Angst! 😱 Fear and the Enneagram Six

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.