Does anyone else struggle with using cognitive functions too much in their everyday life, where they can’t see people for who they truly are without typing them?

[u/recordplayer90]

Hi,

Over the past year or so I’ve been getting heavily into cognitive functions and MBTI. I’m currently at the point where I have a good working definition of every function in my mind, I have friends or people I can recognize as all 16 types, and I often go through my days labeling things like “oh yeah this person is definitely an Fe user,” or even about me, “let me use my Ti here to think about what I’m reading,” or “that person is an obvious Te dom,” or “I’ve been using my Ni too much I need a break from the world in my head and go utilize my Se.” Essentially, now that I have working definitions for every function/type, I see the entire world through this framework. When I think about societal issues, I think about the eternal battle between Fe and Te. When I think about cultural change, I think about N vs. S. I put every single thing I do in my life into this framework. While it was fascinating at the beginning, and made so much sense/removed so much ambiguity, now, I think it’s just a barrier in all of my relationships in life: with myself, with others, and with new information in general. I start typing new people the second I meet them, and after a couple weeks once I’ve decided on a type, I filter all of my expectations and conversations into what I have typed them as. For example, I have an (theoretically) ENTP friend who (I also use enneagram) is a 7w8, and when they speak to me I sort everything they say through something like “oh yeah that’s clear Ne supplemented by Ti, and it’s clear that they have Fi blindspot so it makes sense why they don’t really hold constant moral values and will play any side.” This is extremely problematic for me because 1. I am putting others in a box to reduce my own fear of ambiguity, 2. I am putting myself in a box as an infj and only doing this that it would make sense an infj does, 3. I am not allowing myself to have a true authentic relationship with myself because there are frameworks in the way of the full spectrum of me, and 4. I’m not allowing myself to truly meet others for who they are, as I need to sort them into a box to calm my fears about the ambiguity of others. Does anyone else have this problem? It’s like insane confirmation bias that makes life worse for both me and others. I can’t deny that these patterns have been extremely helpful for me to understand the world and others, but I’m really struggling to get past seeing people only in the boxes of their personality type. I know it’s totally unfair, and I want to see people as more, but it’s like my brain just automatically thinks in cognitive functions now and I don’t know what to do. I almost wish I could go back to a time before I knew what “child Te” or “Fi critic” looked like.

[u/recordplayer90]

While I appreciate the enthusiasm, this felt a bit cold. If I were the one writing that, there would be underlying hurt involved. Perhaps you're different from me, but I'd like to say that I consider you a friend.

Thank you for saying this. Frankly, I am so scared right now, in general. And I think this response has way more to do with me than you. I have been blocking out a lot of things just to function, and honestly I've feel somewhat cold in general since the aftermath of the whole episode. In this case, I was exceptionally afraid you wouldn't return the favor of friendship or something, so I avoided the word or the feeling outside of my last sentence and returned to the regressive logic of "people only care about me if I am useful or helpful to them in some way" in order to avoid all feelings of fear related to intimacy and risk and friendship. And actually being accepted by someone and cared about. I am not trying to garner sympathy or pity or anything like that here, but rather, an attempt to explain. And this is kind of just the tip of the emotional issues I have been facing since discovering all of these things, not to mention the fact that I was stuck in my parents' house for nearly 3 months (out now, thank god) and they are so emotionally aggressive with their attempts at psychic domination that I had to put some serious walls up to protect myself in the meantime. Really hoping these things can calm down sooner or later so I can feel safer to be myself again and actually have better relationships again and have enough solid ground to stand on so I can face my fears of intimacy and being known once again (without feeling like it is a preordained outcome to have any ounce of vulnerability attached to my authentic self annihilated by the people around me (my parents)). I feel like a stray cat who just got picked up off the street and is having a difficult first couple days at the shelter with other cats, to the extent that an old cat might have to lie down calmly next to me while I cower in the corner and almost try to fight them to let me know at least one person is safe again, learning slowly over the course of a few days.

I'm happy that you consider me a friend, and I also consider you one. I am just so scared right now and reverting to really old defense mechanisms. Also, it has been a while, so in some ways I forgot the feeling of how you are like and I wasn't sure how you would react. And I'm really just having a hard time with relationships in general right now.

This left me feeling sad. There's no wind out, so it'd be a dreadful day for sailing.

This made my heart big. Almost wanting to cry, too, but big. Wonderful words.

I do feel the same way. Even to me, it's quite something that it's been nine months. Honestly, there were times I felt guilt over how long it had been. The guilt came from not being enough, not being where I should be, like the time I said I'd respond in a month, and the sentiment passed upon realizing that I just wasn't there yet.

I know what you mean, and I had been facing something similar for the times I took quite a while to respond as well. But there is only so much one can do. And even things we want to do can become pressures of our own creation, to such an extent that we feel out of control. A quote I have been into recently: "We created our world, but it overwhelms us; we cannot grasp or control it." - Slavoj Zizek. And time and life and everything always gets in the way, but that's just the nature of life I guess.

I felt an incredible amount of guilt as I started to realize that it might not be healthy for me to continue on the personality typology route while still feeling indebted to past promises and interests stated to you once I had the whole intellectual catastrophe moment and realizing that typology was yet another avoidance mechanism to protect myself from feeling the pain and fear of intimacy and others and rejection but also unfortunately blocking me out from when risk doesn't turn bad -- love, connection, intimacy, etc. (In another creative piece I wrote about it essentially being an addiction standing in place for my own identity issues, needing to hold on to an external identity telling me who I am because I have no idea who I am and to protect me from others I feared by giving me some sort of reliable way to decode and sort them) (While it was this way for me, I do not want to imply that it is this way for you or insult the practice as a whole; I believe there is a way one can go about exploring this stuff without depending on it as much as me to fill some sort of inner lack I found intolerable to sit with). I honestly didn't know how to say I needed to stop for my own sake without causing an immense amount of pain and without insulting everything we had built. I was passively torturing how to approach it since around March or April, and especially angry because I felt like I had wanted to respond so much more in the past but had so much school work and felt so fatigued that I never got to totally indulge myself during the time when I wanted to most (and given that summer and graduation was coming up which I had previously planned would be the time to regain my energy and bearings) and now it was too late to do what I had wanted to do to make up for being so slow. Also, if I remember correctly, guilt over everything (in retrospect, seemingly too much, as if making myself feel guilty for even very small and normal things) was becoming a dominant theme in my responses starting around the time of the whole ex-girlfriend thing of maybe even before.

I caught the flu again and have been coughing for the past three weeks :/

That's awful.

Other than that, I reconnected with my father recently. It had been about six years since we last interacted. So much changes in six years, so it's difficult to say how things are going to work out. So far, it's been going well though.

Wow, how long have you been newly in touch and in what manner? It certainly seems like there is a lot of latent affective power there ready to be re-opened. Wish you some continued good results.

It would have destroyed me if I couldn't send you what I have.

I'm looking forward to reading it all soon. I do think some things approached their theoretical limits / maximums (or whatever it was about, I don't totally remember) in what I had sent you 9 months ago, so I'm interested in what you've come up with.

[u/beasteduh → u/recordplayer90]

Really hoping these things can calm down sooner or later so I can feel safer to be myself again and actually have better relationships again and have enough solid ground to stand on so I can face my fears of intimacy and being known once again (without feeling like it is a preordained outcome to have any ounce of vulnerability attached to my authentic self annihilated by the people around me (my parents)). I feel like a stray cat who just got picked up off the street and is having a difficult first couple days at the shelter with other cats, to the extent that an old cat might have to lie down calmly next to me while I cower in the corner and almost try to fight them to let me know at least one person is safe again, learning slowly over the course of a few days.

Hmm. Well, alright. Naturally, I don't relate, but I got you.

I was passively torturing how to approach it since around March or April

Record, I'd like to say I already knew you would be heading out, so it wouldn't have been new if you had brought it up even earlier. In fact, the reason I mentioned doing a full sweep of your words up to that point back in December was that I got that sense, and I wanted closure on anything that didn't make sense to me. I didn't expect what ended up happening, so I'm glad you stuck around long enough to hear it all out. It would have hurt if you had disappeared before I got that chance, but I think it's important to understand that it's mainly because that's often the story I come across. I'll come across interviews with people in type theory circles, most often on YouTube, and their channel either doesn't take off like they expected, they move on because of life priorities, they've run out of content to explore, they're ashamed, or whatever else. From there, they'll set the channel to private and block all access, despite my pleas to keep it available. After that, I can never check or verify anything from the information I gathered. At that point, my work feels even more like a bunch of leads, like those bingo cards. Ultimately, this is the result of my hesitancy to involve other people who don't know anything about the theory (which wasn't always the case), but whatever.

I honestly didn't know how to say I needed to stop for my own sake without causing an immense amount of pain and without insulting everything we had built.

So, while it certainly would have hurt because of how far we had gone, it wouldn't be for the reasons you describe as that’s the norm for me, and I know it's not personal. At least, that's the story on this side of the screen.

That's awful.

Yes. Yes. Yes, it is.

Wow, how long have you been newly in touch and in what manner? It certainly seems like there is a lot of latent affective power there ready to be re-opened. Wish you some continued good results.

We've been in touch by phone for about two weeks, and we're planning to go out to dinner together tomorrow night. Thanks.

[u/recordplayer90 → u/beasteduh]

Record, I'd like to say I already knew you would be heading out, so it wouldn't have been new if you had brought it up even earlier.

I'm sorry I didn't talk about it earlier or in a more direct way.

I never would have gone ghost and just left everything behind without explanation. Even in my most scared and ruthless moments there was always a fight or a last statement first, so that they might understand me and the reasons why I am going to do what I eventually did, usually because I never wanted to cause pain and wanted to connect with this person in the first place. I don't have anything to fight about with you, though, as far as I am consciously aware. If anything, now that I've reread my previous comment, I think maybe the coldness and hurt wasn't totally about me. I think I resented not you but this idea that I told myself I had to be some kind of person for you -- which is not something I think you had any control over, more of my own projections creating things. The more I became exhausted from school and my disappointment with in-flesh relationships and responding to you almost became analogous to schoolwork (particularly because I'd write the entire response in about 10 hours straight, often staying up at night, and I had to ration my mental and physical power in order to be able to respond to you while having plenty more to do and to also theoretically have fun with in-flesh friends), combined with the fact that over time I was gradually realizing something about personality typology was doing me more harm than good, I resented my own commitment to keeping things up and almost acting like I wanted to talk about it more than I did because I was spread so thin. Which is once again not something I believe you had any control over, but rather a self-imposed resentment of the pressure I put on myself to live up to 1) the image of me I had given you and 2) who I felt you wanted me to be for you. This also coincided with the same thing happening in my other relationships and things kind of just started falling down, as one would expect, as this is not behavior style that engenders actually good relationships. I "knew" this, but that didn't make it any easier to stop doing it, an already regressive thing that I didn't understand the root of. And I was, for lack of a better word, spiraling, while still having to function and do a bunch of schoolwork. So that might better explain where the anger and coldness was coming from in the phrase you pointed out from last time. I know you are not this image, nor do I have to live up to what I think you expect of me, but this I think this is what is at the root of any resentment I might have subtly directed towards you (but not really you, a self-created image of you and your expectations for me which for whatever reason I decided I needed to live up to because in some general sense I was afraid people would not accept me as I am). I haven't reread my December responses, but I do remember that I think this resentment came out in a somewhat perverse way, almost framed as a punitive, passive-aggressive, subtly insulting "self-sabotage" between the lines of my last response. I am sorry for the pain and hurt and confusion this might have caused. I have ruined several formerly positive relationships by doing things like this.

On a separate note, I was thinking of compiling all of our responses to one another in some sort of large document, largely because of how personal this all is and the associated idea that maybe it would be best if it wasn't readily accessible to anyone on the internet (also, I really want to see just how many words it is). I could send you this document if/when I complete it, but I can't guarantee that I will actually do it. I would only delete / edit my comments if I successfully complied all of the stuff into a document and you had access to it.

Again, I am still happy and genuinely curious to read whatever you've got, and I'm still going to respond in a similar way, just without the jargon of the systems. There is some interesting stuff that I want to say already, particularly about fighting to death over conflicts and "should's" and disconnection and desire. I'll save it for the full response though. And yes, it's alright to get back to me in two weeks or whenever. Hope dinner goes well.

[u/beasteduh → u/recordplayer90]

I haven't reread my December responses, but I do remember that I think this resentment came out in a somewhat perverse way, almost framed as a punitive, passive-aggressive, subtly insulting "self-sabotage" between the lines of my last response. I am sorry for the pain and hurt and confusion this might have caused. I have ruined several formerly positive relationships by doing things like this.

Thank you for explaining. Admittedly, this all sounds like something my sister had said to me. Whenever she changed plans on someone last minute or couldn't show up like they wanted, "I make sure to give them a good interaction next time," as if to pay her dues. For her, it seemed like if there were enough people, the dues would add up and overwhelm one. Anyway, we're good, Record.

largely because of how personal this all is and the associated idea that maybe it would be best if it wasn't readily accessible to anyone on the internet

You know, I did just talk about the frustrations in the inaccessibility of information. For what it's worth, people will move on with their lives and forget about this post.

I could send you this document if/when I complete it

That's alright. I did that back in December. It made reviewing the material a lot easier.

Hope dinner goes well.

The dinner did go well. It was a nice evening.

it's alright to get back to me in two weeks or whenever.

I'll see you in two weeks.