Beebe on Ni
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posted by Vicky Jo at 5:32 PM
Thursday, August 03, 2006
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13 Comments:
Flakey. Darn. How will I ever fill in the rest of my NJ filter from that? Useless.
Well thank you for your efforts anyway.
Have a nice day.
Sorry about that. I guess I figure I have so much stuff about INFJ on my other website, www.INFJ.com, that it's more important to get Fi stuff onto this site.
Nevertheless, I will have more John Beebe Ni nuggets available soon. Check back soon!
I agree. I rely on my Ni to make decisions and proceed with my goals on a daily basis, but without stimuli, or senerios, I'm sometimes at a loss as to what to do next. I forget what I did yesterday to reach my goals and might embark on an entirely new goal today. I'm learning to develop a mental and physical (organizational) system to help remind me of my true goals on a daily basis.
To me, Ni feels a lot like building a house with Legos and then playing house with dinosaurs using that house. (Yea, that made a lot of sense didn't it?) What I mean is, it's about knowing in some weird way what will happen. It's like seeing a bus pull up and you know you're just out of reach even if you run...and knowing that when you get to the bus, it will pull off without you.
When you receive a problem or a decision, suddenly (usually quite suddenly and without warning) images, thoughts, and associations fire off in your head about all the possible solutions to the problem. Ni is this...and it is also instantly, without thinking about it for more than a nanosecond, gravitating to the most probable outcome (or outcomes...sometimes there are several...and that's when I check outside to see which applies to the people involved and then I might even pull back in to make sure it's logically sound).
Best I can articulate it, I think.
Interesting articulation, thanks!
I remember years ago I was talking to my writing partner. He asked me a question about some behaviors I was manifesting, and I straightforwardly looked him in the eye and told him I was afraid he was going to dump me.
He looked me back in the eye and told me in no uncertain terms that he was not going to dump me -- in fact, he was SUCH a good friend to me that I didn't even have to be NICE to him, that's how good a friend he was.
That was the last civil conversation we ever had. I couldn't get him on the phone... I wrote a friend a letter to give to him, and then his manager contacted me and threatened me with a restraining order if I tried to communicate with him. I got a voicemail on my answering machine from him saying he didn't "owe me anything." And that was that.
It's taken me 20 years to realize that my intuition was RIGHT -- I knew he was going to dump me and he DID. Everything else was simply noise.
But all that "noise" caused me to doubt myself for DECADES.
I can understand how the "noise" makes you doubt yourself. I have trouble with that too. Then again, it gets really confusing when you think about self-fulfilling prophecies. Was your intuiton right in the end because you believed it to be right? And in believing it to be right, did your friend pick up on that belief and dump you because he sensed on some level it was inevitable? Who knows. It's possible.
There are positive intuitions I get. Usually they occur when I'm walking to class, and I'll get images of really bizarre things happening. For example, I had an image of a house tottering down the street after the home owner on rickety wooden beams like a dog. The home owner turned around and said, "NO! Go home! Bad house!" and then the house proceeded to poop a car onto some unsuspecting citizen while the home owner hid his face in embarrassment. You have no idea how hard I laughed at that thought.
It's an interesting quandary. I think all INF's have problems with "magical thinking" -- i.e., did I "cause" that to happen? And now with all the Law of Attraction popularity, that seems more likely than ever.
Nevertheless, in this one instance at least, I'm sure I "knew" ahead of time and didn't "cause" it. There was a vibe I was picking up despite all evidence to the contrary (including his heartfelt reassurance).
In terms of the dog story you shared, I wonder whether that's Ni or Ne? Since it's happening "in the moment" as an "emergent" idea, and not as an "aha," or an "insight," I wonder which it is? Hmmmm..... Perhaps it's just Se followed by Ni rather than the other way around, as we're more accustomed -- since it was triggered by something in the moment.
Lots to consider there!
Ooops! Forgot I wanted to share this link about "magical thinking" --
www.INFJ.com/Wishful_Thinking.htm
Enjoy!
Ah, okay. Thanks for the link. It's a fine line, I think. Especially if you don't remember that "aha" moment with absolute clarity and are prone to doubting yourself.
That's interesting. I know this Se then Ni or maybe Ne process doesn't happen too often. Maybe that's why I remember those instances best. I remember them because they are remarkably different, wild things that seem to run amuck with too much visionary power. They're not like normal ideas that just sort of turn up in my head like curious children and state some profound truth about something I haven't really researched or thought about.
No, they have some sort of weird power to them...they're ideas and images I can't ignore. They plaster themselves up onto my mental screen and scream "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME RIGHT NOW!" For example, that dog story. I could practically see the dog-house in the actual street.
Ni is: taking one detail and making something out of it. When someone tells me a personal story, in a I suppose very un-N way, I tell them to give me more detail, and it's usually because I can't really draw conclusions from what I'm being givin. Either I don't really know what they're saying, or it could be just opinion. Finally, they'll usually give me an important detail, and when I get that one detail I can pull together several conclusions, and understand what's going on. Then I can proceed to ask questions that I know will actually matter, and then I an hopefully sympathize with or help that person. I don't know if there's to much 'detail'-ness in that for it to be intuition. Maybe it's sensing. I really hope that I'm not barking up the wrong tree here.
Eventually I plan to write this up, but Dr. Beebe describes iNtuition thus:
"Big Pictures Fast."
So yes, iNtuition tends to charge up the Ladder of Assumption faster than anybody, both kinds.
HOWEVER, the detail is always implicit -- for Ni there is always a corollary of Se that trails right behind; for Ne there is always a corollary of Si that trails right behind. The functions do not operate independently, so when I notice one is present, I look for the other.
Does that help you come to terms with what you're describing?
Yes, my guess is that when I'm listening to people vent and ask for details I'm using extroverted sensing to put myself there, then letting Introverted Intuition take over once I get an important detail
I don't think you can use extraverted Sensing to feel empathy -- I think that's a feature of the Feeling functions. So my guess is that you use extraverted Feeling to put yourself in someone else's shoes.
Extraverted Sensing is more likely to show up in the details if you're using them to ratchet yourself into the experience. So if somebody had a bad day, you might ask for the details. If they say it was 100 degrees outside, you might use that detail to feel the temperature as if you were there. It helps to make it more "real" for you. Based on that, it may manifest as a vision: "I'm wanting an ice cold lemonade now," and they might say, "Yes! That's exactly what I need right now." (or not)
Again, none of the processes operate in isolation. You seem to be expressing a "whole pattern" here. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but when you try to pick it apart, you start to notice how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
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