Reply To: Seelie & Adaptive vs. Unseelie & Directive: Is it Related to Conflict Avoidance?

[fayest42]

I’m trying to take stock of all the different characteristics of unseelieness and seelieness that have been mentioned here and elsewhere and to figure out how they are connected and what might be at the root of all of them.
It seems to me like everything that has been said about the differences between seelieness and unseelieness could be grouped into one of two categories:
1. Seelie people focus on the positive aspects of things and unseelie people focus on the negative aspects of things.
2. Seelie people have an open and positive relationship to their own feelings while unseelie people have a closed and negative relationship to their own feelings.
I’m not entirely sure if these are actually two entirely separate things and if perhaps one individual might be able to fall on the seelie side in one category and the unseelie side in the other category or if one of the two categories is the true fundamental difference between seelieness and unseelieness and the other is a consequence of the first.
One possible explanation I could imagine for category #1 leading to category #2 is that if your feelings are focused on the negative (unseelie), then your feelings are probably an unpleasant mental place to be - so you could end up trying to avoid them, whereas if your feelings are focused on the positive (seelie), then your feelings are probably a pleasant place to be, and you would end up embracing them (note that this isn’t to say that seelie people don’t experience unpleasant feelings, but moreso that because they see the positive in things, they feel safe in the world of their feelings, even when something is temporarily unpleasant).
It’s a little harder for me to see how category #2 would lead to category #1, but not impossible.
I also see @umbilical-sphere's theory that unseelieness is about separating/boundary construction (independence) and seelieness is about merging/boundary dissolution (dependence) as having a lot of potential because it has ties to both categories #1 and #2. Category #1 would lead unseelie people to want to put up a boundary between themselves and others because they are focusing on the negative in others and they want to protect themselves from that. Category #2 obviously entails unseelie people putting up a boundary between themselves and their own feelings and could also lead them to put up a boundary between themselves and others so as to avoid the affect others have on their feelings (as described by Megan Fox in the video @alice posted).
So my thinking at the moment is that either
- umbi’s description is the fundamental difference and that encapsulates #1 and #2
or
- #1 is the fundamental difference between seelie and unseelie people and #1 leads to #2
or
- #1 and #2 are actually distinct categories where people could be seelie in one category and unseelie in the other.
I had previously written a bunch of stuff explaining how I see each thing that people have attributed to being seelie or unseelie as being in either category 1 or 2, but I decided it probably wasn't necessary because people could probably see that for themselves. If that would actually be helpful though, I can post it.
Thoughts?
Side note: I've focused on seelie vs unseelie here, but this all might apply to adaptive vs directive too. I'm not sure.