Originally Posted by
Karu
This is a good post. I went through a similar experience. It's just that I wasn't paying enough attention to valued elements.
INFp won't look receptible to the things that do matter to an ISFp, as IEIs have a tendency to direct their focus to normalized and institutionalized customs in relationships and regurgitate the usual stuff and recipes that are socially received wisdom about life that an ISFp will call trite. They just never seem to go outside the script somehow. And they are meant to be so because Alpha is less open to generic wisdom. The script was (is!) everywhere when I was growing up to the point I thought everyone was seriously misdirected or lining up to the reenactment of the toxic relationships and group dynamics practically everyone warned us about, or to ruin their own psyche. Se/Ni for Fe is...cheerleader vibe that take society's opinion and customs to heart and pays too much attention to people's feelings...but in the 'wrong' and 'dramatic' way, you know? Once you get that out of the way, 'imagination' is more of a secondary trait for type discernment among feeling types.
An ISFp'a use of imagination is more free-style because Alpha Ne makes you be after the 'discovery' just for itself and the contentment it provides. Like you you read a poem just to marvel at the overall phenomenology and the connotations (also meaning: the further possibilities that appear in your mind) but the INFps read it because it's dramatic and it talks about heartbreak and roses. An SEI and an IEI need to utilize their inner eye to draw something from the poem, but echoes of an equidistant rambler are more more noticeable in the SEI. Personally, right now I'm in the middle of the writing process essay-long commentary about the last 15 minutes of a movie like...what benefit could I ever get out of that? Days spent in front of a keyboard worrying about composition so that my angle is clear. Hours down the drain I'm never actually going to paid for that I will happily misuse because of the joy that I get from comparing, recombining, reinterpreting. That's Ne/Ti valuing.
And I could recognize myself as a sensor because I was always in competition with an LSI for resources. In his case, he was trying to control physical objects to extract something in his favor and his regimen; in mine, I was overly zealous of my energy so he could never really put me to use. For this reason after some time we subconsciously interpreted each other's motives as disinterest in each other's well-being and we just ignored the other person. I think there's more of a perception that intuitives are more malleable in that regard. As a sensor you make unconscious statements in the way you go about life about access to 'special object', your space and territory. You don't butt heads with N types over that as much. Similarly, an N type must resent another N type gaining the upper hand in the mind meme they circulate over the environment.