Why Can't You Share Your Feelings

From an INFJ's ode to her INTP husband:

"One thing that stands out to me is asking him how he feels. That question tends to really freak INTPs out. You want to see a deer in the headlights, fire off that question."

Why is that?

Hypothesis: Inferior extraverted feeling makes sincere expression of feeling politically incorrect

Here's the usual experience for ITPs:

Friend/spouse/parent: (Say, while having difficulty making a decision at the pet store.) Would you share your true feelings with me?

ITP: Well, OK. I hate puppies with sad eyes. Their cuteness makes me want to vomit.

Friend/spouse/parent: How dare you say such a thing!

The lesson learned before long is that "Please share your true feelings with me" is a conversational gambit: the other person is looking for a chance to pour shame or guilt over you, by getting you to say something honestly. Either that, or the other person doesn't want you to share your true feelings, they want you to say something false, that confirms your willingness to knuckle under to some politically correct lie. If you say the truth, that will only confirm for people that you're not of the tribe. Give them true knowledge of your feelings, and the tribe will start itching to tear you apart limb from limb.

Dominant introverted thinking leads a person to merge himself with causal and aesthetic harmony. Your "feelings" relate to how elegantly the material one is working with is forming a unified whole. You apprehend this in a gestalt, direct, "emotional" way: causal/logical disharmony produces an immediate "yuck" reaction, and causal/logical harmony produces an immediate reaction of pleasure. These reactions aren't experienced as words or categories, but as bodily reactions, registering in muscle movements rather than in language.

Whether the material is a computer program you're writing, an internal combustion engine you're repairing, a wave you're trying to surf, or a Victorian you're trying to restore, you are continually guided by a raw feeling of how its elements fit together or don't fit together. Your emotions and your thoughts are one, and they all have to do with "the groove" of the material and whether you're flowing with it or not flowing with it. To be truly faithful to the reality where one is ever finding "the groove", one must not fit it to preconceived categories or criteria or even results defined in advance. Your reaction must come to you spontaneously, by inspiration, by getting your hands directly involved with the material and just letting it happen however it happens.

The need to take a clear political position, guaranteeing to others your faithfulness to what people have agreed is socially acceptable--letting them "know where you stand"--clashes in the most direct possible way with the frame of mind where you respond spontaneously and by inspiration to the inherent "logic" of your material. A social fiction of "you" gets in the way of putting yourself aside and letting the material be what it is. The social fiction is a left-brain phenomenon that exists only in the social world of sign and symbol. Your sense of "the groove" is a right-brain phenomenon, involving direct, a-social response: you're faithful to the material and not to a preconceived self-definition that other people can count on or understand.

Consequently, TPs often experience "cute" things as attempts to guilt-trip them out of their ability to lock on to "the groove" and follow it wherever it leads. Big false smiles, sad puppy eyes, the word "love", even a hand placed on a shoulder--all are perceived as attempts to shape their responses to things so they're no longer natural, faithful to their material, and untainted by a sense of self: as attempts to overpower or bully them with a threat of ostracization or perhaps a tribal lynching.

FJs, by contrast, have shaped themselves to genuinely feel what one ought to feel in any social situation. They likely expect that everyone has done that, because, after all, that's the only decent way to be. Of course you should be pleased to see a newborn baby, and of course you should be sad to hear of the death of your friend's father. That's what life is all about. How could you possibly feel disgusted by a newborn baby or pleased when a friend's father dies? Why, if you didn't like babies and feel sad about death, you would scarcely be human. You'd be a monster!

Paradoxically, this leads to a lack of spontaneity about expression of feeling on the part of ITPs, and genuine spontaneity on the part of EFJs. A person with developed extraverted feeling can trust his emotional response to be OK to share in words, whether it's joy, sadness, fear, or even anger. It might be hard to understand why it's not that way for everyone.

(FJs, especially IFJs, might well not feel what they're supposed to feel about deaths or babies, but Fe typically leads them to wonder if there's something wrong with them. But that's another topic.)

ITPs with more developed secondary functions may learn to display appropriate responses to questions about their feelings. By observing people long enough, they may gain a grasp of the basic catalogue of socially acceptable emotional responses, or they might learn to phrase their real feelings in a manner that is more politically correct and possibly watered-down with humor: "I really don't know about puppies with sad eyes... they make me feel so guilty. What do they want from me?!" Such a response allows an ITP's aversion to puppies to still be communicated without alienating people in the process. This behavior is more extraverted, but it is not true extraverted feeling because the ITPs are still not actually feeling the socially acceptable response, nor are they accurately stating their real emotions.

Connection to Autism?

A page on autism has some ideas which resonate with these hypotheses. Excerpt:

"At this point I want to return to what I have called the manipulation of people's interest systems. This is intended to be a factual and not a judgemental description: it means taking hold of other people's interests and attempting to line them up with our own. Because of the turn-taking contract adverted to earlier, it also means letting other people take hold of one's own. The net effect of a successful conversation is to leave both parties with their interest systems reciprocally altered so as to maximise their similarity. It's all very agreeable when it works out, and the feeling states of both parties are in harmony. This has longterm consequences. Those who enter into this game have emotions which are repeatedly tuned to the rest of society's those who haven't entered the game early find it hard to fit in, even if they want to. What is more, the lack of a reflective loop deprives people with autism of the one device people without autism have for exercising some internal control over their emotions - inadequate though that device is to the task.

*To sum up, in individuals with autism emotions are not integrated, either internally within the individual or externally within society at large. They are not adapted to accommodate other people's and may be hard to recognise both for others and for the individual who is experiencing and expressing them. They are not spread thin, so are liable to overload. And, in the absence of reflection emotions are both outside the individual's control and unavailable for enriching the meanings of their memories. "

The link may help explain why INTPs in the Myers-Briggs sense often have tendencies that are similar to Asperger's Syndrome (a high-functioning form of autism). From the standpoint of Lenore's ideas, autism seems to guarantee the poor development of extraverted feeling. (although autists still have Fi).

Myers-Briggs often presents Feeling in a very simplistic manner: Fi is about experiencing emotions, and Fe is about displaying them. The extraverted/introverted distinction is simply used to denote whether the emotions are being displayed externally, or "bottled up inside." Yet this quote on autism demonstrates why Lenore's distinctions between Fe and Fi have much more explanatory power than Myers-Briggs. The ideas that emotions can be "tuned in" to society (or not) to varying degrees shows that Feeling is not just about the experience and display of emotion. Feeling has another dimension: the degree to which emotion is integrated with social expectations and with other people's emotions.

INTJs sharing their feelings

INTJs seem to have similar problems showing their real emotions, and these difficulties are probably more than from having undeveloped Fe.

Dominant Ni might lead INTJs to regard all of their feelings with extreme suspicion. Emotions may be a sign of bias and demonstrate a vulnerability to influence from the external, material world. Such bias and vulnerability must be eradicated.

Underdeveloped Fi might give INTJs a lack of "self-empathy." Furthermore, tertiary Fi might lead INTJs to refrain from showing emotion, like Vulcans. They might see their emotions as impure mental sludge, not really as a part of themselves.

Inferior Se makes INTJs suspicious of anyone's demands on them to display feelings. Such demands would seem like attempts to influence them or push them around.

Perhaps the difference between INTJs and ITPs when asked to share their feelings is that while ITPs have more apprehension over expressing their feelings, INTJs have trouble acknowledging their feelings in the first place