u/SPCell1

Today I was at lecture about trance state. One of things I learned there is that you can cause it to your audience by providing information with incomplete data, so they would finish the picture based on their subjective experiences and interpretation. For example a person went on vacation to sea. A sea has a shore, but due to lack of data it can be interpret as being sandy or filled with pebbles, which are sensory details. The more general description you provide, the less concrete data it contains. Therefore abstract is about intangible ideas and concepts while concrete is something tangible you can experience with your five physical senses.

Few days ago I saw on this subreddit a post from an ISFP who wants to have deep conversation with her intuitive friends, but can't. Today I had the following exercise: I give my conversation partner a general description of my experience and the latter tries to figure out concrete details, which puts me in trance state as I try to remember them and confirm whether they guessed it correctly, then we switch roles. There was a philosopher named Friedrich Hegel, who used from abstract to concrete method which translates intangible concepts and general principles into physical examples, so the exercise I had today is the opposite, to make descrptions as general as possible. With this I started to understand intuitives even better along with my own Ni.

Hello, I'm a 28 years old male and I'm going to share my perspective on why do I see plenty of mistypes in MBTI community and what causes them to happen. During rethinking my life experience recently I realized that I'm at my core a nerdy person who prefers to stay at home and do my things. My usual day was to play something, watch something, eat, chill and sleep. However I had a big problem with emotional control due to environment I grew up in, which led to adopt "emotions = weakness" mindset. IIRC I passed 16personalities test for the first time in like 2018, got INTJ and didn't even think about it much as I was taking tests for personal entertainment rather than genuine research. However, I didn't want to admit that I'm an emotional person and was biased towards more "rational" answers, so I was choosing answers by what I wanted myself to be rather than who I actually was back then.

Eventually as I was getting older I started to get interested in something more complex that emotionally interests me usually, so I tried to read some philosophy in 2023, but my mind back then was pretty much exploding as it failed to comprehend it, so I stopped. Then a year later my life situation started to cause me stress, so I got into it again in order to cope with stress and try to understand why things happen the way they do. My first philosophy I got into was stoicism, which is still helping me now. I realized that I'm actually very much into intellectual challenges and my mind simply matured enough for them. As much as I hate to admit it, but discomfort, stress, pain and suffering exist to break the limitations of your ego so you transcend them and evolve. Solving problems shreds your unhealthy traits and makes you see what actually matters to reach your most authentic self. Under heavy stree my inferior Te also developed quite quickly and due to fear of inability to control my emotions I was living in constant Te mode, which made me feel like a living corpse and I had urges to get some Se through eating a lot and desires for sponteneous physical actions, which seems to match the definition of Se grip of IN*Js.

Then more and more problems started to come, which eventually led me to MBTI. Got INTJ-A on 16p and considering my love for strategic planning I was like "Yeah, totally me", but as I was exploring MBTI community I saw these abbreviations like Ti, Fi, Ne which I didn't understand. At first I thought that I'm INTJ, but seeing information about cognitive functions planted seeds of doubt within me that I'm clearly missing something, so with study of them I started to more and more realize that I'm actually ISFP. I saw many intuitives writing that they felt like being outcasts and being stuck in their heads, which seemed pretty relatable to me, but I also was drawn to physical activities like martial arts, survival, military and exploratory experiences like vehicle travelling. Recently I realized that in my past years my Se was suppressed for the most part, hence why other ISFPs like me can be mistyped as INTJs. With my active Te some people on Reddit were even claiming that I'm not an ISFP, but INTJ or ENTJ, lol.

MBTI exposed some of my psychological insecurities like being not seen as smart as intuitive types, but the objective truth turned out to be much more important to me. Due to constantly solving problems I needed to transcend limitations of my ego, so I don't have time for these emotional bias games like sticking to INTJ flair so I feel like I'm matching this strategic mastermind archetype. Also the more I was understanding my Fi and my emotions in general the more I started to see how practical Fi actually is in terms of problem solving. Another thing that completely shattered my inferiority complex towards intuitives I initially noticed in myself are posts on this subreddit like "I'm so lonely, being INTJ sucks so much, I want to try drugs just not to feel like I'm an alien being surrounded by stupid monkeys". This made me understand the following: being an intuitive is not a blessing, it also has it's pros and cons, ups and downs, what actually matters is who you are as a person, what are your abilities and talents and that MBTI is about how you initially PREFER to gather information and make decisions. As of now my job requires to be physically and socially active and Se seems pretty natural to me and I enjoy physical exploration.

So what is my conclusion here? Many people are mistyped because they don't study functions, they cling to archetypical descriptions that are associated with certain MBTI types and due to personal insecurities like inferiority complex, fears of being seen as "stupid" due to being sensors and wishing to develop qualities they lack, but their ego limits them from actually doing their research and work on themselves. I'm pretty lucky in this regard, because desire for objective truth was always a part of me and when I noticed these insecurities in myself I tried to understand them because solving important problems demands to put all biases aside. Thanks to Four Sides of Mind theory I've realized that what is written about intuitives is appliable to me too since all functions are a part of my consciousness. For example I noticed that in some social groups I can be witty and make humorous puns, which is Ne (ESFJ unconscious) and in fact I realized that I've been unconsciously using Ne plenty of times in my life despite it being my blindspot/trickster functions. If I lack Te data I start using Ti to reach logical understanding of a subject and through Ti I can start connecting abstract concepts and ideas with each other, which is another method of tapping into Ne. What can anyone say on the matter?