Can you help? Am I ENFp or INFp?

[Eliza Thomason]

Hi Eliza, and thank you for taking your time to answer my posts again. I had to think long and hard before answering because I just have no idea how to put into words what I have experienced while reading your response. I don't want to sound insensitive, I don't believe that I'm a brash person, so I hope you can take my answer as a polite try to create some distance between us. I totally appreciate your enthusiasm and eagerness to answer in detail! That was very kind of you to take a lot of time to do it. I think it benefitted me greatly, because I could see some pieces of the puzzle that were eluding me before. So in the name of science , I want to say what I felt while reading, and again, please don't take it the wrong way.

Your answer felt very overbearing and like you were trying to see things in me that aren't there. When you were relating to me, I have in turn found it incredibly hard to relate back to what you were saying. In fact, I didn't relate almost at all. I was surprised a lot of times, trying to figure out how it was that you were relating to something I said, while yourself talking about something completely different and unrelated to my statements. Instead of feeling supported and like I belong, I felt misunderstood and taken for granted --like you just wanted to talk about yourself, using my descriptions of myself as a jumping off point for your own musings. I guess some of my vague statements are to blame, as they offer a wide range of interpretations but it felt mildly insulting to me. But that's fine! It let me find a new perspective on things.

As I said, I needed some time to think about the things you said. I find it helps me cool down when I write down what I feel and then edit it to sound reasonable to others (which, yes, makes writing posts very long. I think I spent over two hours writing this one). (How Fe of me.) I did that process here as well and came to a conclusion that it was a really great to react to your post the way I reacted because it showed me where my boundaries lie. It's probably not related to my socionics type much, but it is important to me to know those boundaries and respect them. I have trouble with that. So thanks for providing that experience! On that note, there was one statement that stood out most among others. Again, my reaction to it could be unrelated to socionics at all, but to my conditioning and psychological profile instead. But I thought I'd share it here in case someone saw something in it.


Maybe I'm overreacting here, I'm sure you had the best of intentions when writing this sentence but I'm so sorry, you definitely aren't seeing a whole pic of me. I think it would be a very rude thing to say to anyone because it's so objectifying, but regardless of social conventions, it touched me very deeply and in a very wrong way when I read it. Few things get to me like that. No, you're not seeing me. I tend to believe only personal interaction with someone can allow you to get to know the other person, and even then it's never going to be the full picture, no matter how many descriptions of themselves they give you. We perceive others through our own prism and we only see our reflections of the other person in us, not the person themselves. Yes, we can do a complicated thing like trying to find a type for someone, but we are unable to really see them in their entirety --that is already too complex for limited cognitive abilities of a human being. It's just not possible. I don't think people even see their own selves in their entirety. And that's totally okay. But in my mind, it's definitely not okay to say you see a whole pic of someone. That's like taking away what makes them an individual person, and bringing them down to an object that you can catalog and put away in one of the shelves in your mind. Sure, we all do that all the time, that makes it easier to live and interact with people. But hearing such a thing said openly rubs me the wrong way. Personally, I make these simplifications while still keeping an asterisk that says 'not really what you think they are' about every person I know.*

*Posting this whole paragraph makes me very uneasy because I'm aware it can create discord and hurt feelings. I thought of erasing it altogether but decided it should stay here, 'for science'.

I hope this didn't sound too blunt. I don't know how better to put it. Thanks again for taking all the time you took! It helped me see some things I couldn't recognize before.

Wow, this has been up for two days and I am just now seeing it. So I will add my feedback to the other feedback you got for this.

I guess I just feel out of touch here on The16T forum now. There has been a lot going on in my life this past year (major shifts and changes) and I spend less time reading on the forum, so I don't' know what is being said, or has been said when I do sign on and read. So when I sign on I just read randomly, and your post caught my interest. I also spend a long time on posts I do write, which have been lately little more than these two long ones to you (which is one reason why I generally don't get on the forum with any intention to write, because when I start one it can get long, and that takes time I don't have).

When I responded to your typing question, which was interesting to me, I wrote a long one, and then you asked me to write more, and I simply wanted to be accommodating. I guess I thought you LIKED what I wrote, and wanted more of the same? Did I completely misinterpret you there??

I should have realized I had said all I could, really, in the first one. I sort of realized it, because I was surprised you asked for more comment. So my second one, yes, did get into thoughts I had about me, as well as what I was saying about you, in effort to respond to what you asked. Rather ADD of me, I guess. I should have said I feel I have said what I can on the subject, rather than squeeze out more thoughts because I thought it would be helpful to you, based on what I understood you were asking. I certainly wish I had now.

And I also likely spent well over two hours, probably more, responding. And I also do lots of editing to get my thoughts out right (yet, i attribute this, personally, to strong Fi and less-confident Fe), though lately I feel I have to cut off my efforts in that area because I have a stricter real life schedule to stick to. So maybe that contributed to this horrible miscommunication.

The pain of seeing I have communicated poorly perhaps relates also to past personal history which has included painful spans of being misunderstood in certain key familial relationships (including a longtime marriage to one who I only years later realized had purposefully misunderstand me all those years because he enjoyed my discomforted reactions to being misunderstood). Because of my past experience in this I make a strong effort to be understanding of others, so it's quite painful to see in this case I have done the opposite of my intention and I am truly sorry for that. But yes, it is also painful for me as well to be misunderstood, so you do not have to worry about needing to create distance between us because I am sure that is the natural consequence here.

I do want to explain the comment I made that you grossly misunderstood, about seeing the "whole picture of you". I certainly did not mean it so literally as you interpreted it and reacted to it. I meant I saw a holistic overview of you. This is typical ENFp holistic- panoramic thinking, taking in an overview of the whole. So maybe you aren't ENFp and this sort of thinking is then naturally foreign to you.

But I am not trying to type you now. My way is to initially accept self-typing, up til the point I feel quite strongly someone has mistyped - and then I will only say something if I feel they will not be hurt by an opposing opinion of their self-typing. But I will not try to type you at all now, because I have offended you once, and do not want to do so again.

I am sort of gobsmacked that I came across to you as overbearing when you explicitly sought my opinion, and am rather wondering how that could have happened. I just thought you sought my thoughts, so I shared them. I don't think my opinion rules, or that you have to accept all, or any of it. I can't imagine how I came across that I felt my opinion was somehow infallible, but apparently, I did.

I am glad you were blunt, because I prefer the truth of things. Primarily, if you hadn't told me, I could blunder on and bother you more, and I sure don't want to do that. Truly, being understood is not so important to me as not offending. I would rather say nothing else and thereby not risk offending you any more.

I am truly sorry I offended you. Please forgive me.

[ToTheMoon]

...

First of all, please don't worry, I really wasn't offended! As a side notw, the comment you made was one I hoped I'd avoid by using my technical approach in my last post but alas . We do seem to function in different ways, don't we? I'd say your considerate and kind response here truly confirms you are a high Fi user and that's a beautiful thing.

I guess the biggest misunderstanding happened when I asked for more of your relations towards my statements. I should have stated my motivation for asking that and I didn't. To clarify right now: I asked for them because I didn't want to judge right away, based on your first answers, and wanted to dig deeper to see your approach to the more personal bits that I shared. I only asked for that to have a better understanding and an easier way to analyze and confirm/deny my initial bias towards what you wrote in the first place. I probably should have said so, so you wouldn't feel obliged to try and focus on me more. Goes to prove that my Fe is only working for me when consciously engaged and I tend to forget that others can't read me as easily as I think they do.

I'm sorry for causing the misunderstanding and possible hurt feelings on both sides. You're right that I did just that --even if I did it totally unconsciously, it doesn't really excuse me. I now see that I did it out of my silly conviction that to share my personal judgments would be a worthless thing to do. More work on F needed.

I am truly sorry I offended you. Please forgive me.

I do forgive you and please don't worry about it anymore! There are no hard feelings on my part.