Based on Jungian Cognitive Functions and Objective Personality, specifically on answers I received from Dave & Shan during the live show Q&A on 18th Sept. 2023.

Decider = Thinking or Feeling. Commonly referring to a type with Dominant Thinking or Feeling.
Ti = Introverted Thinking function
Fi = Introverted Feeling function
Tribe = Others, people around you, their outside perspective

Note: I have Dominant Introverted Thinking, so this post will be based on my personal view and understandings at moment of writing. However, I try to keep it generic enough, so that hopefully this applies for Introverted Feelers for the most part as well.

Managing Darkness

To be drastically honest with yourself, to deal with your personal darkness, you need to develop self-love and patience with yourself. This is especially vital if you are prone to having a negative self-image. Without a positive space within you to take respite in, the road to individuation can easily lead you to a very dark side path.

Below I will attempt to describe my understanding of how to balance your personal perspective with the perspective of the Tribe (others) and why you should care.

Introverted Decider Issues

For introverted decider dominants (Ti or Fi), the biggest issue in life will be the inability to balance between their own perspective of themselves and that of the Tribe. Being incredibly focused on our own standards, values and methods then leads to not paying enough attention to what's going on outside of us, for better or for worse. This will lead to issues stemming from not keeping track on how others view you. Smaller and larger issues then keep piling up until something tips things over, creating chaos, difficult times and causing a lot of pain in the process. It manifests in the Tribe getting upset at you for being selfish or insensitive, eventually getting ostracized from groups; or you getting an increasingly positive view of yourself until you get a huge reality check; or you getting an increasingly negative view of yourself, leading to depression.

We call these upsets, piles of negativity coming in all at once as "tidal waves". Naturally, you will be doing your best to avoid these tidal waves, to avoid the pain. Fear of the tidal wave will, however unconsciously direct your behaviour, actions and therefore your life. The less conscious of these processess you are; the more you let these perspectives go unchecked; the more severe your tidal waves will be; the more afraid of them you are. The more afraid you are, the less agency you will have over your own life. This is something I have personally struggled with all my life and something I surely will be working on for the rest of it.

"You need to be able to jump back to your own perspective, when the perspective of others gets too much. Or back to the perspective of others, when your own perspective gets too much."

Being Our Best

If you focus too much on your own perspective of yourself, you are going to be missing the Tribe's perspective. This is consequently making your personal view of yourself separate from the view of others. So all you have to do is to know what others think of me. Sounds simple, right? Here lies the crux of it. When I say "the Tribe's perspective", I mean how the Tribe actually sees you. Not how you think the Tribe sees you. Since us introverted deciders are incredibly focused on our own perspective, our own standards, we will by default, be ignoring the other side of the equation to that same decree.

So what do we do to avoid the pain as introverted deciders? Because we fear negativity coming from others, we focus even more on our selves. And to us, it's quite logical. If you are really valuable to others and never mess up, everyone will like you and there's no reason for anyone to get angry at you. So when we are not on our best or we have work to do on ourselves, we ignore the very people we want to be our best for. We avoid social situations. We abandon people and social groups at the first sight of negativity. We keep to ourselves, constantly honing our skills, identity, knowledge et cetera.

Queue Tidal Wave

When this goes on for too long without getting checked; when you keep only checking in with yourself and isolating yourself from others, the gap between your view of yourself and how others view you grows wider. You see yourself working hard to better yourself for others, and others see you as selfish and uncaring for ignoring people in your life. 

When someone finally reacts or something else makes you realise what you have been doing, how you have been acting, from the true perspective of others, it is going to be painful. Something very hard to deal with emotionally. From your perspective, you have been working so hard after all, but it's all had an opposite effect of what you wanted. You will get defensive, piled up frustration and anger releases from both sides. And now that there's negativity coming from the Tribe, the one thing you fear the most is happening. Queue tidal wave.

This might all sound like I'm saying that we need to take everyone else's perspectives into account and abandon our own. However, this is what the extroverted deciders struggle with more commonly. They will run around, pleasing everyone else, hoping that others would then support them in improving themselves. Of course, this leads to resentment from the extroverted deciders side because others will not put in the same effort to please them as they put into others. They too will have their own tidal waves.

Aftermath

So it happened. You got hit by a tidal wave. Maybe you got into a heated argument with someone. Maybe you abandoned a group. Maybe a group abandoned you. Maybe your partner left you. Or maybe you got a massive dose of Tribe negativity in some other way. You feel down, depressed and anxious. The worst thing happened again and you did not see it coming. You feel awful. You might turn to self-hatred. You know you have been too "selfish". You know you were an ass. You know you caused upset by ignoring people. You know you didn't communicate with your loved ones enough. You finally look at the other perspective and it does not look good. Long story short, you know you suck. And that really sucks.

You will tighten your standards and try again. You try to do better and better. Thinking that maybe eventually, you will actually be good enough that it won't happen again. Until it does happen again.

Eventually, going down this path, you will come to the realisation that you will never be good enough to not cause another tidal wave. This is where things can get dark. You can quite easily fall into a deep depression. For someone who chronically gets stuck in their own perspective, this is dangerous. You criticise yourself heavily, over and over, whenever you don't meet your own standards. Focusing more and more on failings and negativity. If not challenged with positivity, you can get stuck focused on negativity. This can turn your perspective of yourself to be near completely negative, making it extremely difficult to see any good in yourself. And of course, you're still stuck in your own perspective and you will still keep getting hate from the Tribe every now and then to further reinforce that negative focus.

Gemstones

Long story short, what I want you to know is this: There is always good in you. People are not so simple as to be labelled 'good' or 'bad'. We are like gemstones, uniquely beautiful. Everyone has countless facets, some of those facets are smoother or brighter than others. A person - including you - is not any single of those facets, but rather the sum of all of them. You have simply forgotten how to see your good facets. You have become blind to them. You don't want to lose your love for yourself, you don't want to lose your belief in yourself. You might have uncut and unpolished facets, but at the end of the day, you are unique. There will never be another human like yourself. Don't rob yourself or the world of the unique Self you are capable of becoming. So let's get polishing.

Update And Restart

If you have gone too far into negativity in your perspective of yourself. You need to update your view of yourself. The Tribe does not see you as purely negative. Some people might, but that says more about them than you. Chances are that many people adore you and many traits that you have. So get out of your own head and actually let go of your own perspective for a moment. Update it with some parts of the Tribe's perspective. Let others show you where your shining facets lie. Your view of yourself should always have positive aspects of yourself, so be sure to focus on the good facets of your personality. These are vital in seeing past your failings and shortfalls, in regards to the standards you have for yourself. Standards that, if you are an introverted thinker, most likely are insanely unrealistic to begin with. Stop brushing off compliments and your achievements, no matter how small. These are good ways to update your view of yourself from the Tribe's perspective. Put effort into learning to embrace them.

The trick to get out of this loop of swinging harshly between perspectives is to do it in smaller measures consistently and often, before it gets to build up too much. You need to be able to go back and forth between your perspective and the Tribe's perspective, to use both of your deciding functions, Thinking and Feeling. Extroverted and Introverted deciding functions together to keep those perspectives balanced. This is what we call double deciding. And Double deciding is something you really need to practice as a single decider.

Double Deciding

Double deciding is the ability to be able to jump between the Tribe's perspective and your own. People with their deciding functions in the middle  - not the dominant and inferior functions - are able to do this very rapidly in the moment. Going from poking fun on the Tribe, to giving a compliment. Saying how amazing they are, to deprecating themselves. And so on. Seeing your perspective, then seeing the Tribe's perspective. Crosschecking each perspective with the other. To balance those two out. Not letting either one build up too much before being checked by the other.

Going between the two perspectives is technically not difficult, but at first it will be like doing mental gymnastics. For an introverted decider it feels extremely hard and draining. A near impossibility to do in the heat of the moment. It will get easier over time as you practice and hone those neural pathways connecting your Thinking and Feeling functions.

To get to the Tribe's perspective, you can simply go gather some information about yourself and see what it would look like from the outside. Ask people, observe your actions or words from someone elses perspective. "If someone was watching, how would they perceive me as a person?". This can lead to a lot of negativity on yourself at first, before you learn to then jump back to your own perspective to 'Balance the equation'.

"I may be the worst here, here and here. But I'm really amazing here. I'm really good here. I do have results here."

For double deciders, their body will give them signals to balance these two perspectives. They'll feel when they're going too far into their subjective view of themselves and when they're going too far into Tribe's "objective" perspective.

Observe The Observers

Your mind struggles to notice its own workings, where it's going too far or not going far enough. This is where we can use our knowledge of the "type math" to see our default wiring in action even when the mind is trying to hide it. Watch the IxxJs and what they are doing. How are they getting stuck with 'things'? How are they messing up observing? How and where are they not updating either sensory information or intuitive information?

The intuitive dominant will struggle to check in with sensory information, things in the real world. And the sensing dominant will struggle to check in with intuitive information, 'where is this going' and how things work conceptually.

You're doing these same things, just with perspectives and values and logic.

Mechanism of Double Deciding

You can practice double deciding by looking at how you are doing double observing. When you're getting a task done and you keep simulating where it's going. Do you just keep going? Or do you periodically check what that the actual sensory information is in-line with your intuitive simulation? You have this instinctual feeling to check that your expectation of reality and actual results in reality are matching. You do this so that you don't go too wrong in the long run. You keep updating perspectives off both intuition and sensory information like it's second nature. Because it is.

Example: When you are spending money, you keep checking in with your mind to intuit how much money you have spent and how much you still have left. Even though you can intuit or project forward how the rest of the month will play out, you will still go check your account balance every now and then. This is because you still need the actual sensory information, not only your subjective information, to make sure you're not too off on your estimate. That there haven't been automatic charges like subscriptions you might have forgotten that play into it, that you're not forgetting a shopping trip and so forth. You don't want to suddenly realise that you still have two weeks until payday and you've ran out of money. You don't want to skip on buying something important simply because you thought you were over your budget, when in reality you still had plenty of money. As a double observer, your body will instinctually respond with increasing fear the longer you go without checking the other half of observations.

Example: You are working on a project. You are deep in your tasks, making sure all the details are correct. You still keep checking back on your intuition to project forward, to make sure that you're still on the right path long term. You will use these intuitive projections to adjust what you are working on day to day so that what you are actually doing in reality is aligned with where you want it to lead in the future. If you keep simply painstakingly working on that project bit by bit. You could end up realising that it didn't end up being what you wanted or it didn't get you to where you thought. Perhaps you spent way too much time honing a single component of to be exactly right, having essentially wasted incredible amounts of time that could have been spent working on other more relevant parts or maybe even finishing another project entirely.

Double deciding for single deciders

Observe yourself

Read over all the messages you've sent to someone. What does that look like from the outside? What kind of image would you have of yourself if those messages are all that you'd know of yourself?

Ask someone

Ask someone you know and trust to give you accurate information on how they view you or think others view you. Simply ask them how you are viewed. Do this over time as well with individual events or interactions to slowly develop better awareness. This works the best if that person is a double decider themselves and honest with what they tell you. Remember that they are not in your head. They are only telling you what they see and interpret, so don't get too offended when their perspective doesn't match with yours.

Example questions - Insert your own situations

• "They said _____, I'm planning on replying with _____. How would this be seen?"

• "I responded to _____ with _____. Did I go too far?"

• "_____ happened. What would you say or do in this situation?"

• "I think people thought _____ about me when _____ happened. What do you think?"

Might also be good to ask why they came to the conclusions they did, if you think they can answer, try that as well.

- J.M.J. Rapids