Everyone uses thoughts (thinking) as well as emotions (feeling) when they make decisions.
Most people naturally turn to one of these more than the other1, especially when they’re younger, and especially when the decision they’re making is difficult or they’re under a lot of pressure. We can call this your dominant judging function.
As you get older, all being well, your inferior judging function develops.
If you’re a thinker, you start to learn to pay attention to how you feel about a situation, and how the decision will impact how others will feel, and factor that into your decision making processes. You realise it can be beneficial not to reduce everything down to a checklist or spreadsheet, and that raw facts alone aren’t always optimal.
We can call this development “emotional maturity”.
A feeler, on the other hand, already has those skills naturally. Feelers have been recognising and acting on their emotions and feelings and those of others for as long as they can remember.
But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that these people were therefore born emotionally mature.
For feelers, emotional maturity is the opposite: learning to use thinking, rationale, and facts to complement their feelings about a situation. Recognising that feeling something strongly doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true (the emotion is always valid, but it might be triggered by thoughts that are inaccurate), using rationale and logic to fully understand what’s going on.
Once you’re able to respect other people’s feelings as well as your own, and also use objectivity, rationale and compromise to resolve conflicts: that’s being emotionally mature.
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Men are more likely to be thinkers first, and women are more likely to be feelers first, but this is far from universal: 45% of men are feelers and 25% of women are thinkers. Source: https://www.statisticbrain.com/myers-briggs-statistics/ ↩
