Wednesday, December 26, 2012

One Way in Which I Use Extraverted Feeling


I mentioned in a previous post that I didn't think I was that good at Extraverted Feeling. Well, my gifts seemed to go over better than expected (only one of them really crossed the "dorky" line). Still, I've been thinking about my use of the Extraverted Feeling. In addition to using it neurotically (such as worrying about offending others) I am most aware of when I use it negatively (such as getting offended, particularly when receiving rude service). However, I've begun thinking about how I use it positively.

One way I use it positively, which is very merged with Introverted Intuition, is by knowing things about people. For example:

(1)Just last night, I had a dream that my husband was stuck in Kansas City. As he sometimes travels for work and can have bad luck with airports sometimes, this dream horrified him a bit. (He has seen instances where bits of my dreams came true.) He just got back from the store. On his way in, he ran into one of our neighbors. Apparently, said neighbor was stuck in Kansas City and was just getting back.

(2)During Occupy Wall Street, I saw a photo of a woman being beaten by the cops. She had claimed to be pregnant and was taken to the hospital. The photo went around a lot. I looked at the photo when suddenly the thought popped into my head she grew up in the foster care system. I wanted to find out more about the case. I stumbled across a small Spokane newspaper which had picked up an article from a larger Seattle paper. For the article, the reporter had talked to her foster mother. (Sadly, the young woman in the photo had some personal difficulties and the foster mother was quoted suggesting the pregnancy had been fictitious.) Apparently, my intuition had been spot-on when I'd identified her as having been in foster care.

(3)Awhile back, I had a dream that an acquaintance was sitting next to me on a plane, telling me how they had just got married. In reality, I had previously seen said acquaintance around several times and they'd never mentioned an engagement, so I just dismissed it as just a funny dream. Next time I saw the person, they had a ring on their finger. They had, in fact, been in engaged and got married--they just were very private about it and had only let close friends in on the secret.

You'll notice that all of these ways of knowing things about people are both trivial and in regards to people I'm not very close to. They're about people who are socially, but not personally, connected--a neighbor, an acquaintance and a news story that was big among my social circle at the time. That's how it works for me. There's an objective quality in the sense that these are social, but not necessarily personal connections(Extraverted Feeling). They're also rather trivial in a way. They're things about people's lives, but not substantial stuff, and so it's hard to tell when it's an intuition versus a random thought or merely symbolic dream.

Interestingly, my mother is an ISFJ and has dreams come true but they often involve major life events, such as someone dying and her finding out later that the old friend really did die. Marie-Louise von Franz talks about this as something that happens with sensing types whose inferior function is intuition. It tends to be tied up in major events (and, in some cases, can even be about something catastrophic). To Sensing types, sudden feelings about people can be overpowering precisely because it's so unconscious. When intuition is habitual, you're used to having as many misses as hits and are more likely to dismiss it. It's interesting that it was my ENTP husband that instantly locked on to it as probably being prophetic. He noticed that it was the truly mundane dreams that wind up being the ones that have some sort of eerie connection to a corresponding reality.

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