This post started off being about 'identity' and whether you need to be consistent. In getting hijacked, it has, interestingly, moved on to another aspect of identity.
It's a very 'N' thing to decide for other people what they think and what they intend. ACONs suffer this at the hands of NParents all the time and end up not knowing who they are - and assuming everyone else must be right! We are so accommodating that we even actively do our best to become what other people assume us to be.
The worst kind of N are the know-it-alls who start brandishing psychological terms about. I read about that somewhere - more mind games in the name of power and 'not-relating'.
A sense of curiosity and enquiry and sharing will uncover the truth for those who are interested in it!!
I think of our view of reality as being at the point of a prism - you can slide down either side and on one side is 'reality' and on the other is an 'oh-so-close' version of it which diverges further and further away from 'reality' the further you go. It's the choosing to slide down the 'true' reality which marks us as able to make healthy choices. 'True' reality is often less exciting because it doesn't feed our 'drama' in the same way.
So people 'choose' to view things in a certain way cos it feeds their need for reality to be a certain way eg 'they're out to get me'.
It's sad that ACON's end up with such a fragile and fragmented identity as a result. I guess the Ns have suffered just as much - but I think they glued theirs back together again to make it tough and unbreakable and unbending and definite, no questions asked and no matter what the consequences are for others.
So we have : 'I think this is me' in one corner and 'This is
ME' in the other. And when 'I think this is me' tries to say 'This really is me', it can seem too close to 'This is
ME' for either side to feel comfortable about it.
Ns mistake, too often, the grain of truth for the whole desert. But there's no point in putting effort into disentangling it all with/for people who don't want to listen anyway. Trouble is you don't always know whether or not they are the ones worth trying to reach until it's too late.
R