[bearotter]

Personally I have come to be skeptical of overuse of the loop theory, without questioning what else could be going on.

Not looking for new stuff frankly sounds less like a loop and more like Ti is in dangerous control, meaning all you care to do is reconfirm what it already finds to make sense.

I don't mean to nitpick at all, I used to try to explain stuff with loop theory. But push comes to shove, I think it's misleading to think the tertiary can ever exert such a strong influence as to circle with the dominant back and forth.

The standard theory in the books at least that seems to essentially correspond most nearly to loop theory is called that of tertiary temptation, meaning since these are two introverted functions, there's a natural tendency supposedly to turn to the tertiary in childlike obstinacy to reconfirm the dominant's perspective on things.

 

[bearotter]

Hmm I'm somewhat approve of the loop theory, because I think I may have experienced it.

That was my stance as well - I felt I'd "experienced" a loop.
And I mean, yes I had experienced two functions roughly in the sense described.

The thing is over time one starts finding more and more nuanced explanations, and also having some simple common sense checks.

Why paranoid? I seriously doubt it's caused by typological phenomena. I'd guess typological phenomena could provide a perspective on your experience at a time of paranoia, rather than actually explaining it. I like to think of type as the skeleton, describing how things are filtered as they pass into your world (after all, it starts and ends at describing what patterns of cognition are central to you), and that filter represents you in some sense, but your psychology is ultimately not equivalent to that filter, even if it is reflected in it. At least in what I call the overarching cases.

During a period of paranoia, I'd guess someone with a dominant function would be stuck in that dominant function more likely than they'd truly circle in and out of a tertiary.

That said, this requires having a correctly typed dominant, and after being "certain" a lot of people circle through and try to find what it really is.

 

[bearotter]

I think paranoia and depression can throw a lot of people off. I've been doing a lot better lately this past year though

Always great if something's working. It's one of the reasons I've grown stickler about really nailing how much can be said about the inter-relations between typological phenomena and other psychological ones -- I'd prefer for people like you to continue finding things that work, and get a really quick reality check on what typology might and might not be able to say for you (or at least I wish someone told me that sort of thing when I first started learning this stuff).

I think an extreme leaning to almost any function can lead to some level of psychological breakdown, yes. But one thing which typology won't always hit clearly is what led to that extreme leaning?

As a simple example, when someone enters intuitive reality, and essentially loses sensory reality (some blatant N>>>>>>>>>>>>>S), undoubtedly some psychological break might happen, and nearly without question this is the sort of thing you probably read about when you read extreme over-reliance on Ti-dominance can lead to some break. But why are they doing that? Not all intuitive doms reach such a point, so obviously something non-basic stuff, not entirely native to typology necessarily, is going on.

Hope this helps throw a little perspective! I see people vastly overstep the bounds of what typology does and doesn't say, and half of what I find myself posting is just in the hopes that this can be curtailed.

Do feel free to engage me further on this. I understand it can be confusing to digest exactly what I'm saying when newly processing the loop theory etc (assuming you are). At least it sounded very ripe and convincing to me, and hey there is something to it, but I think there's also something to clarifying precisely what it is and isn't, as well as distinguishing the existence of a typological imbalance from its causes.