Being dismissive: how bad can it be? | INFJ Forum

Being dismissive: how bad can it be?

Gaze

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We can't pay attention to everything everyone says, always or all the time, and we shouldn't either i guess. But . . .


You can dismiss facts/ideas or people.


Being dismissive: how bad can it be . . . really?
 
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how bad can it be? well it depends on what you're dismissing and why, and obviously how useful the information is and how much you can afford to go without it. if we're talking about opinions about the weather, dismissing them would be of no consequence. but if you've got cancer and several doctors have given you different opinions on what treatments you could take, then dismissing one of them could literally put your life in danger. also, there's always a time factor involved in every decision - sometimes making ANY choice NOW is much more important than considering every opinion and every piece of information you have available to you and then deciding - that's also something to keep in mind :)
 
I find, if you have a few good friends, they are likely your friends for deeper reasons than just fun, you trust these people. So if you are dismissing them a lot, thats bad. If they got this far with you the probably have a pretty good head on their shoulders. I try to do my best not to just dismiss Chazzykins for sure, but say irritating family members? Much more problematic, them.
I realized that a lot of the stuff my mother told me about life and living when I was a kid was extreme oversimplifications based on her general refusal to either explain anything (she use to lie to me a lot, and being a kid, I stupidly would repeat this stuff to others and get in shit for it) or because she herself dismissed every input from the world around her. She's also INFJ and a underdeveloped one.
However, if my Dad chooses to tell me something, I damn well listen cause he doesn't give advice often. Except when it comes to conflict resolution cause he usually says "Kill them with force lightning!" XD.
 
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I think we need to be dismissive to a certain extent as you cannot give everyone and everything attention at the same time or process it. Here I am talking about the level of detail people will go into explaining superficial things like the importance of egg shell paint compared to cream paint. There are of course some things that deserve your full undivided attention, what I am more referring to is my natural ability to analyze anything and everything whether this is of significance or not.

The word dismissive has for me a negative connotation to it in the sense that the person being dismissed might be aware and thus would experience it in a negative way, is this necessary though? I do not think they need to be aware, this is where I would use the saying: nod and smile and make the appropriate noises without them being aware of your filtering. I like to compare it to putting a filter in place and I actually prefer using the word filter.

With facts and ideas I have noticed that I will let myself engage with when I have the time, this I learnt after analyzing to the point that it feels like my brain will explode. You become irritable and short tempered as you struggle to finish your analyzing to the degree you desire and in the time available with no room left to recharge.
 
I dunno... whenever I've been dismissive of facts/ ideas / people, It's had a bad habit of comming back to bite me in the ass.
Never hurts to think about somthing first...

Although as far as people go, every now and then you can pull what I call the "human" card.

Goes somthing like this "I'm sorry, I'm a little tired right now... mind telling me later?"
 
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It's funny that we're discussing all this, Res. A lot of your recent threads have been echoing my thoughts as of late.

I don't think being dismissive is necessarily a bad thing; especially if you're the type of person who is used to picking up on everyone's burdens and treating it as a personal mission or responsibility. The more I learn about Fe and how I misuse it in my own life, the more irritated with myself I become and I start thinking about how great it would be to simply do away with my almost crippling empathy. I absorb people's words, emotions, ideas, body-language, etc. like a sponge and it sometimes gets to the point that it drowns out my own wants and needs. I could definitely benefit from telling the world to screw off every once in a while... and I usually do for about as long as it takes for that sense of being 'fed up' pass. As weird as it sounds, I sometimes envy the common, every day sociopaths (not the murderous or violent sociopaths, simmer down) just for the sake of knowing what its like to completely disconnect and do my own thing without worrying about what other people think or say or feel.
 
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I'm only dismissive of people/ideas if they are explicitly unwilling to consider/understand other perspectives. (I don't dismiss if they are unwilling to accept, but only if they are unwilling to consider).

Basically, I don't waste my time talking to brick walls.