintaining the knowledge that it wasn’t my first reaction.  If anyone had asked, I could have honestly said I was sad, but the completely honest answer would have been, “it’s complicated.”  I had effectively Schrodinger’s feeling-ed myself, although not particularly consciously (I wouldn’t have been able to describe it in this way, or probably at all).

I used to do this with all kinds of things, too.  For instance, I’d try and give myself nightmares about movies I suspected were scary, even when I didn’t feel scared watching them.  As it turns out (by the power of positive? negative thinking), I did sort of manage to do this, but my actual dreams were usually a lot scarier, let alone my naturally occurring nightmares.

But, okay, back to Si.  

If I look down, I can tell you a story about each item I’m wearing – where I got it, who I was with, if I wore it anywhere special after, etc. etc.  Si attaches memory – sense memory, but also emotional memory – to things (people, places and things, actually, but I mostly identify with things).  Flashbacks, essentially.  Straight-up sensory memory is pretty easy to just databank for reference (e.g. this is cinnamon, which I know because I have tasted cinnamon before).  Memory with emotional association can be nice (e.g. my mom used to make cinnamon sugar when we had french toast for breakfast), or a gigantic pain (e.g. I was humiliated when I wasn’t able to correctly spell cinnamon in front of the class).  Negative emotions are particularly persistent and very good at bringing me back to the original moment I felt them.

My Si story is about the time I remember experiencing the most grief:

When I was little and I grew out of my clothes, my mom would give them away.  Of course, I had memories (and therefore identity) tied up in every piece of them, and it was like ripping myself apart to let her take them.  I would be frantically trying to remember everything important while I let them go, but I was… not very happy about it, to put it mildly.

She got to the point of taking them while I wasn’t around to object, which was possibly even worse.  I’m assuming this is in part what Alzheimer’s is like: having chunks of memory missing without knowing why, just the suspicion that someone is taking things from you and avoiding you when you try to confront them about it.

And then take that level of attachment to my clothes, dial that up to eleven, and there you have the complete and utter agony at being moved out of my room when I was a pre-teen to share with my sister (ugh, terrible, I feel like I’m punching myself in the gut right now – flashbacks are stupid).  And yeah, I’ve never really invested myself in anything in the same way since, not even after I moved back into that room later on.  I think if my house burnt down with all my stuff in it right now, I’d mostly be annoyed at the inconvenience.

So, super melodramatic, but like, devastating at the time.  If you were wondering why [F type] Si people are clutterbugs and can’t get rid of things, especially gifts, even if we hate the actual object, that’s why.  They are a physical manifestation of our memory and they remind us of who we are and who we’ve been.

ETA: looking at this, I think actually that my Fi and Si are just heavily intertwined… the Fi is the emotional memory, the Si is the sense memory.

Nah, I don’t think neuroatypicals will get angry at you, unless you have really weird, stereotypical reasons for thinking someone is neuroatypical :) I’m an ISFP, and I don’t know if I fit into it perfectly. My first two functions are pretty spot on (Fi and Se) but I feel like Ti would be higher up? and my Fe too. My identification with Ti may be because I am a really logical person in some ways because of my autism, but I think it’s probably not really the same as using Ti(1/2)

because I don’t feel like I have a good understanding of the functions. The Fe thing doesn’t really have to do with autism directly I think. But if you’d ask me what functions I most identify with I’d say  Fi-Se-Ti-Fe.

Okay, I will try to chill out a little, thanks 🙂

I’m trying to wrap my brain around your function stack, and I’m imagining from the outside you appear somewhere between ISFP (the Fi and Se as primary and secondary functions), and ISTP (the same Se and Fe extraverted functions).  But on the inside, because of the Fi-Ti combo, you don’t actually have an inner world like any MBTI type, although I guess it might be somewhere between ISFP for Fi-Se and ISFJ for Se-Ti. (???)

Not having an N function makes a certain amount of sense, from what I understand of aspergers (although I think I’ve seen many people who I’ve thought were N types, so I don’t really know how that works), but Fi-Fe sounds kind of exhausting.  That is a lot of feelings, yours and everyone else’s, and I can see that being overwhelming or just generally a source of inner conflict.

Oh, wait I just had a thought: If for ISFP, you would be Fi-Se-Ni-Te and your 5th through 8th functions would be Fe-Si-Ne-Ti, what if when you are leave out the N functions you’d have Fi-Se-Ti and your 4th through 6th functions would be Fe-Si-Te?  And Fe as the first of those, gets bumped up to the primary four function stack?