I’ve been on a hunt, of late, to satisfy my interest in my self. Small self, if that wasn’t obvious.
I am enneagram numbers 4 and 8.
First, number 4: The Individualist.
Fours are self-aware, sensitive, and reserved. They are emotionally honest, creative, and personal, but can also be moody and self-conscious. Withholding themselves from others due to feeling vulnerable and defective, they can also feel disdainful and exempt from ordinary ways of living. They typically have problems with melancholy, self-indulgence, and self-pity. At their Best: inspired and highly creative, they are able to renew themselves and transform their experiences.
Yes, definitely. I’ve had the unlucky (or perhaps fortunate, depending on how you look at it) addition of hefty amounts of shame for these characteristics from my very overbearing parents.
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Profoundly creative, expressing the personal and the universal, possibly in a work of art. Inspired, self-renewing and regenerating: able to transform all their experiences into something valuable: self-creative.
Level 2: Self-aware, introspective, on the “search for self,” aware of feelings and inner impulses. Sensitive and intuitive both to self and others: gentle, tactful, compassionate.
Level 3: Highly personal, individualistic, “true to self.” Self-revealing, emotionally honest, humane. Ironic view of self and life: can be serious and funny, vulnerable and emotionally strong.
Average Levels
Level 4: Take an artistic, romantic orientation to life, creating a beautiful, aesthetic environment to cultivate and prolong personal feelings. Heighten reality through fantasy, passionate feelings, and the imagination.
Looking at the entire list of these Levels, starting at 9, I have gradually progressed through all of them. In some aspects, I’m already at Level 1, but in most I think, I am a solid 2 to 3. I feel very chuffed about this. That was a long, hard road to travel.
Enneagram Type 8: THE CHALLENGER
Eights are self-confident, strong, and assertive. Protective, resourceful, straight-talking, and decisive, but can also be ego-centric and domineering. Eights feel they must control their environment, especially people, sometimes becoming confrontational and intimidating. Eights typically have problems with their tempers and with allowing themselves to be vulnerable. At their Best: self- mastering, they use their strength to improve others’ lives, becoming heroic, magnanimous, and inspiring.
Yes, again. I would look at this one as the outside part of my personality. Whereas the 4 describes more what is happening on the inside.
Healthy Levels
Level 1 (At Their Best): Become self-restrained and magnanimous, merciful and forbearing, mastering self through their self-surrender to a higher authority. Courageous, willing to put self in serious jeopardy to achieve their vision and have a lasting influence. May achieve true heroism and historical greatness.
Level 2: Self-assertive, self-confident, and strong: have learned to stand up for what they need and want. A resourceful, “can do” attitude and passionate inner drive.
Level 3: Decisive, authoritative, and commanding: the natural leader others look up to. Take initiative, make things happen: champion people, provider, protective, and honorable, carrying others with their strength.
Average Levels
Level 4: Self-sufficiency, financial independence, and having enough resources are important concerns: become enterprising, pragmatic, “rugged individualists,” wheeler-dealers. Risk-taking, hardworking, denying own emotional needs.
I’ve been stuck in Level 4 for quite awhile. Maybe that was good, as I definitely moved through the lower much less healthy levels intensely but quickly. Again, my feeling of intense shame and my vulnerability in feeling that shame without judgement actually seems to have propelled me very swiftly into the upper Levels of both these characteristics.
I’ve been stuck in Level 4 for quite awhile. Maybe that was good, as I definitely moved through the lower much less healthy levels intensely but quickly. Again, my feeling of intense shame and my vulnerability in feeling that shame without judgement actually seems to have propelled me very swiftly into the upper Levels of both these characteristics. I recognize quite a few characteristics of Levels 1 to 3. This tells me that my growth is ongoing and positive; that my time "being stuck" is done.
Meyers-Briggs INFP
I don't feel much connection with this form of personality typing. I feel too ambiguous about whether I am a natural Extrovert, a programmed Introvert, a Senser or Intuitive. I have defining characteristics of both. I don't see it as very helpful. Feeling, and Perceiver I knew.
I guess there is some helpful information in the FP part; that I am able to be so flexible and toss out bas ideas on the fly and not feel any injury to my identity. I often feel the pain and conflict in others as they confront paradigm shattering reality; I feel confusion as their entire structure seems to crumble around them, leaves them with nothing tangible to hold onto or to trust. They seem to disintegrate before my eyes. And, for a majority of them, they cannot even acknowledge this. They lock away that entire episode and stick with their prior paradigm, even though it was already disproven and destroyed their identity. They just throw that out and keep going with the old identity. Like, wut. I don't comprehend.
For me, there is more pain in keeping going along that same path. Not so with others? Idk. The combination of Feeling and Perceiver does seem prone to ungroundedness. Hello. That's me. Sort of. lol. Air and Fire. A bit of water. But no earth.
Perhaps that is why the Sensing and Intuitive doesn't make much sense to me. I have to be both. Intuition is the only way I can know anything. But if I were to be entirely Intuitive, I would just... float away. Airy-fairy, no-thing keeping me here. And so the Sensing becomes so very necessary for my life, here. I mean life here as in here, in the material realm. I feel so much felicity floating off and perhaps never coming back. But, I do sense that I have a purpose here, and so my Will to be here in my body and using my senses is quite developed. That's the higher level Type 4 on the enneagram, no less.
And I have such hard feelings about the Extrovert/Introvert. I have my rulers in Fire signs. I believe that I was naturally an Extrovert. And, now I'm not. This might riff on and on if I go into Germanic New Medicine and all the conflicts and avoidance patterns that left me with this Introverted personality. Hard feelings, and all.
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