“Trust your intuition. It never lies.”
“Trust nothing but your own experiences.”
“Trust your heart. It sees what the eyes cannot.”
“Use your brain. Think while it’s still legal.”
Each of these quotes glorifies one Base Function to the detriment of the others. Intuitors will resonate with trusting their intuition, listening to their gut, and going with their first inclination. Sensors on the other hand, will place more value on concrete physical experience, past or present. (N and S are opposite means of Perception.) Feelers know the importance of tending to the emotional impacts of experiences and relationships. Thinkers on the other hand, know the value of stepping back to critically evaluate all the information logically. (F and T are opposite means of making value Judgments.)
The balanced person will engage all four when appropriate.
Intuitives can be tempted to glorify intuition into a magical all-knowing higher guidance. Really though, Intuition is a conversation with your own unconscious. Intuition is a tool that requires practice to use reliably, and your intuition can be inaccurate. An Intuitive with decades of use of this function will learn when their intuition can be trusted, and when it is likely to be unduly influenced by other factors. A Sensor, or a poorly developed Intuitive, is likely to be rightly suspicious of their intuition (or should be if they are not). We should only trust our own intuition to the extent that we have honed it with practice.
Sensors will have little experience of successful intuition when that function is underdeveloped. Since Sensors rely on their own direct experience, this makes it difficult for them to believe that others have developed a trustworthy intuition, and so they will default to their own experience.
Conversely, Intuitors are well aware of ways in which their body and senses have tricked them. If it comes down to a question of what they see before them and what they intuit to actually be the case, they are likely to follow their gut. A well-developed Sensor, however, will have spent decades compiling information on how their senses work, when to trust them, and what is likely physically occurring in a situation that appears physically off.
Intuitives and Sensors are often disdainful of each other because they project their own difficulties with their less developed functions onto others. But your opposite has developed a skill in an area of your own life where you have less ability. You could turn to them for advice and training in this lesser function, stretching your abilities, and spiraling in on greater balance.
Feelers understand the importance of acknowledging and proactively dealing with feelings in any situation in which humans are involved. Not doing so can derail the best laid plans, ruin a relationship, and gridlock an office team. Meanwhile, Thinkers are purposely setting their own feeling preferences aside in order to take a broader view of the picture and come to the most objective conclusions possible.
Feelers get upset with Thinkers when it seems that individual needs are being neglected. Thinkers get upset with Feelers when it seems that what is in the best good of the collective is being ignored. A balance of both is required to make the best decisions. The needs of individuals balanced within the need of the collective is the optimal solution.
Feelers are practiced at working with individuals and specific groups to meet needs in order to bring harmony and cooperation. Feelers have less practice with the logical analysis that is required by Thinkers to accumulate a large amount of data from a complicated system of many parts, order it usefully, and extract valid conclusions. If the Feeler doesn’t understand how the Thinker arrived at high level assessments about what is best for the collective, and they see that individuals are suffering under this scheme, they will protest against what they see as cold-hearted, impersonal, and therefore likely corrupt.
Thinkers are required to set aside emotions and subjective preferences in order to derive objective information about the whole system, so they have less experience in interpreting the information contained in the emotions of individuals (themselves included). If the Thinker observes chaotic, uncontrolled emotionally subjective outbursts undermining the objective analysis they have painstakingly teased from assessing the whole system, they will become frustrated and not want to work with individuals who are seen as self-centered, obstructionist, and willfully ignorant.
However, it is not possible for Thinkers to isolate themselves from Feelers or from their own subjectivity. It is not possible for Feelers to meet all the needs of every individual without interfering subjective preferences leading ultimately to confrontation — requiring a more global assessment to solve.
I suspect that the only way Thinkers and Feelers will be able to achieve a solution that balances the needs of individuals with the needs of the whole group, is by developing their own opposite function. Thinkers will need to become open to learning (with the help of Feelers) how to enter and navigate in the subjective emotional realm of their own lives. Feelers will need to become open to learning (with the help of Thinkers) how to objectively apply the rules of critical thinking to their personal enterprises.
Experience gained in our underdeveloped functions will enable us to drop the suspicion and projection. We will become better able to speak the language and understand the concerns of our opposites.