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Enneagram Type 5 Board Archive Re: 5 with 4 wing or 4 with 5 wingPosted by Zen Cowgirl on August 12, 2000 at 22:58:43: In Reply to: 5 with 4 wing or 4 with 5 wing posted by synewton on August 12, 2000 at 20:29:21:
: I've read many books about the enneagram but have never been able to decide ~~~~~~~~~~~~ I do have very intense and turbulent emotional life, which had me convinced I was a 4 until I realized that nobody else I knew had a clue about it! Though I can be temperamental, most people I know see me as being rather cool and laid-back, because I rarely show what's going on beneath the surface. That I see myself as being overly emotional while everyone else thinks I'm a wee bit frosty sounds pretty darn 5-ish to me! I also have a rather disconcerting tendency to be *extremely* analytical, even at the same time I am feeling intense emotions. As an example, my favorite cat, Simon, was hit by a car and killed two weeks ago. When I went out looking for him and saw him lying on the sidewalk, the grief was intense, and for that first moment it was overwhelming. But even as I was going through the initial shock and pain, I was still keeping up a rational dialogue in my head. I was heartbroken, but at the same time was thinking, "okay, I need to get a sheet or something so I can pick him up, and there's an old flowered one in the basement that I can cut in half. Then I need to find the shovel. I should get him buried immediately, but not in the backyard--he never went back there--I'll bury him up front by the rosebushes because he liked to lie there. And from the way he is lying there, I don't doubt he was killed instantly, so that's good--he didn't suffer." It was very hard losing my friend, and I definitely felt the pain. But my mother, who was there at the time, later expressed amazement that I was so "stoic and level-headed" about the whole thing, when stoic or in control was the last thing I felt! I think the 4 manner of dealing with such a terrible event would have been to let the grief show in a much more outward fashion, without the simultaneous "rational dialogue." My mother wanted to help me bury Simon, and as a 4 I probably would have let her do so, and talked and grieved and wailed about it while we worked. As it was, I knew I couldn't stand to have another human there while I dug the grave, even as sympathetic a one as my mother. I needed to be alone to process it in my own head, to think about it and feel what I was feeling without the distraction of someone trying to say the "right things" to comfort me. For me, there was comfort in getting the hole dug right and burying my cat, alone. Which to a 4 probably sounds unbearably cold! But it was this sort of thing that made me realize about seven years ago that I was not actually a 4 at all, but a 5. That said, what makes you think of yourself as one or the other? What part of 4 "speaks to you?" And where do you see yourself fitting in as a 5? You might also hit the 4 Board and see if what the people over there say resonates more or less than what you find here.
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