I knew that YOU understood, karen -- I was really addressing others when I said that stuff...
Maybe you've read this on the Enneagram Institute site
Quote: Profile Summary for Enneagram Type Two
Key Motivations: Want to be loved, to express their feelings for others, to be needed and appreciated, to get others to respond to them, to vindicate their claims about themselves. Lil: This sounds very much like the way you relate to your H.]
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become deeply unselfish, humble, and altruistic: giving unconditional love to self and others. Feel it is a privilege to be in the lives of others.
Level 2: Empathetic, compassionate, feeling for others. Caring and concerned about their needs. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving and sincere.
Level 3: Encouraging and appreciative, able to see the good in others. Service is important, but takes care of self too: they are nurturing, generous, and giving—a truly loving person.
Average Levels
Level 4: Want to be closer to others, so start "people pleasing," becoming overly friendly, emotionally demonstrative, and full of "good intentions" about everything. Give seductive attention: approval, "strokes," flattery. Love is their supreme value, and they talk about it constantly.
Level 5: Become overly intimate and intrusive: they need to be needed, so they hover, meddle, and control in the name of love. Want others to depend on them: give, but expect a return: send double messages. Enveloping and possessive: the codependent, self-sacrificial person who cannot do enough for others—wearing themselves out for everyone, creating needs for themselves to fulfill.
Level 6: Increasingly self-important and self-satisfied, feel they are indispensable, although they overrate their efforts in others' behalf. Hypochondria, becoming a "martyr" for others. Overbearing, patronizing, presumptuous.
Unhealthy Levels
Level 7: Can be manipulative and self-serving, instilling guilt by telling others how much they owe them and make them suffer. Abuse food and medication to "stuff feelings" and get sympathy. Undermine people, making belittling, disparaging remarks. Extremely self-deceptive about their motives and how aggressive and/or selfish their behavior is.
Level 8: Domineering and coercive: feel entitled to get anything they want from others: the repayment of old debts, money, sexual favors.
Level 9: Able to excuse and rationalize what they do since they feel abused and victimized by others and are bitterly resentful and angry. Somatization of their aggressions result in chronic health problems as they vindicate themselves by "falling apart" and burdening others. Generally corresponds to the Histrionic Personality Disorder and Factitious Disorder.
The 4 moving in an unhealthy direction becomes more like the 2-- that's me turning into a caretaker. But the 2 moving in a HEALTHY direction becomes more like 4, i.e., looking inside him/herself for meaning. The unhealthy direction for the 2 is 8-- ANGER... and that's where you've been stuck for a while. "Unhealthy" means the direction you move when under stress.
Does having an idea of of these different models of personality help when the rubber hits the road in direct interpersonal interactions? Does it bring you closer to being in the moment? It is a tool for anaylsis I understand that I am not sure how it affects your interactions with others and especially with yourself.
I think the main benefit of knowing about these typologies is to show that others have completely valid ways of looking at the world and experiencing life that are different from mine.
Some less enlightened people (not anyone here) might believe that the only right way of thinking, doing, being is THEIR way. That anyone who does not see the world as they do and function as they do is wrong, uneducated, misinformed, or even mentally ill.
The first time I was exposed to the Myers-Briggs types it blew my mind. It gave me a window into how others see the world. It kind of removes one from the center of the universe chair.
Sometimes people think that their particular brand of intelligence, suffering, problem solving, etc., is unique. They feel very special, either in a good, superior way or in a bad, inferior way. But the first time you read the Enneagram description of your type and it really clicks, you realize that you're not all that special-- again it removes you from the center of the universe chair. This particular collection of attitudes and quirks can be found in lots of other people of your type.
This is particularly helpful if you're stuck in a negative place. You realize that lots of other people like you have suffered in just exactly this way... and my reaction was always to say "if they can get through it, I can get through it."
Each of the Enneagram types (or fixations) is a way of coping with the... how should I put this... basically with the fear of death and annihilation. This is the existential fear that comes with being alive: the fear of non-being. Each of the nine types copes with this fear in a different way.
Even the cheerful and upbeat 7 is running from death and distracting him/herself with planning and acquiring things. The 5 is buffering his fear with all the knowledge and information he can find. The 1 clings to the assurance that s/he is always right. The 6 finds refuge in institutions, such as the army or the church. And so on...
The first time I read the description of the 4, I was shocked and embarrassed. I laughed out loud. It was as if someone had been looking over my shoulder. The description fit me to a "t." I felt enormously relieved that I was not uniquely cursed as I had pretty much believed up until that time.
Not everyone likes to know this stuff. My late H feel discounted and minimized somehow to know that his quirks and traits could be categorized this way. My bf feels belittled, too. I always felt very relieved.
Martelo, do you truly see no benefit to knowing about these patterns as they apply to interpersonal relations?
I do see value in these catagorical models of personality in analasis of ones self and others. But I also think that catagories can be a buffer from experiencing the fluid nature of persons, self, and consciousness. It has been said "the map is not the territory" a model no matter how complex is only an attempt to represent something that is.
Martelo, your point is extremely well made and needs to be emphasized, in fact. These typologies are like a suit of clothes. They are not who we really are in our deepest nature. That's also one of the useful things about them (and a point that I skirted around in my post above but didn't make strongly enough). When you have spent your whole life thinking, "I'm just a tortured soul, cut off from God, I suffer in a unique way," or "I'm one of the responsible people who hold society together by always doing the right thing," or whatever enneagram type you are, then you find out that lots of people have what you thought were your unique collection of traits, it helps you to see that there's more to you than your personality quirks, preferences, fears, etc.
I'm not saying this very well... it's helpful when you can see that they enneagram type or the Myers-Briggs type is just a costume, a role, a suit of clothes... that there is more to you than this, that this role can change, that YOU can change.
This "type" is not all of who you really are. It's the mental/emotional/personality clothing that you have worn up to now. You can grow, and you will NOT be changing your essential nature. Your essential nature by definition cannot be changed. These typologies are useful for understanding yourself and others but they are not set in concrete, nor should they be.
These are just tools. You said it perfectly here
Quote: It has been said "the map is not the territory." A model no matter how complex, is only an attempt to represent something that is.
And the map changes as we get to know the territory better and better.
Sometimes it helps me to defocus on the daily stuff and focus on the map a little. Stepping back and gaining perspective is a good thing.
Lil - interesting about "anger" being the unhealthy side of the "2". My approach to anger has always been deny, deny and submerge my anger. Most people perceive me as "Miss Merry Sunshine". Of course, the ones you live with, your H, your children etc...are rarely fooled by that for long. So...I'm sure my H is aware of my anger no matter how submerged and denied. I am certain that he knows it is there now although I have shown it toward him in almost no way at all. I have shown more toward the kids in response to their behaviors than to H. He was absolutely nasty last night - his holiday blues are still there along with the tendonitis in his hip. So, he's in no mood to deal with the anger that he feels seething under my exterior. I suppose that is what is maintaining the distance (not sexual distance but general distance). H is mostly only angry with me when he has already sensed my anger. I guess the truth is that timely, healthy expression of my thoughts, angry or otherwise is where my work needs to be.
I'm still seeing how long it takes for H to mention sex or take any action about it. I plan to wait at least through Christmas and once that has come and gone, address it. I figure it is kind of an experiment to see how long he really will go and allowing the time to go by will let his tendonitis heal and hopefully his holiday depression to ease. Then the excuses will have faded. What can he say then?
Karen, I like that you're reframing things in terms of an experiment...implies that you have an element of detachment and are not making yourself too stressed out.
I think it's really hard to know when to step in and help things along, versus allowing the situation to unfold and giving our partners the chance to step it up. I don't have the answer to this.
Well Journey, I'm seeing it as having little choice in the matter. I could probably have sex with H if I did all the work and then later feel more frustrated and undesirable or I could bring it up, we could have an argument, then I will feel ungrateful and nagging and he will feel like "See, who would want to have sex with someone who just doensn't understand all I am going through." There just isn't any use in that. So, I will enjoy Christmas with my babies and sundry friends and relatives and pretend that I am an LD preggo (hard to be LD when I am sporting this tremendous rack right now!!).
Karen, knowing that when the 2 is stressed, she moves toward being an angry 8 gives you the option to be otherwise.
Here are the healthy and average levels of the 8. Right now I see you stuck at the red spot-- you don't have to stay there
Quote: Profile Summary for Enneagram Type Eight
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become self-restrained and magnanimous, merciful and forbearing, mastering self through their self-surrender to a higher authority. Courageous, willing to put self in serious jeopardy to achieve their vision and have a lasting influence. May achieve true heroism and historical greatness.
Level 2: Self-assertive, self-confident, and strong: have learned to stand up for what they need and want. A resourceful, "can do" attitude and passionate inner drive.
Level 3: Decisive, authoritative, and commanding: the natural leader others look up to. Take initiative, make things happen: champion people, provider, protective, and honorable, carrying others with their strength.
Average Levels
Level 4: Self-sufficiency, financial independence, and having enough resources are important concerns: become enterprising, pragmatic, "rugged individualists," wheeler-dealers. Risk-taking, hardworking, denying own emotional needs.
Level 5: Begin to dominate their environment, including others: want to feel that others are behind them, supporting their efforts. Swaggering, boastful, forceful, and expansive: the "boss" whose word is law. Proud, egocentric, want to impose their will and vision on everything, not seeing others as equals or treating them with respect.
Level 6: Become highly combative and intimidating to get their way: confrontational, belligerent, creating adversarial relationships. Everything a test of wills, and they will not back down. Use threats and reprisals to get obedience from others, to keep others off balance and insecure. However, unjust treatment makes others fear and resent them, possibly also band together against them.
If we stick with the metaphor of the enneagram as a map, you have the option of taking another route when you find out you're on a dead-end road.
Quote: it's helpful when you can see that they enneagram type or the Myers-Briggs type is just a costume, a role, a suit of clothes... that there is more to you than this, that this role can change, that YOU can change.
this is not what I'm reading at all. Every desscription says that these traits are based on innate preferences, with which we are born, and can NOT be changed. If you're talking about choosing a suit, based on its fit, and not a subjective style...it "fits" because of its size and shape relative to your own, and that is something over which we have little or no control. If you are talking about "styling", well...I certainly wouldn't have chosen the one I've got, that's for sure. I would say these tendancies are more akin to a leopard's spots. There is no right or wrong number or distribution of spots. But you're unique combination might make you better suited to say...do most of your hunting at night, rather than in the daytime. As a tool, it helps to identify and leverage your strengths, and work around your weaknesses, and relate with others. Thats not to say that there can't be "growth", as no one is a pure "I" or "E" or "whatever". but a complete change? I don't think so.
-- I was really addressing others when I said that stuff...