The Barrcast

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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 barrcast.substack.com

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

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

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

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

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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…

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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,…

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