(Disclaimer: I make no pretensions to objectivity in the following post. I speak only from my personal experience and although I have a few working hypotheses about why certain patterns have recurred, they are only hypothesis, not conclusion. Part of my motivation for writing this post is that I want to write a future post about the difference between INFJ 9s and INTP 9s and how most descriptions of the Enneagram describe how INFJ 9s function and are less applicable to INTP 9s (and conceivably, other types of 9s). I should also say that I have had friends who are INFJ 9s and INTP 9s in about equal proportion and at similar levels of intimacy: we were friends, but not necessarily confidants. As for 5s . . . alas, I must say that the 5 I know best is myself, and my information is on the one hand, based on a much smaller sample size, and on the other hand, far more intimate and detailed!)
Not Type Misidentification, Type Conflagration! Fire, explosions, what is otherwise known as the chemical process of combustion! The following post is my own personal musing on why 5s and 9s might not get along so well, especially when both types are in average or unhealthy levels. This has to do with the fact that while both types are superficially similar, they are moved by alien and often times opposed forces. I should say that this musing comes out of my own experience as a 5 having oftentimes explosive relationships with 9s (in which my 5-self did all the combustion internally and it didn't quite register for a 9 even after being confronted. I used to work so hard to make a 9 mad! And then feel gratified that I managed to get a response at all. More recently, I have made my peace with 9s, but I did spend a great deal of time puzzling through the relationship anti-chemistry before coming to peace with the most peace-loving of the Enneagram numbers.
The main issues are of engagement, intellectual curiosity, contentment, and intensity. 9s, I think, are particularly attractive to me because of their intellectual curiosity. They are curious about everything, oftentimes to no practical end--simply because they happen to find most things at least somewhat interesting. Other types can be intellectually engaged, but they aren't necessarily curious about everything, and while 1s are often very intellectual, they are also intellectual for practical reasons. They want to do something about it, and oftentimes their search for knowledge is grounded in a quest for justice or some other ideal. 4w5 can also be intellectual, but oftentimes their curiosity is limited to the one field in which they are engaged. 7s and 6s can also be intellectually engaged, but I'm not sure that 6s are really open-minded and curious (because they are so caught up in their quest for inner guidance) unless they are terrifically healthy, and the intellectual power of 7s is often invested in a million different places. 9s at least give the initial impression of being as intellectually engaged as 5s, and perhaps for their sheer open-mindedness they are very likely to be open to having an intellectual conversation about anything. This is obviously a hook for a 5, who is most likely used to having thoughts or being directed toward conversations that are almost exclusively intellectually oriented.
9s are also fairly undemanding emotionally, and project acceptance and peaceful relaxation, and affection most of the time which to the 5 is something like finding a batch of chocolate chip cookies waiting on your kitchen table that you didn't expect. 5s spend most of their life being so intensely involved in whatever they are thinking about that relaxation is just foreign. At least one Enneagram book I've read claims that the 5 personality forms out of contact with overbearing and demanding emotional environments, so the facts that 9s are chill and oftentimes want closeness without having impossible emotional demands is also a breath of fresh air to 9s. 5s are like, "I didn't even know people came in this variety. You mean I don't have to work hard all the time and have people still scold me for not being what they want me to be? Imagine that!" I doubt that 5s are all that good at self-acceptance because we have such a hard time just getting to know that our feelings and our bodies exist and are important, let alone getting around to accepting them as good and necessary parts of being human. In those ways, 9s have a lot of qualities that 5s lack and need to see in order for them to become more human and more present.
But then the other shoe drops and the full picture of the 9 starts to fill out and it turns out that the less easily seen side of the 9 is not one easily fathomed by the 5 (who of course works very hard to fathom everything in her path). Part of the accepting, contented nature of the 9 has to do with the fact that they don't want much of anything from other people much of the time (including things they should want) and this is because they aren't engaged enough to have normal give-and-take relationship sorts of expectations unless they are out of the average levels of development and into the healthy levels of development. And disengagement is just not something a 5 can wrap their minds around. 5s are engaged in everything, intensely, all the time! There is never enough knowledge of the world, and that intellectual curiosity and focus is just as often directed toward people as toward things. The disengagement of the 9 is utterly foreign and sometimes utterly anathema to the average 5, and is often the source of upset.
Another point of deeper division is intellectual engagement. 9s can be idealists without solid interest in theory or "scientific method". If the 9 has a strong 1wing or is of the NFJ variety, the 9 can be more interested in ideals or fancy than discovering through hard and sometimes harsh thinking whether something is true, which is oftentimes something the 5 is devoted to. A healthy 5 is most interested in accuracy, a non-attached, discipline vision of the world. Average or unhealthy 5s pursue this and pursue certainty in accuracy--but with unhealthy attachments to both, getting wrapped up in theories more than in reality. But a 5 is going to be interested in either proving her claims or at least advancing her claims or knowledge. She wants to make progress and be able to check something off the list of knowing. Knowing isn't just interesting or abstract--it is a disciplined way of life to which one must be thoroughly converted! (Ahem, sorry, got carried away there.) 9s don't found their identity on the pursuit of knowledge and therefore aren't invested in it in the sometimes mad way 5s are. This can be a source of frustration to both, for obvious reasons.
The final point concerns affection. 9s, I think, are naturally inclined to have some degree of affection toward everyone. They are warm-hearted and open-hearted. 5s are not. If 5s have affection, they have deep affection toward people they have come to love slowly and deeply over time. It requires a concerted effort for them to be open-hearted and they are either private (or secretive) or they are deeply invested in a relationship. I defy you to find a 5 superficially invested in someone he or she claims to have affection or friendship for. 5s do not bother with superficial investments or attachments. On the other side of things, 9s have a terrible time coming to know themselves and know the ways in which they are distinct from other people. Therefore, they have a difficult time being genuinely and deeply engaged in another person or in multiple persons. But they don't have a problem being superficially engaged (most of the time) and oftentimes with people with whom they would claim to have a great deal of affection or even love for. That's enough to drive a 5 absolutely mad . . . and alas, the poor 9 still doesn't know what's going on, partially because they aren't necessarily present and clued in enough to even notice. And remember, 5s at their best and at their worst are extraordinarily attentive and perceptive--so they are cataloging the 9s out-of-touchness and either making up a paranoid tale about it or throwing in the towel because they are deeply opposed to making their needs known--actually asking for something or trying to get someone's attention who's unlikely to be good at giving it seems like madness.
So what's a 9 and a 5 to do? It might be dramatic to say that unhealthy 9s and unhealthy 5s are poison for each other, but perhaps not. Average 9s and 5s inclined toward wisdom might have the grace and sense to be aware of opposite inclinations and take care with one another. I imagine with enough shared interests and having just the right personality chemistry cocktail might enough to overcome certain fricative issues, but both types I think are liable to feel misunderstood, and 5s are rejection prone and thus more likely to believe 9s to be ultimately indifferent to them. Healthy 9s and 5s will have less issues since the 9s is able to be more present and engaged and less engaged in wishful thinking. 5s will be less paranoid and rejection-prone and probably more capable of being warm and accepting toward a 9.
Showing posts with label Enneagram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enneagram. Show all posts
Monday, February 4, 2013
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Enneagram and Identity: What makes Enneagram Distinct from Myers-Briggs and All the Rest
I am not claiming to be an expert on the Enneagram or on Myers-Briggs (or the thousand other personality tests and inventories), but from my amateur study of the two, I have reached a couple of preliminary conclusions. As I said in my previous post, I think Myers-Briggs is interested in providing a description of how cognitive processes work in human beings, but makes no claims about what human identity is or ought to be. The Enneagram is different. It has a "narrative" so to speak, about the origin of human personality and the neuroses thereof, and the story of redemption is about a return to the primeval harmony. In most accounts, although some tend to Christianize the Enneagram, the story is what I would call secularized pantheism. The problem is mostly one of being reconnected to the One, but the One is not necessarily Other, nor is the One a discreet Person, as far as I can tell. (Actually, the way the folks on the Enneagram Institute's website tend to talk about the relation between the individual and the One reminds me more of Spinoza's Ethics than anything else, but that may be coincidence. They point to medieval mystic traditions of all sorts, and back to Plato or Pythagoras, if I'm not mistaken.)
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology. In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.
What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity. In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation. Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole. The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing. In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else. And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.
If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves. Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor. The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things. Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures. John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment. And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good). But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things. (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead. God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.) In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly. But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations. Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God. That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.
The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period. It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine. For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire. For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves. The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not . depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment. Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change." The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.
I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs. I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do. For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website. It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world. It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different. But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity. For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!
*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously. Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons. It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with. The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)
Though I am by no means a pantheistic and am not quite sure what I think about "secularized mysticism" of the kind proposed by the folks at the Enneagram Institute*, I do find the Enneagram's understanding of the connection between personality and identity to be one of the most helpful in contemporary psychology. In this, the Enneagram seems to be in tune with what much of Christian mysticism (especially medieval mysticism) has said about personality, and I find this true, helpful, and mostly unsaid in modern settings.
What the Enneagram writers and the Christian mystics (and possibly other mystics) agree on is this: personality--the sum of habit, inclination, predisposition, orientation, and desire in a human being is not necessarily helpful, and it is not necessarily essential to our identity. In fact, personality (our inclinations, habits, predispositions, orientations, likes, dislikes, loves, hatreds) oftentimes gets in the way of true identity formation. Personality is either unshaped or it is misshaped or it needs to be reshaped or finished--and some parts of personality have to be abolished altogether in order for the person to be made whole. The Enneagram folks will say that every person is a sum of all the Enneagram points as represented by numbers 1-9, and the number you identify as is the way that your personality has become fixated on a certain thing. In other words, personality--the fact that I am a "5"--is much more about how my soul has wrapped itself around my own brokenness than it is about anything else. And what self-work in the Enneagram is is a way of getting "unfurled"--a way of relaxing into who you really are, a way of easing yourself out of being wrapped up in yourself out of some anxiety or knowledge of some deficiency in yourself or in the world.
If you're even a passing admirer of the work of Martin Luther, perhaps my description of the Enneagram makes it sound like Luther's description of original sin--that human beings are all incurvatus in se--all curved in on themselves. Inflamed with the love of self and cold toward God and neighbor. The way the Spanish mystics such as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola used to describe it, human beings are attached to the wrong things. Part of our cure is being detached from wrong things (mostly creatures, created things) in wrong ways (i.e., idolatrous ways), re-attached to God in the proper way, so that we can also be present but non-attached to creatures. John of the Cross' famous Dark Night of the Soul is all about this journey of proper attachment and non-attachment. And for him there are two dark nights--the first is "sensible" (about stuff: feelings, experiences, etc) and the second is "intellectual" (about the work of reason, the intellect, knowing, the possession of the good). But both nights are about deprivation--God deprives first the sensible part of human beings, and then the whole intellect of knowledge, sensation, use, in order to correct their disordered attachments to wrong things. (This is why the theological virtues--faith, hope, and love must lead. God must lead where we cannot even see, especially where we cannot we have gone wrong.) In other words, this correction in the form of deprivation occurs in order to reform identities properly. But what ends up happening is that the mature person, having died to self as one might also call it, has become less involved with their own inclinations. Those inclinations are purified, reformed, remade, brought back into submission to reason and to faith and ultimately to God. That is the work of the dark night and that is the work of sanctification.
The idea that we can love the wrong things in the wrong way is by no means unique to the medieval period. It's essential to the whole scheme of virtue ethics and can be found in different forms in both Aristotle and Augustine. For Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics of course moral virtue is about the proper response (the mean between extremes) to emotion or desire. For Augustine, having the right loves is essential to living well, but we need the Spirit of God to give us love and to reshape our loves. The Enneagram is helpful because it is friendly to the idea that we need to change and be reshaped, and that our identity does not . depend on our behavior or even on what we see in ourselves at this very moment. Myers-Briggs can sometimes be used superficially--"See, look, the MBTI says I'm like this, so don't ask me to change." The Enneagram calls us to deeper observation and to the continual work of transformation.
I'm not knocking Myers-Briggs. I think cognitive process theory is helpful, especially when what we struggle with is the fact that someone gets at the world differently than I do. For that, it's a nice idea to do a nice jaunt through the pages of a good MB book or website. It can be a great aide for self-knowledge or even for just helping one think more clearly about how to play well with others or with the world. It can be helpful for self-acceptance or acceptance of fundamental non-moral ways in which human beings are different. But I don't think it addresses the problem of transformation or discerning the difference between personality and identity. For that, the Enneagram is an unexpected ally to the Christian agenda, even if the Christian response to questions about identity and transformation go deeper and are not, I hope, a sophisticated form of pantheistic monism!
*I am much too much a supernaturalist to be happy with any sort of system that doesn't take mysticism seriously. Either someone is communing with God in a mystical experience, or being distracted by demons. It is nothing to play with and vague notions about "the One" do leave me concerned about who exactly people are talking with. The enemy does take every advantage, whether we want him to or not.)
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
A Little Side Quest: Correlating Enneagram and Myers-Briggs
Two of my favorite play-toys that are my favorite partly because they are useful and helpful and partly because they are fun are the two "personality inventories" called Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. I am curious about them both. They are both helpful to me in different ways. Myers-Briggs is helpful to me in understanding the mechanism of personality--how exactly thoughts, feelings, and perception goes down in human consciousness. Its value (as far as I know) is more phenomenological than anything else. It explains more that you have x or y preference for viewing and interacting with the world not why. The more serious and formal the study of Myers Briggs the less it claims to be interested in telling you what an ENTP is other than a person whose preferences for cognitive processes stack up in a particular way, beginning with Extroverted iNtuition and ending with Extroverted Sensing. The more serious one gets about Enneagram on the other hand, the more one learns that the system concerns motive, virtue, and identity more than anything else. (I am nowhere near understanding why a nonagon is important. I do understand that number values are employed, not in any numerological way, but because number values are neutral unlike most appellation.)
So the little pet theory or interest I have is how the two correlate . . . and it would be nice to understand eventually--perhaps before I die--why they correlate. But if you wouldn't mind leaving a comment telling me what your Myers-Briggs letters is and your Enneagram is, I would be greatly entertained. From time to time I shall perhaps post some articles or thoughts about why such and such MB type correlates often with an E type.
If you are interested in playing my little game, but don't know what your MB letters or E numbers are, please see this site for Myers Briggs (I also like this one, but not for its inventory) and this site for Enneagram. These are my favorites for various reasons. There are certainly other ones.
A starting example: The author is an Myers Briggs ENTP and an Enneagram 5. ENTPs are rare enough that I don't know for sure if I've met another ENTP 5. The chief irregularity according to the Enneagram theory is that 5s tend to be introverted, not extroverted. My preference for extroversion is low, but there is no question in my mind that my Extroverted iNtuition vastly outstrips my Introverted Thinking. It seems to me also that I get less extroverted as I get older. Also, when I first became introduced to the Enneagram in high school, I misidentified as an 8 (the 5's arrow of integration). While that seems to bespeak high school as a time of positive integration for me, it also underscores the extroverted dimension of my personality.
So the little pet theory or interest I have is how the two correlate . . . and it would be nice to understand eventually--perhaps before I die--why they correlate. But if you wouldn't mind leaving a comment telling me what your Myers-Briggs letters is and your Enneagram is, I would be greatly entertained. From time to time I shall perhaps post some articles or thoughts about why such and such MB type correlates often with an E type.
If you are interested in playing my little game, but don't know what your MB letters or E numbers are, please see this site for Myers Briggs (I also like this one, but not for its inventory) and this site for Enneagram. These are my favorites for various reasons. There are certainly other ones.
A starting example: The author is an Myers Briggs ENTP and an Enneagram 5. ENTPs are rare enough that I don't know for sure if I've met another ENTP 5. The chief irregularity according to the Enneagram theory is that 5s tend to be introverted, not extroverted. My preference for extroversion is low, but there is no question in my mind that my Extroverted iNtuition vastly outstrips my Introverted Thinking. It seems to me also that I get less extroverted as I get older. Also, when I first became introduced to the Enneagram in high school, I misidentified as an 8 (the 5's arrow of integration). While that seems to bespeak high school as a time of positive integration for me, it also underscores the extroverted dimension of my personality.
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