Next we must learn that the emotional mind reads symbols, impressions, and overall patterns more than it reads reason and logic. This is why symbolic and metaphorical language, images, poetry, and any emotion-packed communication find a ready and instant response in our limbic system. This language carries rich and potent feelings that empower the imagination. Imagination, intuition, memory, empathy, and passion provide energy to the emotional mind.  In fact, they are the emotional mind’s “language.”

Words Cannot Tell the Story Like the Emotional Mind’s Language Can

A symbol can tell a story that words cannot.  Furthermore,  the emotional mind readily translates imagery into feelings that can introduce expansive thoughts and excite our imagination.

A smell can also awaken lost memories that are full of feeling.  It can do so without waiting for the slow process of thinking to reason its way to what that memory was. We feel the emotion of the event immediately.

Also, just the sight of a sunset can stir our memories of experiences connected to other sunsets or to something the sunset suggests. Symbols unleash the potential of our imagination.  And the emotional mind runs with it using the emotional mind’s language to the greatest effect.

Keep the Imagination; Dispel the Negative Emotion

A child will hear a sound at night and what the potential of the sound suggests is limitless. The mind runs wild with suggestions. Each suggestion is replete with emotions that can run the gamut from fear to fantasy. Whatever the emotion is, it will soon take the mind captive.  It is the emotion that holds the mind prisoner, not the imagination. If the emotion is negative, the child must be freed from the emotion, not from a fertile imagination as some parents try to do.

The Emotional Mind’s Language Outpaces Our Thoughts

We often feel something before we start thinking about it because we have an emotional mind that outpaces our thoughts. After the emotion has surfaced, we find our thoughts running rampant, but always in the direction of the emotion. Think of how this happens many times in one day. What we see, read, hear, and detect with our senses or create with our imagination can spark love, trust, hope, fear, doubt, or anger.  And it all happens before we think. Just the flash of fantasy or the whisper of a wish can birth a powerful feeling.  And our minds are off to the races.

Feelings, touching, and other influences fill our lives and affect all our decisions. Imagination is not left out of being an instigator either. Imagination is an experience full of suggestiveness (not just an analytical thought, thanks to our emotions) and often leads the way to emotional experiences.

The Emotions of the Fs Versus the Emotions of the Ts

All Fs find rich meaning in their emotions.  But the NF temperament, dominated by intuition and feeling, lives on the meaning the emotions give. In the NF temperament, metaphoric language, imagination, the love of symbol, passion, and sensitivity combine with intense emotion to make a temperament that reads the emotional patterns and images of life with heightened familiarity.

If you have a T in your profile and believe you are also good at “feeling” things, then double your degree of emotional sensitivity to understand the intense emotions of anyone who has an F in their profile. Symbolism is a language more suggestive to the Fs. Life is richest for the Fs when they live the language of their emotional mind. This is not necessarily so for the Ts because they must feed on the facts.

Speak in the Emotional Mind’s Language to the Child Who Is and F

Do you have a child who is an F? Then wonder at the unseen warmth of all things that are emotional to them. Try to learn, at least in part, the language of their emotions by sharing emotive words with them. You can share in the wonder even if you can’t share in the expressions of their mental wanderings.

Winston’s Emotions

“I hate my emotions,” Winston said. “People thought I was so celestially minded that I was of no earthly use.  At least that’s the way it seemed to me as a child. I’m a male and I’m not supposed to be this way. I’ve tried to think tough and speak prosaic-like.  But it sucks the softness out of my heart and I feel parched, my emotions cracking in the heat of societal expectations. God made a mistake, didn’t he? Trying to be what my friends expect me to be is horrible to me. There’s a tug of war going on inside between what I should be and what I am.  And I can’t stand it at times. How do I make my emotions lie down?”

I felt his pain.

It must be torture to have to live as though you are a mistake. Winston was a gifted student, majoring in Psychology in hopes of being able to heal himself. I could have saved him the cost of his studies, or so he put it, if only he had found out earlier that this was the way he was made and that he was not perverted, just filled with an extraordinarily rich emotional mind that he could channel into many rewarding careers.

So, what have we learned? Here are a few points:

• Appreciate the richness of symbolism and metaphor and the journeyings of an emotionally-packed imagination.
• Seek to understand the mind that is set afire by such suggestiveness.
• Learn how metaphors suggest more than literal descriptions.
• Learn why feelings can so easily captivate our thoughts and why it is so hard to dislodge them.
• Don’t despise emotion, even in the one who has such a hard time controlling it.
• For “feelers,” the meaning of life lies in their investigation of all things symbolic and metaphorical, in analogies and likenesses.
• Symbolism is more powerful if it suggests more emotion.