I just had one of those breaking-through-a-layer-of-the-matrix twilight-zone like experiences where a part of socionics that once seemed mysterious suddenly showed a comprehensible part of itself.

Based on Gulenko's ideas of "crossed" function values across +/- (i.e. Delta and Alpha both value Te+ and Ti-, etc) I've always known that the following sequences of types were significant to the extent that Gulenko was right:

ENFj-INTj-ESTj-ISFj-ENFj (taciturn, rational, negativist cycle or "temperament")
INFp-ENTp-ISTp-ESFp-INFp (taciturn, irrational, positivist cycle or "temperament")
ISTj-ESFj-INFj-ENTj-ISTj (narrator, rational, positivist cycle or "temperament")
ESTp-ISFp-ENFp-INTp-ESTp (narrator, irrational, negativist cycle or "temperament")

(there is still a slight possibility that rational and irrational should alternate in these sequences instead of i/e; but I tend to think J/P is the more structurally important trait of the two and therefore the stable one; the advantage of the other approach is that Focal/Diffuse would be held common in any function shared by adjacent types, for example INFp Ni and INTj Ne are both Focal)

Not only do these sequences line up the types so as to make the types with common values adjacent to one another; they also lend a basis for the idea that the ID functions of a type are reversed in +/-. In other words, the ID Ni of an INTj is not the ENTj version of Ni, but the ENFj version. This gets rid of all kinds of annoying relativation problems along the lines of "if ID and Ego are the same anyway, why are INTj and ENTj different at all?" ; the NiTe this refers to is just a state in between of ENFj and ESTj, not anything involving ENTj.

Where does the new breakthrough come in...

Basically up to this point I have never had any inkling of how a transition from one type to another on this cycle "feels" or what I should look for in my experiences so as to register such a transition happening. Until now...

Take a common function between two types on the cycle; we don't use i/e like we normally do, cause i/e is not common between shared functions of two adjacent types on the cycle. Instead, we use taciturn/narrator. This gives rise to the t/n functions (Tt, Tn, St, Sn, Ft, Fn, Nt, Nn). But let's take the shared Nt between ENFj and INTj...

ENFj - i - Nt - e - INTj

The introverted "side" of the function is always on the left, while the extroverted function is always on the right. I/e acts much the way +/- does on the regular temperament cycles.

Now here's basically the idea: the starting state is the type on the left, and the transition is one towards the type on the right. During this transition, a mentality of inward contemplation changes to a mentality of outward activity.

In very simple terms, this describes the process of getting more and more familiar with a topic until the point is reached where one is confident to bring expression to it in the outer world. +/- has been described in very similar terms in the past. This should be pretty easy to relate to a psychological event of some kind.