# Extinguishment.



## trifle (Jun 30, 2013)

I'm trying to get an understanding of the extinguishment relationship - the descriptions I've read seem unclear to me. So: I'd appreciate if you have a known personal experience of this relationship for you to sort of describe how it works/worked. How it appears to onlookers, frustrations, positive aspects, the 'dynamics', where it went, anything like that, if you want. Thanks.
(Oh, and I've got IEI and IEE in mind - so yknow if you know anything about that then great.)


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## Nico1e (Jul 27, 2011)

In my experience, there is actually some attraction in the extinguishment relations. They sincerely like each other and get along well. My most recent experience with a SLE in the workplace (I'm a SLI) went like this. In the beginning, when he first started working there, he annoyed me so badly that I had to leave the room and complain to a coworker about him. He was, literally, extinguishing everything I tried to do. We were working at McDonald's during a busy lunch hour. I would do something, and he would undo and set it up his way instead. I know it's hard to imagine if you've never worked at McDonald's, but there is this big bun toaster where you can toast dozens of buns at one time and pile them up. I would be toasting buns and setting them in one pile, and he would take the pile and move it over someplace else so it was set up 'his way' instead of 'my way.' He would do this again and again, like I didn't even exist and like he didn't owe me any kind of courtesy or respect at all. 

It was like a love-hate relationship. I did get used to him after a while, and later on, I was one of the few friends that was still loyal to him after a lot of other people were mad at him. He had had an argument with an ESI girl (supervision...) and had shouted that she was a 'bitch' in front of everyone. Then he tried to deny that he had been referring to her. Several other incidents like that caused a lot of people to be mad at him.

I've been using a different model of socionics lately which explains the extinguishment relation better to me. But it would just confuse things if I tried to explain what this model is (Model B) because I know almost nothing about it and am only just learning about it right now. Partly because of this different model, I think that people are attracted to their extinguishment relations, and it's not as bad as the classic socionic model made it out to be. 

Whatever the attraction, I didn't find the person attractive enough that I made an effort to become his friend outside of work or hang out with him. It was something that only existed at work or in a social context when we were doing things together in a group of people. I didn't have a desire to spend a lot of time alone with him, but when we did, say if we were sitting outside work talking, we still got along very well, and we had genuine attraction and affection for each other. 

I haven't actually seen IEEs and IEIs together in real life recently enough to remember anything. I don't think we have any IEIs working there at the moment, and work is the place where I interact with people the most - I'm not socializing at the moment. So I can't tell you anything about them in particular.


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## RoSoDude (Apr 3, 2012)

The main issue with extinguishment relations is not that the person has a strong valuation for things that you find kinda irrelevant (Ego block vs Id block clashing), but that they are actively annoyed by the your weak and valued elements and you are annoyed with theirs (Super-Ego vs Super-Id blocks clashing).

This means that, in my experience, extinguishment relations involve a lot of very obvious stepping on one another's toes. In my case, as an LII, an LIE friend of mine has open disregard for the emotional atmosphere of social interactions (Fe), and this tends to make me very uncomfortable, because I find that sort of thing vitally important but am very incompetent in that area. On the flipside, I have a rather clear disdain for being sensitive to interpersonal closeness and personal values, which grates on my LIE friend.

Do note that in these relations, the person will rarely seem initially rude or obnoxious. In fact, you may have rather common interests and preferences. But as you each become more comfortable exposing your disregard for certain types of information (your Super-Ego block), you'll likely offend or annoy each other. This is draining and _extinguishing_ because as you expose your vulnerabilities to the other person, you will find your weak points ignored or in some ways mocked. This leaves you either to be drained by continuing to cover up your weaknesses and overcompensate, or to be drained by the other person's hidden hostility for them. And you may be unconsciously forcing the other person into the same trap.

What I'm essentially saying is that if you experience a feeling of distance or guardedness with your extinguishment partner, this is natural and may actually be a healthy thing. I like actually _doing_ things with my LIE friend and he can be refreshing to talk to and interact with casually, but things get prickly when we're just together for longer periods of time, and especially when we're in large groups just hanging out.


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## Figure (Jun 22, 2011)

I am an ILI and interned under an ILE way back, so it may help since issues regarding the Lead function will be similar with IEI and IEE.

In Extinguishment, the other person looks very appealing and one on one interactions usually go fine. You share the same rationality and lead function dichotomy, so it isn't particularly hard to get a feel for what he/she is saying in your own way, and it can actually lead you to develop your own new stance on something you hadn't previously considered. There will be a common "flow" in interactions, but the two will be off thinking about the topic in radically different ways that, oddly, are intelligible to the other.

You get Extinguishment when you combine the undesirable traits of your Semidual and Mirage partners. Your Semidual can help you where you're weak and need support, but does it in a way that seems like it needs to be corrected, and your Mirage cannot help you where you're weak and need support, but you have similar preferences. Your Extinguishment partner cannot help you where you're weak, and will seem like they need corrected which can seem surprising at first, given the common ground mentioned above. 

I interned for an Extinguishment/ILE and things went well at first. We could talk about basically anything, and there was always a sort of unsure mystique about what the other person's reaction would be, because it was always very different from what I was expecting despite making sense on the whole. A lot of his ideas seemed pointless and borderline stupid to me though - totally wrong emphasis, oddly-rationed, too dispersive and not seeing the same projections I did. When we had strategy discussions, we would usually have the same idea of an end result, but essentially opposite ways of doing it that neither of us agreed with. It was surprising to have such a totally opposite take on something I thought was very simple, and not like ESTp, where it's "whatever, we disagree, move on." All this over and over again led to him becoming sneaky, passive-aggressive and short with me. It led to me absolutely hating him, hating every little thing he did or said, and not wanting to spend more than 2 minutes around him. 

I think it could work if you had distance available and didn't have to work together on something where will factors in. I think it belly flops when you have trouble dealing with each others' very different takes, because it is suprising how different (extinguishing) they are from your own.


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## trifle (Jun 30, 2013)

Thank you all - I think I now pretty much understand the relationship and what all that would entail, and if I was certain on my own type I'd probably be able to identify that. It would still be nice to hear about IEI and IEE, but I can easily enough work out what that experience would be like anyway.


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## Vanishing Point (Oct 2, 2012)

trifle said:


> Thank you all - I think I now pretty much understand the relationship and what all that would entail, and if I was certain on my own type I'd probably be able to identify that. It would still be nice to hear about IEI and IEE, but I can easily enough work out what that experience would be like anyway.


I'm IEI, very happily married to an IEE for six years now. My best friend of ...well 20 years now... is also IEE. Doesn't fit the theory but it's what it is. I'm not complaining.


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## Entropic (Jun 15, 2012)

I know an ILE and intellectually the relationship is fine for most of the part. I think what really ticked me off was the Ne and Fe in group interaction in particular, as that combination just has a tendency to really drive me up the walls when it's excessive one way or another. I have little disregard for the "Fe fluff" she would sometimes create in the group situation, which annoyed me greatly. I was not the target of this though, meaning I tended to just remove myself before I felt like exploding on something. No idea how she perceived the interaction from her end.


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## GreenCoyote (Nov 2, 2009)

Hey I am a newly discovered IEE!

don't have any documented relations for extinguishment but have felt extinguished like the relationship says.

good luck findiing more relations of IEE and IEI. I'd like to hear from an IEI perspective what the IEE does that is so annoying. ha ha


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