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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarrCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a windy Friday afternoon.

So we're jumping into the social six and the keyword for the social six is in Spanish, in English duty, duty or obligation. And remembering that the background passion for all of the subtypes of the six is fear. We've also been playing with angst as a keyword there.

But it's funny because I've been sitting with fear versus angst. And I think angst is a better description of a condition that the six might find themselves in. But fear might be a better word to describe the passion, right? The engine, the motivating, sort of the battery source of the six. The six scans their environment from a place of fear for danger and through that projects danger onto the world and sometimes even manifests danger where there wouldn't have been any uh previously and so that's that self-fulfilling prophecy that's that um see you know see that means i need to continue to scan for fear right so there's that pattern that reinforces itself

And angst doesn't, as much as I like the word angst, it doesn't quite lend itself as clearly to that passion.

So let's look at duty. And the other thing we need to keep in mind as we dive into the subtypes of the six is two things. One is that the six and the four have the most diversity in the subtypes. And secondly, that another way sixes are presented in the Enneagram is along the lines of phobic and counterphobic. So you can roughly think about this as people who have more of a flight response or more of a fight response. Do they move toward the danger or do they move away from it?

So all that's just background as we begin our translation work. Doody, here's what I call a Prussian character. The social six is cold, very formal. Kant, for example, was a great philosopher. He was Prussian, and the Prussians had this type of character. It feels great love for precision and intolerance for ambiguity. This is precisely the complete opposite of the conservation six or self-preservation six who is warm and feels too much permissiveness for ambiguity among the nazis there were many social sixes their behavior is very visible this is the line the party line the line that defines who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and what we need to do and we do it very efficiently in efficiency the six the social six is similar to a three.

Ichazo used the word duty, which is more than just being concerned with duty, as social sixes are primarily concerned with the point of reference. They have the mind of a legislator with clear categories. Their intellectual orientation is to know very well where the north is, where the south is, where the west and the east is. And if they were ever to become human beings, they would first need to go crazy and forget all the reference points. They need to forget duty, no duty, and connect with instinct and intuition with life.

So here's another reference to Nazis. Sixes are... The Nazi party comes up a lot. Hitler as a six. And the German identity before Hitler and after Hitler. This need for precision. So a certain kind of, it's got to be this way, it can't be that way. This efficiency.

So poor sixes are always getting... uh tagged with nazism um and of course uh that's that i i think that the job that that's doing is twofold one is it helps us it's always helpful to have like a country or a culture or another handle in mind and so germany in general or they call the prussians that german character is six-ish

And then I think part of the reason that teachers oftentimes reference the Nazis is because it shows a few things. It shows that

I guess what we need to keep in mind with the six is that there can be a clustering or a herd energy of this good guys and bad guys and the good guys need to stick together. The six has a very... There's a lot of we energy in the six. There's a lot of wanting to be with... An inside an institution and it shows how dangerous that thinking can be on a global stage, even if individually thinking is quite understandable.

Something kind of falls apart, you know, duty, right? This duty, I need to do what's right. I need to have a role. I need to know that my role fits inside of a system that's right. This need for orientation is really significant. Yeah.

So duty with respect to right and wrong, duty with respect to a role, duty with respect to a job or an institution or an organization.

So let's hear the Transformation in the Social Six by Gerardo Ortiz. And I love this. He starts out, let's just listen to the style of the writing. And if you've been along for this, you maybe can go back and remember what the fives writing sounded like and the fours writing sounded like. Listen to the writing of a six here.

It seems a very difficult task to make a self-assessment of my process over time and not fall into the conscious or unconscious temptation to favor myself in the evaluation, pretending to sell the idea that I am currently better. However, recognizing the great subjectivity in which I can fall by doing this self-evaluation forces me to be stricter and more demanding when applying this test to myself, making an exercise of honesty.

I mean, this person is really in their six energy as they're writing that. Can you feel that? First of all, he's saying, oh, this is good because it forces me to be stricter and more demanding. He's applying this rigor to the task of his self-assessment process. There's a lot of there's so much doubt. I need to make sure that I don't fall into temptation. So it's just really rich with six language here.

And this is sort of the sweet quality of sixes too, is it's like they have a lot of doubt. And I almost find myself wanting to put my arm around the author and be like, you're good, man. It's okay. But that's a bit of the fear reassurance loop that sixes can fall into. They kind of, in their way of being, they need reassurance from the outside. And giving them that can serve them in the short term, but in the long term, no. It potentially exacerbates the passion of fear, the operating mechanism of fear.

With this preamble made explicit, I can refer to my conclusion, sharing that a significant element in this diagnosis is the feeling of well-being with myself, achieved in recent times. This is a real novelty, as for many years in my life I felt a deep rejection of being as I was, and maintained a fierce fight against myself. This felt sensation, as Eugene Gendlin calls it in his book on focusing, of deep well-being, pleasure, and joy for being as I am, is the seal of guarantee that I'm not deceiving myself, and that this appreciation I now feel for myself is the fruit conquered over years of work and commitment to my personal transformation.

That's quite lovely, like he's... He's letting in joy, not merely for its own sake. Joy, just simple joy. Joy of being himself. Joy of being alive. Joy of well-being. Not simply as delightful, but also as the fruits of his work. That he can feel appreciation for himself. And that's his permission to let doubt go.

I recognize that several characteristic and defining traits of my personality have not ceased to manifest. However, I can confidently say that their intensity has decreased. I have not stopped feeling anxiety, but it is no longer an experience that traps and takes hold of me. Now it is lighter and sporadic in its presentation and most of the time controllable. I'm learning to be patient and not to get angry when things do not go as I intend or do not have control over them. Likewise, I've incorporated flexibility into my behavioral repertoire and my body through dance and body expression, which helps me not to obsess over the idea that everything has to be done according to my codes or points of view. I've also managed to significantly reduce judging.

And, you know, as we as we explore judging, I want to refer back to that question I posed in the introduction to the six was around guilt, the guilt that the six feels that they might be the cause, the underlying cause of the separation. And

So therefore, in that framing, then judgment is above and before all else self-judgment. He says here, recognizing that this aspect, judgment, is intimately intertwined with self-esteem. As every time I made a judgment, I was indirectly manifesting with arrogance that the people I put on trial were inferior to me.

And yet sixes don't have a superiority problem. They have an inferiority problem. Sixes, I think Richard Rohr says this, have the smallest sense of self. So they feel that somehow they are smaller than they really are compared to the eight who actually feels that they're bigger than they are, has a bigger energy.

I'm no longer afraid to show myself, nor do I feel guilty for not being as others want me to be. Episodes of inadequacy appear less and less intensely. So again, that guilt, that fear that one might be attacked, one might be found out, I'm still working through this guilt quality of the six, and I'm not quite sure if I... have grasped it and how it operates.

Let's keep diving in.

By making decisions from strength and courage, I have felt my self-esteem increase and I have been able to let go of the belief that everything is going to go wrong. This same happens to me when I dissent from authorities and express it, and also when I handle frustration better, accepting that I cannot please everyone and stopping imagining what others might think of me while avoiding self-judgment and judging others.

Again, that fear doesn't feel so profoundly connected to guilt to me. The fear just feels more core, feels natural. Everything is going to go wrong. The world is dangerous. Someone's going to hurt me. Someone's going to disappoint me. They're going to abuse or lie to me.

I don't know if the six, when I think about guilt, I think, and I somehow deserve it. And I don't know if sixes show up that way so clearly to me. So there might be guilt about like, I made something out of nothing. There might be guilt about like, I brought this on myself. Six might feel that kind of guilt. I did it again. Six might feel the pain of operating from doubt. There's a lot of doubt for a six.

But this feeling of being somehow responsible, that feels more one-ish or four-ish to me. Because there's a certain quality of largeness in that, you know, in the four, I am uniquely broken or in the one, I am bad.

And it has a different quality. Sorry, I'm kind of rabbit holing on this a little bit, but as I mentioned before, I'm still trying to get the feeling of the six more deeply. And so I'm really poking at guilt here and the nature of guilt.

describing his development. He continues, I trust myself. I'm more secure in my physical appearance, the energy that my presence radiates, my knowledge and wisdom, my sexual power in touching and being touched. I live with pleasure. I enjoy it. I live pleasure with enjoyment. I enjoy it. That's a pretty rough translation.

I'll just say I live pleasure with enjoyment. I savor it. What helps on the path? I confess that in my case the path is still being made, and nevertheless I have walked with decision.

So you see that kind of... Six language, and I'm not picking on Gerardo at all. I think this is, you know, a perfectly humble way of communicating. But it's the sixes, the six plays out their doubt. You know, I think when I contact my six energy, the sort of hemming and hawing and caveating and look, this is just my opinion and I haven't really thought it out well, but I do want it like that, that whole thing. That's kind of maybe one way into the six energy, right? And it comes from a really good place. It maybe comes from not wanting to make oneself be bigger or more authoritative, right? You're basically saying, I don't have authority here. You really want to reassure the other person that you don't have authority, right?

And while there are all sorts of healthy reasons for that, if you are a Sikh, if you've made an art form out of this practice, learning to actually say, you know, I actually do have authority here and either declaring it or just living it, as Gerardo says, like just sort of coming with that presence, letting yourself embiggen. That can be some of the work there.

I confess that in my case the path is still being made and nevertheless I have walked with decisive steps thanks to unblocking or completing through therapeutic exercises intimate situations that have been barriers in my life. For instance, facing fear.

expressing my disagreement with authority and defending my position now so this is something that's really key is that for some sixes the work will have to be to defend their position and disagree with authority however a common thing that sixes experience is they think they need to do that but the authority itself is already experiencing the six in disagreement

the six sort of says, I'm going to need to stand up for myself. But the authority figure is like, this person keeps kind of nitpicking or either passive aggressively or actually just aggressively sort of objecting to my things. And so the six sometimes isn't in contact with how critical they can be. This is why the six, I think, in terms of titles i like the loyal skeptic because it both communicates their loyalty to institution as well as this skepticism they're always in relationship to authority doesn't mean they're always following authority they might be rebelling against authority they might be seeking authority but they're always in relationship to authority and in their less integrated states authority is always somewhere out there never in here

By expressing my disagreement with authority and defending my position, I manage to act with determination and strength, with courage, feeling the impulse regardless of what they say. On the other hand, practicing compassionate love with myself has helped me to heal from self-demand and self-criticism.

Therapeutic theater has helped me. The SAT program used and uses a lot of therapeutic theater. I'm really interested in exploring that more. I think that's really promising.

Meditation, body work, more particularly working with my parental figures has helped me. It has allowed me to detach from my mother's toxicity, a very fearful woman who breastfed me with her insecurity. That's tough. As well as to shake off the gray shadow of a father without courage.

So his mother was fear and his father was a lack of bravery in his internal world.

Knowing, recognizing, and accepting myself as a coward has been a painful and sad mission, and it has also been the catapult that has launched me to come out of myself and start to dare. I have learned to live without a previous script, with a certainty of having the courage to face whatever comes, knowing that at every moment I will have the right answer. I'm learning to tolerate uncertainty.

And he says here, I think this is valuable. I recognize my fears, doubts, anxiety, and ambiguity, although paradoxically, I find serenity and joy with less mental dispersion.

So I think the six lives in fear. The six lives in simulating these paranoid chess games. And of course, not doing that is wonderful.

But the six, I think, The six is probably so inclined to sort of have this self slapping on the wrist. Ah, you did it again. You know, someone, I think it was Rohr again, this great word called scrupulousness. And it's basically like OCD before there was OCD and it was a problem in the church. So it's scrupulousness was described, it was a way of describing certain priests or people in the church who were like over, they were getting too like rigid and like got to do the rules just right and really needing to do all that. And so, again, I'm not saying that if people with OCD are in their six energy, I don't know enough about OCD to make that claim. But that is very, the thing that's six-ish about that is, again, like, focusing all your energy on the external getting that right as if that will make the inside okay when in fact it's the opposite and so i think you can't just say i'll stop doing that it's about connecting with your inner authority like like he says at the beginning about connecting with his joy his well-being as a sign of his okayness

Gestalt, body therapy work, energy work, breathing, body expression, holotropic breathing exercises with classical music. He really credits so many different modalities, which I really appreciate.

He's a therapist. And I love that, you know, working with the wounds of others generated in me the effect of the drop of water that constantly falls and by force of hitting the stone gradually wears it down.

sacred plants, yopo, I don't know, yopo. He's done it all.

Connecting with his ancestors who have been his teachers, his helpers, his healers.

More plant ceremonies, yahi, I think that's ayahuasca.

a mystical presence manifested in me in a deep voice that emerged from within, called me to surrender to the divine, recognizing in all existence and all people the manifestation of God. And yeah, if we go back to angst and fear and describing that wound as a loss of the paternal father,

In a way, I think a healing journey for the six is reclaiming a connection with God. It just might be a different kind of relationship with God. As he described here, this was a voice that called from within and recognizing everyone as manifestation of God, which is different than maybe, and I don't know what his own childhood religious experience was, but that might be a different...

a relationship with God than imagining, you know, a paternal figure outside of us kind of looking at us. That relationship, then you're constantly going to be living in fear if I'm living in his good graces or bad graces, right? And maybe that's the guilt, really. It's just sort of like, am I in... There's a camera that's watching me. Am I getting it right or am I getting it wrong? Am I with the good ones or am I with the bad ones? Am I on the path or am I off the path?

And so living as if there's this view from the outside onto oneself that maybe starts to speak to that guilt, the connection of guilt and fear. Like why do I need to be so oriented toward others

Um, one reason is I think the actual danger out there. Um, and so that's, it's one way of describing it. And I think then the other way is the guilt that there's some feeling, some, the fear is not just a danger. The fear is also that I am in sin essentially. Um, and, and, and underneath that fear, a guilt that I really am in sin, that I'm not getting it right. That's where that scrupulousness I think can emerge.

Okay, I think we're wrapping up the social six here.

I don't know Gurdjieff's stop technique. It helps to meditate and even practice Gurdjieff's stop technique where several times a day we stop to respond to what am I doing? What am I thinking? And what am I feeling?

Balancing compassionate love with devotional love. which is almost always the most developed. You know, I think sixes, that makes sense that sixes have, they might have more access to devotional love than they do to compassion love. So love for the other, whereas like love from the self maybe is one way to frame that.

Generating self-confidence. And I noticed that in the literature about sixes. I think the literature tends to be kind to sixes. And I think part of that is because they're maybe sort of people who could use some kindness from themselves, from others. And they also could use some reassurance. But in that reassurance, it has to serve the purpose of your own capacity and facility for self-soothing and self-assurance and self-confidence.

The optimal state of an Enneagram type 6 social subtype, in my opinion, is the full acceptance of oneself and one's fears. Acceptance of one's fears, not the cessation of fears. This acceptance will allow me to relax and conceive a deep state of gratitude, joy, and self-confidence. Freed from the sense of duty, I will be able to choose the life I want to live every day, trusting with my heart and intuition, feeling loved for what I am and not for what I do. And that's kind of a connection to the three.

In this way, the next step will be to live my emotions freely, containing myself with kindness, being sober, but with a sense of humor, optimistic, joyful, experiencing life with serenity, calm and peace, open to fun, enjoyment and pleasure. I will express my unconditional and non-judgmental love, balanced in the three loves. I will show myself and be assertive and trustworthy without explaining or justifying actions, accepting error and the ability to correct in myself and others. I will live creating a world of possibilities with more tranquility, facing what comes at the moment without thinking about hypotheses, risks, or danger.

Those are nice commitments that he's making at the end there. And, yeah, I think freed from the sense of duty is probably really scary for a six. I think there's attachment to duty. And my impression of sixes is, you know, compared to, I think, many other types, drawn to being freed from the sense of duty, I think a six would find that quite scary and would also be scared of what would happen to me on the one hand, the danger, and also what would I do to the point of the guilt.

So therefore, I need duty both to avoid dangers because I know that I'm doing the right thing and I'll get a pat on the head as opposed to a slap on the wrist. And also a suppression of guilt, because if I'm doing my duty, then as we learned from the trials, I was just doing my job. There's an absence of guilt because I was doing my job. But we see that that doesn't work.

And so the six has to move into that open space that was described at the beginning of this section of guilt. No orientation, no responsibility, no duty. And I think what the six might find is that they're just fundamentally have goodness in their hearts and they're not going to be some reckless monster. I guess the great irony is that the reckless monsters in history who have been sixes did that in the service of duty rather than the freedom from it.

Okay, that was the social six. We'll do the sexual six next time. See you later.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a rainy gray Thursday morning here in New York.

We're moving on to the six today and I'm excited for that because the six is the type that I feel the weakest on in terms of my understanding of the operating mechanisms behind the six.

And so, yeah, this will be this will be good education for me. And we're going to start with the social six.

But each each type has this little prologue. And so we're going to just read a little bit about the passion of the six overall, which in Spanish is el miedo or fear. Although I've also heard it rendered as angst by Russ Hudson and i think that's a pretty compelling alternative so we'll talk about that in a second. Let's read this translation.

If the nine seeks to overcome the anxiety of separation with forgetfulness or the illusion that it never existed.

The six has a surprising awareness of loss and in the face of it reacts compulsively to defend against the danger inevitably spread in the external world. The passion fear implies a compulsive need not determined by internal or external events to move in relationships and in the world, always in a state of alert.

The anxiety of the loss of meaning becomes constant background anxiety, which it manages to mitigate with a clear separation between good and evil. It is as if, faced with the anxiety of feeling lost and fragmented, the Six finds relief only in constantly defending against danger, with the illusion that fear will guarantee control to foresee from where or from whom that danger will come. The anxiety is channeled through the search for the enemy, the cause of the suffering experienced, even preferring to feel guilty to avoid navigating an uncontrollable ocean.

This tension implies a disconnection from one's own emotions and a paralysis of action, because since each action would be a possibility of error, guilt that deserves punishment, and each error would be irreversible, it paralyzes in the face of experience.

They try to anticipate difficulties using thought as a way to control and study the causality of causes and effects, like a game of chess. Deep down, the anxiety is intimately connected with the fear of being the cause, guilt, of separation, rejection, and therefore their interpersonal style and philosophy of life are always based on self-accusation and devaluation, a deep self-rejection, fixation.

I know this is heavy, so let's just breathe our way through it. There's a lot of material getting thrown out here, and so if you recognize sixness in yourself, we're going to get through it.

During childhood, there is often a lack of a guiding or paternal authority, understood here as a function not necessarily identifiable with a physical father connected to reality, irrationally punitive or emotionally dangerous, and a relationship with a father or mother experienced on the one hand as castrating and harmful and on the other as a source of protection. Like all schizoid types, it just means splitting. Don't take that as a diagnosis.

The six splits good and evil, identifying alternately with one or the other, in a constant attempt to feel good, to be safe from the danger of being punished, and therefore deserving rejection. They find refuge in the search for meanings and interpretations of reality, with a ruminative and labyrinthine way of thinking, completely losing contact with reality itself.

Regarding interpersonal relationships, this attitude often focuses on perceiving the other as a potential enemy, cultivating distrust instead of maintaining contact with the difficulties or pain that intimate relationships may involve. Accusation is their style of contact with themselves and the world, aiming to control where the evil is, where the enemy is, ultimately reaffirming themselves as their own enemies.

We'll come back to that in a minute just to close the loop on these ideas of guilt. Instinctivity must be controlled and kept at bay because surrendering would mean opening the doors to a devastating external invasion, thinks the six. The head must always be in command of experiences.

Okay, so that's a lot. And maybe we'll break this out as its own piece. There's a way that the experience of the six, this fear, is in some ways a very fundamental human experience. And this is captured in the Enneagram in two interesting ways.

First, the six is a core type. Six, nine, and three are all core types. And without over-defining that, one way to describe the core type is having sort of an essential relationship with separation. And that's named at the top here. The six's essential relationship with separation is being aware of and compulsively trying to sort of defend against that separation.

This is why I love angst, as Hudson posits, as opposed to fear, because angst points more specifically to that post-separation state that defines really European, at least, society, you know, the Western society, post-Freud, post-Darwin, post-God, there's no authority. We've become rudderless and compassless, and we've been cut off from God, not merely fallen or separated from him, let's just say for now, because I think him-ness, we'll talk about authority and paternal authority, is relevant for the six.

So I'll actually kind of invite in the paternal God, not just because we're separated from him, but in contemporary society because he maybe doesn't even exist. And so we're just left in this background anxiety state that pretty much every great philosopher in the West has tried to wrestle with since, what to do with this background anxiety.

And the reason that these philosophers wrestle with this is because we can see how wrecked we are by our background anxieties, how we try to avoid it and mitigate it in a number of ways, captured by the nine Enneagram types, but perhaps most sort of dealt with directly by the six, who is saying the world is threatening, I don't know who to trust. And so it becomes very important for me to categorize the world and people into good and evil.

In this fragmentation, what else would I do other than to start to sort of categorize the fragments, pick up the pieces, not to put the thing together again, but just to sort of make some sense of the world so that I know who to seek refuge with, who to avoid, the institutions to trust, the institutions to distrust, the people to throw myself onto, the people to avoid at all costs. Right? That's like a very sort of natural and arguably even universal human instinct.

And this speaks to the other quality that I think the Enneagram points to here, which is that so all these passions are rooted in the seven deadly sins and before that the eight evil thoughts from Evagrius Ponticus in the 300s, who was a desert father who went out and fasted for however many days in Egypt and came back with this discernment of spirits, this idea that there's these eight evil thoughts. And of course, by naming these eight evil thoughts, then there maybe are eight prescriptions, right? Eight ways to deal with these evil thoughts and avoid sin and be redeemed, be closer to God.

The one that wasn't in his eight evil thoughts is fear, is angst, whatever we want to call this passion. And I think the most natural explanation of why is, again, because it's so universal. It's so backgrounded. It's fear and anxiety and angst in our thoughts. in this world that we find ourselves in is sort of the human condition. There's just a way that the six has made that their home base and it becomes really amplified.

So the six is at once sort of familiar and simultaneously, just like the other types, has their own way of what Richard Rohr says, making an art form out of it, right? They've made an art form out of angst, made an art form out of anxiety and fear. And I love the reference to chess here because I think it it both shows how the six is a neighbor to the five, but has also kind of gone in a different direction, right? Because the five is a highly mental type.

Their schism, their splitting happens in a way earlier, more deeply, really between mind and body, right? The five is quite you'll meet fives who really do think that when they die, maybe their head can be put in a freezer and they can continue on in some ways. And I'm not even evaluating the quality or the feasibility of the idea. It's just a rare idea that's held by a small number of people who feel deeply connected with their mind consciousness. and feel like that's actually really the essence of who they are. So we're in the mental type there.

The six as trapped in their heads as they are in a different way, They're simulators of reality. So they're much more engaged with the world around them than the five. And we talked about refuge. We talked about fortress, cave. We talked about totem. We talked about ivory tower. And we talked about, I mean, those are the three subtypes, right? So the social is the totem. And the confidant, right, the sexual five who seeks in the other some sort of divine holding presence, right? So in those instincts... Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.

Well, there's a withdrawing that's universal for the five, right? The six is a little bit more engaged. They're simulating. They're feeling the threat of the world and they're not choosing to withdraw from that threat so much as navigate that threat. So there's an engagement in the world on the one hand with the six. But on the other hand, they're just as removed from reality. They live in their heads. They live simulating possibilities. And we're in such a simulating culture now that that just gets exacerbated.

I was listening to some talk that Sixes gave and the Six was just describing, they Google everything. They just, you know, someone asks something, they're the ones who are like, let's Google it. And they're probably going to read a few different articles and then they're going to, which one can I trust and which one can I not trust? So they'll sort of like make, they'll sort of make chess out of everything. And so that's what I love about, they try to anticipate difficulties using thought as a way to control and study the causality of causes and effects or the consequences of I would change that to consequences.

So again, I think we can all connect with that fear. And if you hear suspicion in that, I think that's right on, right? There's behind all these games, they're not neutral. So the five has a neutrality. If the five is playing chess, what would happen if I did this? What would happen if I did this? And on another hand, A and B. So the five has quite a neutral... way of simulating because they've already done a deeper cut that makes them feel safe. They've already withdrawn into the world of ideas. So the world of ideas is fundamentally safe for them, allowing them to actually have quite productive simulation.

The six is not yet safe in merely simulating things. They need to simulate so that they can determine safe paths and unsafe paths. And this is where the problem starts is that they're not good at doing that. And it may in fact be impossible to do that effectively. I'm not saying that they're incapable of making good decisions, but the six is not a productive thinker the way that the five is a productive thinker. And Suzanne Stabile has been working on this a lot, and I think it's helpful. She focuses on the centers of intelligence and the repressed centers.

And so the six is a mental type. Their center of intelligence is thinking. and their repressed center is also thinking so they're thinking dominant and then their thinking isn't as productive compared to the five or the seven at least so um paranoia suspicion you know thinking that the other person is thinking something that they're not thinking but then accusing them of that and then they then it becomes real right you you don't like me You know, you did that thing because you didn't want to spend time with me. Well, that wasn't true. But now that you say that, you're not making me want to spend time with you more. Those kinds of sort of self-fulfilling prophecies, those accusations.

And so a lot of what happens to the six is their chess games, their anxiety riddled chess games fail. And they fail in a couple of ways. One is the way I just described. essentially by having a fear-driven, by being so attuned to danger, danger will come to you. And then the other is guilt. And so let's go deeper a little bit on this.

Deep down, the anxiety is intimately connected with the fear of being the cause of separation, rejection. And therefore, their interpersonal style and philosophy of life is always based on self-accusation and devaluation. So there is a... It sounds like for the six, there's a deeply held suspicion that they're the cause. They're to blame for the separation.

We could draw a comparison to the one here. The one and six are quite different. I don't think there would be much confusion between discerning those types, but the one also is really preoccupied with right and wrong and good and bad. And the one also may have a deep fear of being the cause, the wrongness there. So what would be the difference then between the one and the six? Well, for one thing, the one is actually on a mission to make things right, to make things good.

So we talked about this fragmentation. The one actually, I think, is sort of trying to put the pieces together again. And they have a vision for how to do that. They're in the gut triad. They're a doer. They're action-oriented. The six is not on a mission to do any kind of restoration. The six is on a mission to navigate safely through this fragmentation, through the categorization of what is good and what is bad.

And similarly, when it will come to institutions, which will surely come up a lot because the sixes are the joiners of institutions. the ones are the creators of institutions, the ones are the reformers, the ones tend to be the visionary kind of we're going this way people and tend to be visionary in that way, in a way that the six just simply isn't wired to do.

The six wants to follow someone else's vision or argue against somebody's vision or be in relation to somebody's vision, but they're not necessarily at that level of having vision in the same way. Not that sixes can't be visionaries, but sixes are always in relation to authority, I would say. They're always in relation to authority, including the absence of authority.

So I'm going to hold on to that guilt piece because I don't think I fully understand that That anxiety intimately connected with the fear of being the cause of separation. And therefore, their philosophy of life will always be based on self-accusation. I'm going to keep an eye on that as we do the subtypes.

I don't know if there's anything else we need to say as way of introduction for the 6th. I love this compass. There's sort of a talk of, or maybe that's in a subtype, but it's sort of obliquely mentioned here in this, you know, this labyrinth finding your way. And so you need a compass. You need orientation. The six wants to know where they are and where others are.

Accusation is their style of contact with themselves and the world, aiming to control where the evil is, where the enemy is, ultimately reaffirming themselves as their own enemy. Again, Naranjo really wants us to come back to the six concluding with great, I would imagine, desperation and sadness that they are the cause of this fragmentation. that they are the cause of the wrong in the world. And we'll continue to flesh that out.

But certainly they have, it's almost like a radar technology that rather than this sort of neutral ping, ping, ping, who's there, ping, ping, ping, it's accusation, accusation. And you either will get you know, the accusation validated, or you will get the accusation invalidated, but at great expense to you and to the relationship, right? Because accusation is sort of fundamentally a violent... There's...

If you live through accusation, you will further isolate yourself and feel further fragmented, one would think. But at the same time, you know, I mean, I do think that as we get into sixes more, sixes do find safety. It's just sixes find safety and it's like they need to kind of hunker down with that person or that institution or that group. Right. And so I think there's some ways that like from a psychological perspective, I don't know if the six passion is like so unhealthy.

You know, some of the none of these passions are meant to work well, but some of them kind of get you by in society better than others. Right. And I think the six, three and the nine, the core types, all of their passions, I think, will get them, you know, can potentially help them land in some stable psychological social position, right? And the spiritual project is another thing. And so, you know, a six coming to the Enneagram, a six coming to inner work is probably coming to inner work because their strategy has broken down in some ways.

But sixes, you know, sixes, I think, do throw themselves into institutions, into groups, into families that then they really are loyal and they really do feel safe. So I think we need to be a little bit careful as we proceed through the type, the instincts of the six. Like there's the spiritual journey where all these passions will inevitably fall apart. But then there's sort of the psychological everyday piece of it where I'm not sure if I'm ready to say, as I think Naranjo seems to be implying here, that it's like... You know, this approach will always fail because it'll always reconfirm them being the cause of their guilt. You know, I don't think we need to come in as strong on that as maybe these words are initially applying.

But again, it all depends on the project, right? Like is the six trying to wake up from this pattern or is the six trying to build a stable life where they feel safe, right? And those don't have to be the same projects.

Okay, so we'll pause here and then we'll jump right into the social six whose keyword is duty.

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Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Sunday evening. We're getting a lot of rain in New York, so we've got hot, muggy weather. And it's a good time to seek refuge, and so that's the keyword of the Enneagram Type 5 self-preservation, or in Spanish, conservación, or refugio. Beautiful word in Spanish, translated neatly to refuge.

But let's get right into it and find out what keyword makes most sense for us. This is a really wonderful chapter, so I am going to go deep on it because I actually think this is... The self-preservation five is the fiviest of the fives subtypes. And so I want to go deep on this. It's also the best written chapter, in my opinion, because it goes into more of the five in their less integrated state. I've also had a glass of wine, so I'm amped up to do this. So let's see how it goes.

The need to retreat is a clear characteristic for the conservation type five. However, it must be taken into account that each subtype of the five has some of that, a need to withdraw. In the case of conservation, the passion has a lot to do with finding refuge, erecting high walls that separate them from a world that can invade them, that can take them out of a small precious world hidden inside them. The idea of self-conservation becomes clear if we imagine them as firm supporters of retreating into a cave.

The five conservation extremely limits their needs and desires as each desire could mean a status of dependency for them. Like every conservation subtype, this one is also linked to survival in the concrete, attached to objects in personal space, but as a five, which is the most mental of the mental characters, it is in thought, in incessant reflection on the way to survive and live by limiting external disturbances where they find the greatest refuge.

So already just like really wonderfully lucid writing. I think we're seeing themes again of why Buddhism... might appeal to a five, a practice that literally talks about going into a cave. And then we're also starting to touch on a few different metaphors. We've talked about the cave, but then we also talk about high walls. And at least one of the popular Enneagram organizations, I forget which one, calls this subtype castle is their keyword.

And I think castle is I wish there was one word for castle meets cave. Refuge, the problem with refuge is it's a little bit hopeful, and so you might actually think that. You might get away from what the passion is trying to do here. It is not a successful strategy. None of these strategies is ultimately successful. Instead, it's a self-perpetuating strategy. Retreat, you know, retreat is actually not a bad keyword. Refuge is also fine.

It's a radical act of separation. It's a removal from the possibility of invasion. But castle and cave, maybe these are sub-subtypes. Cave is an act of renunciation. Cave is private. Cave is... retreating and then castle is more of a fortress defense it so castle is prepared for interaction and heavily boundaried we think about moats we think about spires we think about little little windows for archery to stick through Cave is removing oneself from the possibility of interaction.

So there are two different versions of refuge, and I think this subtype covers them both. Castle, and I think we'll cover this later, castle does a good job of describing, maybe part of this is just like, do you have a family or not? Because the family-oriented SP5, you can't have a cave. I mean, you can have a castle and you can have a man cave in your castle. And man cave is a perfectly good thing to have in the back of our heads here for the five.

I think men who have their man cave are accessing their five. It's probably, you know, and okay, so let's just touch on that. If you have a man cave, are you a five? No, not necessarily. You might be a five. But the, I think this is maybe a good point to touch on masculine feminine energy in Enneagram. According to Naranjo Naranjo. Roughly speaking, the left side of the Enneagram is masculine, the right side is feminine.

So five, six, seven, eight have more masculine energy. Not that women can't be those numbers, they just have more masculine energy. And then a five connects to all those. A five is the wing of a six, and then a five goes to seven and eight, and seven and eight go to five. So all of those numbers may have times where they want this cave-like retreat. And I think for people in relationship with a man who needs to withdraw, these are classic, at least in the U.S., like classic gender stereotypes, the man cave. I think learning about the SP5 and the passion of refugio, refuge, is instructive.

So let's go deeper. The transformation in the social preservation five by Jose Ignacio Fernandez. I got to know the Enneagram in 1998 and had a great impact on me. I'm not going to diligently read all of this. I'm going to skip it. How the process starts seeing the cave that I'm in. At first, the main work for ego healing consists of becoming aware of one's own vengeful attitude towards the world, which manifests itself with separateness. It involves undoing the victim image that judges the world as hostile, inadequate, hypocritical, ignorant, brutal, etc. When this issue becomes clear, one becomes aware that withdrawal and hiding are forms of aggression toward others.

And I think this is a really important point for the five that I don't think came up in the previous subtypes. becoming aware of one's vengeful attitude toward the world one's one has certain beliefs about the world that are maybe not so obvious to the five the five might think that their separateness comes from a quirkiness or an introversion or an inborn innate inclination But according to Jose Ignacio Fernandez, connecting with this vengeful, the world is not merely scary, the world is brutal, hostile, full of idiots, but full of dangerous idiots, potentially.

The process also involves becoming aware of one's own vulnerability, hypersensitivity, and fear of being crushed, and realizing that these difficulties are so great that they lead to avoidance and disconnection. It is about seeing how little life one has that the choice to manage with little implies living little. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life.

In the end, it's about seeing that there's great passion for not wearing oneself out, for conserving one's energies. That's why the SP5 is the five-iest five, conserving one's energies, as there's no faith in being able to obtain more. It is necessary to identify the unattainable ideal of the self. This unattainable ideal then harkens back to our talk about the social five, totem.

Yeah, so fives want to avoid conflict. That's why they're going to the cave, to the castle, to the fortress, to the refuge. So why is that? Conflict is experienced internally, and it is necessary to see the toll this entails. This is really starting to point now to the energy deficiency that five experiences. On the one hand, the price is self-aggression by internalizing anger, internalizing rage, also killing the other internally, the inner beheader.

It is useful to recognize the mechanism by which, when what is perceived as a particularly painful aggression occurs, a great resentment develops internally, which, however, the conservation five barely allows themselves to express outwardly. I mean, I would go farther to say they barely allow themselves to experience internally. The most common consequence of this resentment is withdrawal.

resentment is a constant so um and let's let's listen to this quote from Ignacio Fernandez I have indeed left many relationships after feeling hurt by something the process is always very similar first something happens that hurts me I do not express it I keep it inside and later I start to have feelings of rejection or devaluation toward that person and I withdraw stop having contact with them Normally, the person in question never knows the reason for my withdrawal, says Ignacio Fernandez.

So again, we now are connecting back to the self-preservation for whose passion or whose keyword is tenacity. And we can see the connection here, this self-aggression, this biting, this clenching. The difference seems to be that where the self-preservation four will, from time to time, explode. That that rage is never really... It's bottled up, but it's quite alive.

For the five, and the SP5 in particular, there's more of a self-killing, a deadening that happens. And it's dual. It's... If you hurt me, I have to do two things. One is I have to behead the other. I have to behead you. I have to defang the other. It's not that they hurt me. There is hurt. And I'm not going to experience that hurt.

So instead, there's sort of there's the experience of aggression, but maybe it's sort of uncoupled from the other. Take Jose Ignacio Fernandez's example. He starts to, it's almost like, I almost feel like you get impersonal about, you know, you get impersonal about hurt and aggression and devaluation. So who's rejecting who? You know, his partner offends him. And then he's sort of just like left with feelings of rejection, left with feeling of devaluation that he ultimately feels toward that person.

But wait, they were the one who rejected you. They hurt you. But it's almost like the five kind of moves into this world of phenomena. Not you hurt me, but there is hurt. Not you rejected me, but there is rejection. And then the five almost sort of then grabs the rejection. Like, well, I guess I have to leave this person. So their responses aren't as, they don't feel like detonations to me.

They don't feel like, okay, there was a wound and now I'm holding it and then I'm going to explode back at you. That might be more of a flourish response. It's less explosive, but there is a seething quality to it. And I think what Ignacio Fernandez is pointing to here is starting to open up that resentment, which the four swims in resentment, but the five has to start to admit that there might be some resentment that starts to point to the differences between the two.

The typical way of living the conflict is to inhibit the response, sometimes changing it for the opposite behavior to what is felt. Okay, so it's just what we're talking about. For example, when someone unexpectedly shows an aggressive and demanding attitude toward a conservation five, they may accept what is demanded of them to escape the pressure, but at the same time begin to feel a sense of anger inside for not having reacted in a way more in line with their desires, displacing the action.

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. You know, there's this feeling of abandoning oneself, right? So you hurt, you know, you say, you demand something of me and you accuse something of me and it's so hurtful, but I kind of do it. I take it seriously. Okay, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm going to do it. And then I'm just left with this like feeling of injustice or feeling of abandonment or rejection, right?

But it's not just that you rejected me. It's also I abandoned myself or rejected my own. Hey, that's not right. I'm standing up for myself. But then the anger can sort of morph in any number of ways. In all likelihood, I'm not going to hold on to it as that was me abandoning myself. I'm going to hold on to it as I'm angry at you. But I'm not going to express that anger. I'm just going to withdraw back to my cave.

Clandestine action, acting in secret so that their actions do not compromise them, becomes a way of avoiding confrontation and avoiding generating expectations or relationships of dependency. The hyper-adaptability manifests, for example, in a compulsive way of saying yes to an external demand if the refusal can be uncomfortable or lead to conflict.

So this starts to point to the passive aggressiveness of the five. And it's how would you, I don't know if other, maybe we'll get into this. I don't know if other people would experience fives exactly as passive aggressive, but the five is passive aggressive in the sense that, you know, you ask them to do something and they say, yep, I'll do it. And then they don't do it. Or you ask them to do it and they do it, but they do it with resentment that's private.

Or they kind of maybe half do it. And so there's this... And I don't think it's necessarily conscious passive aggression. I think it's the five's way of... Finding a way to meet the needs of others without losing oneself, without having to leave the cave.

Let's see what else Ignacio Fernandez has to say about this. There's an internal idea of not wearing oneself out by paying attention to things that are trivial to oneself and resistance to remembering such things. The tendency to anesthetize oneself, to forget, and to mental confusion is another notable trait of this character. Appearing invisible, playing deaf, that was a way to hide from my own sense of discomfort of perceiving myself as a coward, a fearful person who, at any sight of threat, would run to hide inside the house.

I never knew if my perceptions were correct, if my reactions were appropriate, if my feelings were acceptable, said Luciano, describing his childhood. So that's interesting. So that speaks a little bit to the core number of the head triad, right? The six. Cowardice, fear. I mean, which is sort of the most relatable reaction to fear. There's fear, so I'm going to hide.

And so refugio, refuge, has a taste of that. But the five's version of refuge isn't directly fear from threat, running inside the house from a threat. It's more complicated than that. And Luciano points to it. Is this a threat? I'm not sure, I have doubts, so I need to retreat into my world of thinking and question my perceptions, question what's real, question what's not real, and retreat potentially physically into a man cave or a woman cave, but also potentially into a mental cave of thoughts.

And then maybe try to communicate with my partner in that mental realm, which no one will ever meet you there. That's your own thought fortress, your own thought castle, your own thought cave.

Seeing one's own withdrawal as aggression helps. Yeah. The five isn't aware of how aggressive or passive aggressive their withdrawal can be. It hurts others, this withdrawal from contact.

The avarice of time. Not wasting time is an obsession. In the self-preserving five, there's a passion for making the most of time, but without a clearly defined purpose. I'm laughing at recognition. It is rather something diffuse that is connected with when wasting time. This character needs to see to what extent they feel attached to objects and safe places, even transferring their emotional bonds to these. Something similar also happens with the fewer relationships they establish. Although they have little awareness of their attachment to them, they often feel great attachment and possessiveness.

That tends to be particularly true with family. I'm not sure if that'll come up here. I think it will. The SP5 also needs to realize the great attachment they have to their own intuitions, ideas, or deductions, and the impoverishment that entails by clinging to them, closing themselves off to others' point of view, realizing that many times criticism or disagreement with these ideas are experienced as personal devaluation and aggression, and also how this leads to a reaction that can be of offense or arrogance, but also of self-devaluation.

starting to connect. The first point of reconnection with oneself is to recognize one's own needs. And that's the same for two. but it leads in really different directions. During my first year of therapy, I lived through a situation that was decisive for me. I remember a night with my partner when suddenly I started to see her cry. I don't understand anything. Then after a few moments, she tells me that she's decided to leave me.

I'm left in suspense and I begin to think, well, it's okay. I'll meet others more interesting. I'll be free, better, and things like that. However, after a few moments, I begin to feel very great pain and infinite pain. Something inside me said, you see, it has happened to you again. You've lost it again. Then I felt that I was playing everything in that moment and I cried like never in my life. I literally felt like I was breaking inside. That also reached her heart and the relationship continued. It was the first time in my life that I realized that I needed another person, says Ignacio.

And again, if we want to take a kind of a slightly pastiche view and go back to the man in his man cave, does he appreciate his wife? Probably not. He probably takes her for granted and then she threatens to leave and maybe does leave. And then for the first time he realizes how dependent he was on, on her. Um, um, and, and so the, the SP five, um, They haven't neglected their own needs. They've just been unaware of their own needs.

And so in the story that Ignacio is telling here, he was getting his needs met unconsciously by his partner. And it wasn't only until the threat of her leaving was presented that he started to see, I'm going to lose her again. Now, I mean, the story is ambiguous in the sense that one interpretation is for the first time he became aware of how much he needed her and made adjustments to keep her.

That sounds like that's the case here. But there's another story, which is that... if the five is to truly be left alone and have to fend for themselves, then they're going to come face to face with the absolute futility of their survival strategy, which has been to not have needs. It's a fantasy. I won't need other people. I won't have needs. The paradox of surviving alone is that you have to rely on other people, the friendship and love and support of other people, your neighbors, your friends, your neighborhood, your church.

So there's no such thing as living alone. And the five, maybe in relationship, had a fantasy of living in their cave, but they were actually getting their needs met, just as maybe a monk in a cave is getting food dropped off at the mouth of his cave every few days. And so it doesn't mean that the five should stay in that relationship, that Ignatius should stay in the relationship, but Ignatius is going to have to reckon with his needs either way.

Either the way that his partner was meeting his needs and he wants to keep that, or the way that he now needs to figure out a way to actually get his needs met that she wasn't doing.

Taking care of the body, appearance, and personal image, realizing that is not something for others. Another case of that, allowing oneself to please others and oneself. All of this is fundamental. Taking care of myself, treating my body with love and delight. We've talked about body a lot in the five. Nutrition. There can be a lack of interest, neglect, eating for the sake of eating. Other times it can be compulsive eating to fill the void. And again, these are things that can show up for the two as well.

I guess these are behaviors or lack of behaviors that can emerge when one's just not connected with one's own needs. Now here's something not two-ish. At first, there's a great disinterest in people in general. For example, wasting time getting to know someone is not interesting for something, who is not interesting for something. The change comes by paying attention to names, to the trivialities they tell one, but it is about loving attention.

And one must learn to say no when one really doesn't want to pay attention. Experiencing situations of joy, jubilation, uncontrollable laughter, spontaneous play. Those are other elements of transformation. Not taking things so seriously. Go back to the ivory tower or the sexual five who wants the one. Not taking oneself so seriously is an attitude that also helps. Experiencing pleasure helps. Realizing that one can only enjoy from trust in the other. Experimenting with one's own assertiveness.

Here anger comes up. When the anger is so characteristic of the Conservation Five, I guess that goes back to the resentment, the quiet resentment. When the anger comes into play, consisting of punishing in silence, not speaking, showing a bad face. So it's withdrawal, but it sounds like there's withdrawal with resentment there.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think the five has to connect with their anger usually. I'm not sure if they recognize the anger in their behaviors because it won't show up necessarily as anger. But if we have an argument and I withdraw to my room and close the door without explanation, that is an act of aggression. And I think the five has to see that. It might not come easy.

Showing oneself more, coming out of the cave, just having conflict and realizing that for many types, having the conflict and expressing the anger, expressing the hurt, that's relationship, that's contact, and that's what the other person wants from you.

Sometimes the fear of generating expectations in others is so great that there is an intentional concealment of oneself, hence the appearance of being strange. The work is to realize that one can share information about oneself, one's opinions, emotions, tastes, while reserving a space of intimacy.

That's interesting. Yeah, I do think that the five struggles with balance there in going back to the core wounds of the five relating to contact and boundary that One of the ways to look at the five's childhood wound is either there was an invasion of the five's space, that they're hypersensitive and somehow the parent or somebody intruded, invaded too much and they had to withdraw. Or the opposite, that there was neglect and there was not healthy.

In either case, it's a lack of healthy contact. And so I think the five can reenact that in a way as described here of like, either I'm not going to give you any of myself or I'm going to give you all myself. And you've got to love all of it. And if you don't like all of it, it's like, well, no, you can share this much and keep that much. And that takes a lot of practice, I think, for the five to develop a sense of a healthy boundary there.

Sometimes there is a desire to share everything intimate and is about being able to share the space with whom one wants and when one wants. Detaching from cherished objects and safe places is a big step forward. Transformation consists of feeling more alive, acquiring a new version of oneself in the world. It is also discovering that life hurts And above all, it is discovering what love is. And this is a great discovery. It opens the door to living relationships more intensely, developing trust. From there, there can also be a new intuition of what spirituality truly means.

Taking one space. Hmm. Pretty much just repeating quite a bit of what we've talked about. But yeah, taking one space. I mean, this goes back to a right that the four and the five both struggle to connect with, which is the most basic right. I have the right to be here. I have the right to be here. I have the right to take up space.

Refuge is intimately tied up with not feeling the right to take up space. I can contact this a lot where it's like, I feel like I have to be small until I'm in my space and then I can sprawl because I've been holding in because it's not safe and because I'm not safe. And if I were to be myself, then something bad would happen.

Often will be necessary to do what is most difficult for conservation five teaching groups leading therapy groups doing individual therapy giving lectures leading a team to name a few examples.

Some comments about sexuality and letting go of sexual fantasy and this goes back to the sexual five right like. Sexuality and fantasy are so linked for the five and so kind of ordinary sexuality, ordinary wanting, ordinary desire. Connecting with one's masculinity or femininity or both. Recovering one's own aggressiveness.

For me, says Maurizio, it is allowing myself to do crazy things, giving myself the luxury of saying what I think, allowing myself a bit of narcissism, self-promotion, self-indulgence, giving myself a break, a satisfaction.

Let's hear again from Ignacio on blooming. During my therapeutic process and my training as a therapist, I went through several phases. At first, it was something I did for my own growth, I never imagined being a therapist. Later, the desire to be a therapist someday appeared in me as I realized how much it helped me to be connected. But I saw it as something distant, someday when I had sufficiently prepared and obtained the necessary titles. Finally, I started to practice as a therapist with my current resources.

first it was organizing and leading a zen meditation group then the idea of doing a gestalt workshop arose then a series of bioenergetic workshops next someone asked me for individual therapy then a colleague sent me another patient throughout this process i could experience my fears my insecurities my ignorance but i also discovered that i had many more resources than i believed and increasingly trusted myself signal nasa you know i've been meaning to write about this um but i'll just mention it here in my own work

moving into independent practice and coaching, I've come up with like three arenas of my practice. And I call it the stage, the field, and the lab. And so the stage is if I'm going to be teaching or running a workshop, teaching what I know. And that speaks to my threeness. I'm teaching, here I am, I'm teaching. I'm conscious of the image that will help people learn and it's a one-to-many thing. So there's sort of a slightly on quality.

Then there's the field, which is one-on-one work, either as a client or as a coach, which is deeply intimate work. It's interesting, this also goes to social-sexual self-preservation. So the stage is social, the field is sexual, it's one-on-one, it's intimate, it's intense, it's open, the boundaries are less sharp.

And the field is also where a lot of the magic happens. It's like the frontier. And then there's the lab, which is what I'm doing now. It's like translating neuronal or reading some new thing or learning some new methodology or coming up with a new theory or planning some idea. And that's my refuge. That's my cave.

And my own, even though I think of myself as a four, this is interesting. I think... This is a good example of where the instincts and the Enneagram converge. I definitely feel like my home base is four, but my home base is also self-preservation.

i i mean also maybe that's just a self-preservation thought but like when you really feel unsafe don't you want to be by yourself i guess some people maybe truly seek safety in others but for me when i feel like my most threatened i just want to be by myself in the lab so that's why i like that's why i love doing these because it's like when i'm having a

when I don't have the energy to do stage work or do field work or build out those practices, I can just be in the lab here. Of course, there's a little stage quality here. I'm talking to, I don't know if anyone's listening, but this is lab work. I mean, at some point, maybe I'll do some more deep, more prepared work, but this is pretty, this is just like if you were sitting next to me doing lab work with me.

So going back to the five, then I think the five, especially the self-preserving five, they love being in the lab, but I think all fives are lab people. And so maybe the five can feel into, as Ignacio was describing, workshops, meditation groups, dinner parties, just subtle ways to like get out. And then they can think about it through the lens of the lab. Well, I can't sit in the lab forever. I've got to apply some of these things in the field. So I'll practice some conversation starters, you know, or learn about conversation starters, then I'll have a dinner party and I'll practice some of that. I think that'd be very five-ish. That would be like a nice way for a five to start to step into some of these things.

Leading, motivating, taking the reins, in any case, from a purpose with personal meaning or transformative elements. Healing, helping others to heal is another step. From where one is and with one's own resources, whether as a therapist or as a teacher, parent, sibling, friend, or whatever, this can lead to connecting more and more frequently and counteracting the tendency towards self-absorption.

Finally, it especially helps to work and balance the three loves through relationships, giving more space to compassionate maternal love, and recovering, giving life to erotic love or love, I don't know, these three loves. That's not, we've got enough going on. We don't need to learn about the three loves right now.

Okay, so that's it for the self-preservation five, which I think refuges a perfectly reasonable definition word for it. I just want to, what I would add to it is from my working with some fives, especially fives who have families, they really lean hard on, you know, fives don't need many relationships, but as we saw, there are a few relationships where they really depend kind of on all of their needs getting met. There's a high dependency.

And so a five in their midlife with family and kids, they're more of a castle five. We need our fortress. All I need to do is make sure that we're good. So that's, I think, the only limitation of kind of cave or refuge. And let's just see if we can kind of name, we've captured it, I think, in the other subtypes, but why does this break down? And paradoxically, why does it break down is also the same question as how does this self-perpetuate?

So I must withdraw to my refuge when I'm in threatening relationships or when I'm hurt. When there's contact that is unpleasant, when there's friction in contact, I must retreat to my refuge. That's our key word, refuge. where that hurt, aggression, contact won't happen. And I must remove my needs. I must be strange. I must not show up as whole. And then what happens?

Well, I think there's two things. One is the other person is going to feel deeply Actually, they'll feel like there was aggression there, reciprocal aggression. And so if they're a seeker, they're going to come back and say, hey, don't walk away from me. We need to talk about this. And so that's one way that refuge will break down is refuge is an act of aggression. But because it's not visible to the five, they'll be so perplexed and concerned. I'm just trying to get my own space. Why is this person chasing me?

And then the other problem is that they will retreat into a place that's a fantasy place. You can't go through life not needing things from other people. You can do it for a little bit, but you can't do it forever. You're going to get sick. You're going to get horny. You're going to get lonely. You're going to need sugar. There's going to be a flood and you're going to need someone to bring you food.

And what's gonna happen then is the five is gonna come out of their cave and they're gonna be a little bit weird because they haven't had the practice and they're gonna need something. But the way they need it is gonna be quote unquote ugly or gonna be like, it's like the, just imagine someone who comes out of their cave after years, I'm like, I need this. It's like, whoa, you're not showing up in healthy ways.

So exactly because they've withdrawn so much They won't know how to, they just don't, they won't be equipped to have healthy friction. So then they'll come with some need and it's going to be overwhelming. You know, in the case of a partnership, they might dump out all their stuff. In the case of a party, they might be like way too on whatever it is and they'll get disappointed. the contact will disappoint them in some way. They'll be hurt. They'll feel rejected. It'll be really deeply rewounding. And they'll say, see, this is what happens when I come out of my cave.

So that's the passion. That's the passion of refuge, which is inside the passion of avarice, of stinginess. So we covered the ivory tower, the totem, which is, you know, one version of refuge. We covered the confidant or trust, which is putting all of, you know, seeking the other to complete you and be your refuge. And then finally just refuge, you know, a cave, a mental cave or a physical cave, some version of withdrawing into safety.

And so with that, we complete the five. Okay. And again, you know, this is really more focused on the passion. So I'm sorry if I didn't give people enough of like the, the healing journey. But I think these chapters did quite a bit there too. And really the project here is just to translate, not do too much beyond that.

So next time we'll move into the six and start to talk about fear, angst, and doubt. all of the qualities of the six and, you know, as the core type of the head triad, we'll bring in all that fiveness, but then see that the six has quite a different set of ways of engaging with what's fundamentally sort of the same starting place, which is the world is scary. Okay, so look forward to that. See you next time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a Tuesday afternoon. We're trucking along here with the five and we're on to the sexual five today. The keyword for the sexual five is confianza which is translated here as trust. If you also hear confidence in Confianza, I think that's a connection.

But in the deeper sense, maybe like the confidence man. I guess that's where con man originates from. Should we just start with a quick etymological investigation of the word confidence? Because there's something about contract and trust here that I don't think I fully understand so let's look at the etymology of confidence.

Of course, right we have confide, confiding having full trust. Let's see what else we have to say here. Assurance or belief in the goodwill veracity of another is the original meaning of confidence. Firmly trusting, fully trusting, full reliance. So there's a, the origin of confidence is relational. Assurance or belief in the goodwill of another. And so I think that's where, you know, it can connect with trust.

And then Con, Con Man. Confidence with a sense of assurance based on insufficient grounds dates from the 1590s. Con Artist is attested by 1910, but Confidence Man is a Melville book. So obviously, yeah, 1840s, I would guess.

So let's just invite in all of that association, trust, contract, fully trusting another in sort of a formal way that sort of establishes reliance on the other. And I'm going to, once again, I'm not going to read the whole chapter, although this is actually the shortest chapter I've seen yet after the social five, which was quite long. And the keyword there was totem.

And the points made multiple times that fives have, as it says here, is if one tries to find the difference between the sexual five and the other type of five, it will not be easy. But if one engages in conversation with them, they will hear them say that they're very passionate about a person, generally about a person they cannot find in their lives.

So we've got the four who I call the romantic because I think the individualist leads one astray and too far away from how fundamentally dependent on relationship the four is. And the sexual five is also a romantic type here, very passionate about a relationship that seems not to exist in the ordinary world. It's a relationship that would finally give them the security that they never had.

Here occurs a case similar to the extraordinary search of the social five. The extraordinary would be what is at the top of the totem pole. The sexual five seeks a very high specimen. The same happens to them in love. This subtype is on a quest for absolute love. And their search is so strong that if you are the one being sought, it's very difficult to pass the test.

If someone is looking for the absolute, it is very easy for them to feel disappointed. We must understand this passionate search in the sense of trust, of being able to trust the other. The sexual five is looking for that person who will be there for them and with them no matter how or what, far beyond the normal vows of a commitment or marriage.

The thought of the sexual five is that they must be able to present themselves to you with the worst of their inner world, and that you, as their partner, should maintain complete equanimity in front of their inner monsters, since they love you so much. So they live the love of a couple as a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal that does not exist in the human world.

Excuse me. They go on to mention Chopin as kind of an example of a sort of romantic person who's not generally open to intimacy, doesn't have many friends, doesn't have many relationships, and is sort of saving all their trust for the one. Not the type one, but the soulmate.

So I think this is a pretty understandable passion here. So again, we're all of the subtypes of the five return to avarice or stinginess, which is I have so little. I have so little, so I need to be very, very deliberate about what I give. Why do I have so little? It's because the world is threatening. Relationship is threatening. Emotions are threatening.

And so to need and be needed are pretty frightening for the five. And so the five seeks ways to avoid being needed or needing. And really becomes very stingy with the few interactions or the few relationships where they allow themselves to be needed or allow themselves to need others.

So that's the basis. And we covered totem already. Let's just hit a couple of the beats from the essay by Mireya Dardar.

We isolate ourselves, we do not expect anything from others, and we do not trust life. So there's that word trust. So as someone said in the last chapter, this feeling of like locking your heart in a box, and so the sexual five is saving. In a way, there's almost sort of a virginity there, that they're saving themselves. They're saving their trust for that special somebody.

We do not trust life. Both people and life itself constitute a cosmos situated behind a glass that separates us from everything. And it's the five who, in early, early childhood or even infancy, created that glass separation. Or we talked about muffling before.

On one hand, we live any relationship with the outside world as threatening, which at best will cause us pain. At the same time, deep down, we perceive ourselves as guilty when interacting with others because we feel we may hinder them. We believe that if we do not need and are self-sufficient, we can survive, and thus they will not hurt us and we will not hurt them.

We live the emotional world as threatening and complicated, as something we can do without since it causes displeasure. Therefore, we prefer not to get emotionally involved and stay in the role of observers of life, the investigator, the observer. The same non-involvement gives us a certain emotional infantilism and, at the same time, an inhibited hypersensitivity, since we do not put our own emotions into practice.

And I think that's true of the five is sort of emotionally frozen potentially at a really early age. And so the path for the five to recover that can be really rocky. And for the sexual five maybe in particular, they're going to be putting a lot of pressure on that relationship to sort of like birth their emotional life, birth their maturation that is set up for disappointment, right? Because that's too much to put on another human being.

And by putting that much on the relationship, you're also setting yourself up to be disappointed, thereby saying, see, I knew I couldn't trust, right? And so all these words, we just have to remember with the totem or trust, these words are always just keywords meant to point to a self-perpetuating or what Naranjo calls elsewhere, a deficiency motivation. A motivation that comes from some sense of lack and when acted out, reinforces that sense of lack.

So I must not trust the world or relationships until I find that special somebody. And then when that special somebody inevitably disappoints me or is nowhere to be found, then that just reinforces my sense of distrust, which all reinforces this stinginess, stinginess of energy, stinginess of love.

It does seem that for fours and fives, these wounds are really early. I know that's been the case for myself, that working with some of this material tends to be pre-verbal. It's really deep in the body.

Here, the author says, the wound in the bond usually occurs in the first months of life, when the baby has not yet established the differentiation between the world and themselves through the maternal bond. So there's a disconnection that runs very deep. A splitting is sometimes used as the word, a splitting.

The sexual five has locked themselves in, creating a safe inner world filled with ideations, theories, romantic fantasies, and utopias about the search for unconditional love. And that totem would be there too. So it's detachment. It's detachment.

Again, that detachment comes with many gifts of neutrality, of intellectual rigor and honesty, incredible categorization, gifts of making sense of data. But the five themselves are not in that world. And so the quality of the data is always sort of corrupted. The five really is living in a fantasy world.

Waiting for the right person to appear with whom they can exist and show themselves as they are, since this person in their fantasy will accept them unconditionally. And they will be able to live with the obtained security, everything they do not dare to live in the world. Waiting for that encounter, the only time they allow themselves to be themselves is when they are alone, feeling isolated in everyday life.

So there's this emotional non-dependence as sort of a basis for relationship, except for this imagined partner where there will be a full unloading of exaggerated dependence. And so the transformation story here, very similar to what we covered in the totem, first is sort of realizing the existence of this fantasy world. And abandoning the project of idealism, which, as covered extensively in the Totem chapter, can be really painful for the five.

Transformation begins when one leaves the world of reason and makes room for sensation, recognition of needs, inhabiting the body, body work, massage, yoga. Talk about Tai Chi in the last one. When one gives themselves permission to exist, and it is that sort of lower chakra, like right to exist work, right to be here, and leaving renunciation as a way of life, then a psychological change can occur, influencing their way of thinking.

The author here says, it's necessary to go through the process of psychologically killing the parents, which is certainly evocative. And what they mean is all the interjects we have swallowed about how we have to be and act will die, leading to paralysis and isolation compartmentalization.

That might be a little bit above my understanding this idea of killing the parents, but I mean, let's just connect with it. So the five in sort of this way of talking about it, the five didn't get some really basic stuff from their parents that didn't, it didn't take root in them. And so they don't have internal nurturing parents.

They don't even have necessarily a sense of, you know, there's not going to be like an inner critic necessarily, voicing that, but, the five builds up a defense mechanism. We've called it muffling or filtering or separation or hypersensitivity. And that's kind of their parent in a way.

That's sort of the parent that they've invented. And I think what this is saying is that that internal parent communicates a very deprived sense of self, a very weak or easily destroyed sense of self. And therefore, the five, and I think this would probably be true of the four, will, when we talk about interject, you know, I must, I must not need, I must not be needed or else I will be destroyed or else I will be annihilated.

That's sort of like the inner parental guidance. And it's all grounded in a deep sense of lack of safety. So those are the parents that have to be killed. That's how I take that.

See if this says anything else. When we finally begin to release the chains that bind us to our parents and feel more rooted in life, the heart also begins to open and the feeling of being the authors of our own destiny emerges, recovering the paternal or inner authority figure castrated by an excessively authoritarian family member.

Let's just see the Spanish there. It's a good translation. It's just a lot of parents here. So there's the recovery of the paternal figure who was castrated by an authoritarian family member.

And this isn't my area of expertise, this kind of like depth psychology or parent archetypes, but I want to try to contact it if we can. The internal parent that we were just talking about that the five develops is a parent that says, you are not safe. It is not safe. The world is not safe. You will not survive. You will be annihilated.

So recovering the inner father is recovering this sense of authorship, of sovereignty, of agency. And something happened in the five's journey that they didn't get that. And so they have to recover it. And part of that recovery process is by sort of undoing this, what they call authoritarian family member, which may or may not be external. It may just be this internal authoritarian parent figure.

That may have been self created by the actual absence of contact from the family. In other words, like, if the five was neglected emotionally by father and mother, then the internal parent that they formed may be this sort of authority that says it's not safe, you're not safe, etc.

And so that's the parent that has to be killed so that a healthy internal mother and a healthy internal father can be grown. We can leave behind the fear and guilt of existing.

Fear of annihilation, which is mentioned here, I think is there's something about annihilation that for me really clicks with the five. Overwhelm and annihilation, which is different from the four. I think the four can recognize annihilation in their own deepest fears, but the four is almost more concerned with like non-existence.

And again, that's that difference between the heart type and the head type or shame and fear. Being annihilated is like terrifying. Being invisible or being nothing or being broken, those activate the heart center more when I touch those.

Connection with the body as a path to the recovery of the senses is fundamental, especially body work as a way to recover lost vitality and energy. As one feels vital, they can go out into the world to meet others. The body is also where needs can be felt to be satisfied from there. In body work, it is important to recover the feeling of grounding and in this way, energy.

I think recovery of energy is an essential project for the five. You know, that's another way to look at the stinginess is the five is very energy conscious. And that will always be the case for the five. It's not like that's going to magically disappear. But, you know, I think it just comes over and over again how important body work can be for the recovery of energy.

Something has happened where when the five locked, you know, locked their heart in that chest, they locked a lot of their energy in there too.

We'll just touch on this last piece with the mother again, because this particular chapter talks a lot about interjection and internal parents. So I think it's good to just follow that thread all the way through.

Recovering the bond with the nurturing mother, once the interjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother is dead, helps to feel that there is no separation, that we are part of the same. Part of the same what?

I'm just gonna check the Spanish here. Yeah, it doesn't, it's sort of like the, we're all, we're all part of the same, we're all, we're part of the same, I don't know how you translate that. Parte de lo mismo. Que formamos parte de lo mismo.

I'll just leave it. Well, yeah, exactly. Here we have the introjected. So first of all, introjected as in self afflicted. Should we look up introjection just to double check our Freudian terminology? When I think about introjecting, I think Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes like a syringe, like a needle. It's like a self-injection of negative stuff.

And so let's look at these descriptions. Not the nurturing mother, but the introjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother. So there are contradictions there, right? How can something be absent and invasive? How can it be absent and demanding?

But I think the story here is again, through neglect or through some failure in the family system for the five to internalize their mother, there is an absence. There is a void. And there is an exposure, there is a lack of safety that is resolved through story, through interjection of deficiency, of particular lack of safety of risk of annihilation.

And, the demanding aspect is maybe pointing even more precisely to this trust quality that it's like, I must not trust just anybody or else I will be annihilated. I must only trust the most trustworthy. I must wait. I must save all my trust for that special mother, essentially, for that, for that special caregiver, the caregiver that I've, I've created a fantasy for, cause I never, never experienced it.

And so that's the demanding piece. Once that whole story subsides, then there's the opportunity to recover a bond with a nurturing mother. Again, internal, not like the actual mother, not the physical mother, but the mother who loves all her children. You know, the mother Mary, the mother of all beings.

And that's that feeling also that, you know, the four can find refuge in of the ordinary. And from there, there's a feeling of non-separation that we're all part of the same. And through that bond, the key to loving and being loved fluidly opens, wanting to stop feeling it only through the partner.

So then it no longer is bottled up in just the romantic partner, but can be seen through the lens of all relationships. Then finally, the sexual five can fill themselves with love to give it without exclusive or highly selective relationships and can love life and people in general, simply because they exist.

The work will involve expanding the circle of relationships where we can express our emotions and allow that flow to nurture spontaneously so we can see that exchange is necessary not to dry up.

And the chapter concludes with also just comment on not just relationship through human interactions, but also art, dance, poetry, stories, tales, so that this internal happening can be externalized, can receive an outlet.

Okay, so that is the sexual five, trust, confianza, and we will wrap up the five next time with the self-preservation five or the conservation five, which is refuge. See you then.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit polytrope.substack.com