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Enneagram Main Board Archive No, there was no easy time; yes I am a brat!!!Posted by Kronus on October 06, 1998 at 00:12:56: In Reply to: Re: There is the dark-side to SEVEN posted by Christy on October 05, 1998 at 09:54:39: High School was a miserable existence. Fortunately the enneagram personality preferences are somewhat in their infancy in high school. Most of the defense mechanisms that we use to define our personalities are hypothesized, tested, retested and theorized in the crucible of high school. It is only when we reach our twenties and thirties that we begin to solidify our notions about which mechanisms tend to work and not work. As we reach our forties we are looking for Significant Emotional Experiences (SEE) to define our purpose and realize our journey. (That, by the way, is why Bill Clinton's sin is so egregious! He used a young woman who had no idea of her own purpose or personality to further his own personal self gratification. REMEMBER: when someone asks you for something, BE SUSPICIOUS!!!) Primarily, what has worked is to: do something, even if it is wrong. I mentioned that FIVE is an easy counter arrow direction for SEVEN since escaping inward into research and definition, "Learning", is just another form of escaping pain... the real trick for SEVENS is to go to FOUR and feel pain. Facing the cause of the pain is probably the more difficult of tasks. Meeting a person, or discussing the root of emotional pain is nearly impossible for even a well healed, healthy SEVEN. It becomes far easier to "forget-about-it" through doing something, anything else. In high school, you can be all over the board and screwey, as an adult one must maintain a respectable, expectable, decorum. It matters little if that something is indulging in drugs, alcohol, illicit sexual addiction, or jumping out of perfectly good airplanes... the event is the life-force, just being in the game as compulsive gamblers will tell you. Now recognizing that these are the conditions of your existance is not enough! For as my good Jesuit brethren would say: "knowledge is not behavior". There are many unhealthy and "dark-sided" types lurking about here who know the enneagram symbolism, but misuse or do not allow themselves to behave as if it meant anything at all. Perfection however is a journey, not a destination. "Man, in whatever form has never been perfect!" is perhaps another way of saying that the glass is half empty. My cousin, a recovering alcoholic prefers the alternative: "It must all be perfect, otherwise it would be something else!" I, as a SEVEN, on the other hand, have a third view: "We just need to keep looking for the right glass, this one appears to big!" Kronus
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