Enneagram Side Quest Continued: Type Misidentification, 5s and 8s

    For a rather longish period of my life--from discovering the Enneagram in 11th grade until my senior year of high school I misidentified as an 8.  If you go to one popular Enneagram website (specifically, here) they have an entire section of their website devoted to type misidentification.  There are particular types that tend to confuse themselves with one another or have trouble discerning which types they are.  9s and 4s, I think, are types that have a tendency to misidentify, and women in general have a tendency to misidentify as 2s.
  I don't think it is very common for a 5 to misidentify as a 8.  Part of my trouble was that most descriptions of 5s assume introversion (although it is normally acknowledged that it is not essential for 5s to be introverted or extroverted), and I am not introverted.  The other part of the trouble was that high school was a particularly good time for me and I found myself over-identifying with my "arrow of integration".  (If you are an Enneagram newbie, "arrows of integration" is a descriptive term Enneagram theorists use to describe the pattern of natural direction of growth that "personalities" take.  If an 8 is a 5's arrow of integration, that means a healthy 5 who is learning and growing an "integrating", that is moving in the right direction in terms of identity-formation, will begin to acquire and take on the characteristics of a healthy 8.  There are also "arrows of disintegration"--meaning the habits and patterns of personality that people take on under stress or failing to deal well with stress.  5s take on the negative patterns or behaviors of 7s).
   There are worse things than over-identifying with one's "arrow of integration"--over-identifying with the good qualities one takes on when moving in a healthy direction.  Certainly there are worse things.  However, it was still unhelpful and proved to be a barrier to self-understanding.  This worked itself out in two ways primarily.  Firstly, I had a hard time coming to terms with the contemplative part of my personality.  It is only so possible for someone who is under the age of 18 to be contemplative.  Harder still for an extrovert to discover that one has inner depths or life at all, especially when I was certainly not prone to be caught up by feelings (NT all the way).  It took me until my first year of college to discover I had anything like a soul--a real inner life with thoughts and feelings that were more than just a response to my external environment.  It took me three or four years after that to discover that the contemplative life was something of a calling for me.  I have always been someone entranced by the complexities and beauties of the external world.  It was difficult to allow myself to be called away to invest in the internal world, a mirror image of God himself.
  Conceiving of myself primarily as a "doer" (as 8s are) rather than a "thinker" (as 5s most certainly are) meant pressuring myself to activity to the point of exhaustion in the name of self-development and self-actualization. I still remember the moment it occurred to me that I might be a 5 and not an 8.  It came at a moment when I knew I was doing something wrong in terms of self-actualization, but it took quite some time to move from "maybe not an 8" to "definitely a 5".
   There is something incredibly important that motivates both 5s and 8s: the desire to have power.  The way they go about the acquisition of power is very different.  One Enneagram book I read (I think it was The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective) adroitly put it: "5s believe that knowledge is power.  8s believe that power is power."  One of the chief struggles I have had is giving up the desire to know exhaustively and therefore be in control.  God was also merciful to me very early in my life in showing me that I had a choice: I could use my knowledge and insight and discernment into human personality into manipulating people into believing me and trusting me so that I could have power over them or lead in the way I wanted to.  Or, I could refuse the path of power and manipulation and choose one of service and life in the Spirit of God instead.  One was a path of dead works in which I could build a little kingdom that corresponded to my desires and visions of the way I thought things should be in the church or the world . . . it would only have been a little kingdom that would have crumbled eventually . . . but I could have tried to invest in that path.  Instead I chose the path of self-denial and trying to find out what it meant to obey the Spirit and actualize his will rather than my own.  A tricky business fraught with risk and failure . . . but ultimately it is one built with the precious metals of love and joy and peace rather that anxiety, self-will and egotistical self-determination.  But I digress.
  The other thing that really convinced me I was a 5 was a cursory read through the section on 5s in The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective .  I remember going to a bookstore (Borders, alas) on some afternoon, and reading through the chapter on 5s and saying, "This has nothing to do with me!  I must not be a 5."  I was very annoyed and walked away from it disappointed for its lack of insight.  Then I went back the next week and read the same chapter and said, "Oh, darn, this is me exactly."  I suppose sometimes it takes a while for the scales to fall from one's eyes.
    The central conviction for me at that time concerned avarice or greed.  5s always want more.  Not more money, usually--which can be confusing since that is the kind of greed that we speak of (superficially perhaps) most often.  But 5s rarely have "enough" in terms of time and knowledge and silence and space to themselves--and they think if they have more they will be able to get it right or that things will be better.  That is a part of my personality that grips me less these days, but it used to be central and driving and sometimes paralyzing.
  There is probably one other reason why I misidentified as a 5: generally speaking, our culture is hypersensitive to any sort of assertiveness or inner strength possessed by women.  If you are a "strong" woman, you must also be a "domineering" one, and if you are a natural leader, you must also be one who struggles with be controlling, manipulative, etc.  Or so much of our society is inclined to think.  I believe I was inclined to think of myself as much more aggressive and assertive than I was naturally simply because I had some natural aggression and assertiveness.  I also have a fair bit of natural courage (in the Aristotelian sense of "natural"), which I come by honestly: both of my parents, but especially my mother, have unusual amounts of courage and ability to resist what other people are doing to do what they believe to be right or just.  There were probably also some natural obstacles in my childhood that exaggerated the 8ish traits in myself.  8s are inclined to overcome challenges, but some of us get good at overcoming challenges simply because we have to and it "masquerades" so to speak as 8ish qualities.  In my case, "masquerade" is probably too harsh of a word because of how 5 characteristics and 8 characteristics are interconnected.
  I would welcome any type misidentification stories you might have.  Recently, a friend of mine realized or reasserted that he better identified with 9 than 1.  (Those INTP 9s boggle my mind!)  I can't wait to see what kind of insights he will have due to that shift.  I had hard time understanding one of my ISTJ friends until I realized she was a 1 and not a 6.