Confidant and the Sexual Five

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a Tuesday afternoon. We're trucking along here with the five and we're on to the sexual five today. The keyword for the sexual five is confianza which is translated here as trust. If you also hear confidence in Confianza, I think that's a connection.

But in the deeper sense, maybe like the confidence man. I guess that's where con man originates from. Should we just start with a quick etymological investigation of the word confidence? Because there's something about contract and trust here that I don't think I fully understand so let's look at the etymology of confidence.

Of course, right we have confide, confiding having full trust. Let's see what else we have to say here. Assurance or belief in the goodwill veracity of another is the original meaning of confidence. Firmly trusting, fully trusting, full reliance. So there's a, the origin of confidence is relational. Assurance or belief in the goodwill of another. And so I think that's where, you know, it can connect with trust.

And then Con, Con Man. Confidence with a sense of assurance based on insufficient grounds dates from the 1590s. Con Artist is attested by 1910, but Confidence Man is a Melville book. So obviously, yeah, 1840s, I would guess.

So let's just invite in all of that association, trust, contract, fully trusting another in sort of a formal way that sort of establishes reliance on the other. And I'm going to, once again, I'm not going to read the whole chapter, although this is actually the shortest chapter I've seen yet after the social five, which was quite long. And the keyword there was totem.

And the points made multiple times that fives have, as it says here, is if one tries to find the difference between the sexual five and the other type of five, it will not be easy. But if one engages in conversation with them, they will hear them say that they're very passionate about a person, generally about a person they cannot find in their lives.

So we've got the four who I call the romantic because I think the individualist leads one astray and too far away from how fundamentally dependent on relationship the four is. And the sexual five is also a romantic type here, very passionate about a relationship that seems not to exist in the ordinary world. It's a relationship that would finally give them the security that they never had.

Here occurs a case similar to the extraordinary search of the social five. The extraordinary would be what is at the top of the totem pole. The sexual five seeks a very high specimen. The same happens to them in love. This subtype is on a quest for absolute love. And their search is so strong that if you are the one being sought, it's very difficult to pass the test.

If someone is looking for the absolute, it is very easy for them to feel disappointed. We must understand this passionate search in the sense of trust, of being able to trust the other. The sexual five is looking for that person who will be there for them and with them no matter how or what, far beyond the normal vows of a commitment or marriage.

The thought of the sexual five is that they must be able to present themselves to you with the worst of their inner world, and that you, as their partner, should maintain complete equanimity in front of their inner monsters, since they love you so much. So they live the love of a couple as a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal that does not exist in the human world.

Excuse me. They go on to mention Chopin as kind of an example of a sort of romantic person who's not generally open to intimacy, doesn't have many friends, doesn't have many relationships, and is sort of saving all their trust for the one. Not the type one, but the soulmate.

So I think this is a pretty understandable passion here. So again, we're all of the subtypes of the five return to avarice or stinginess, which is I have so little. I have so little, so I need to be very, very deliberate about what I give. Why do I have so little? It's because the world is threatening. Relationship is threatening. Emotions are threatening.

And so to need and be needed are pretty frightening for the five. And so the five seeks ways to avoid being needed or needing. And really becomes very stingy with the few interactions or the few relationships where they allow themselves to be needed or allow themselves to need others.

So that's the basis. And we covered totem already. Let's just hit a couple of the beats from the essay by Mireya Dardar.

We isolate ourselves, we do not expect anything from others, and we do not trust life. So there's that word trust. So as someone said in the last chapter, this feeling of like locking your heart in a box, and so the sexual five is saving. In a way, there's almost sort of a virginity there, that they're saving themselves. They're saving their trust for that special somebody.

We do not trust life. Both people and life itself constitute a cosmos situated behind a glass that separates us from everything. And it's the five who, in early, early childhood or even infancy, created that glass separation. Or we talked about muffling before.

On one hand, we live any relationship with the outside world as threatening, which at best will cause us pain. At the same time, deep down, we perceive ourselves as guilty when interacting with others because we feel we may hinder them. We believe that if we do not need and are self-sufficient, we can survive, and thus they will not hurt us and we will not hurt them.

We live the emotional world as threatening and complicated, as something we can do without since it causes displeasure. Therefore, we prefer not to get emotionally involved and stay in the role of observers of life, the investigator, the observer. The same non-involvement gives us a certain emotional infantilism and, at the same time, an inhibited hypersensitivity, since we do not put our own emotions into practice.

And I think that's true of the five is sort of emotionally frozen potentially at a really early age. And so the path for the five to recover that can be really rocky. And for the sexual five maybe in particular, they're going to be putting a lot of pressure on that relationship to sort of like birth their emotional life, birth their maturation that is set up for disappointment, right? Because that's too much to put on another human being.

And by putting that much on the relationship, you're also setting yourself up to be disappointed, thereby saying, see, I knew I couldn't trust, right? And so all these words, we just have to remember with the totem or trust, these words are always just keywords meant to point to a self-perpetuating or what Naranjo calls elsewhere, a deficiency motivation. A motivation that comes from some sense of lack and when acted out, reinforces that sense of lack.

So I must not trust the world or relationships until I find that special somebody. And then when that special somebody inevitably disappoints me or is nowhere to be found, then that just reinforces my sense of distrust, which all reinforces this stinginess, stinginess of energy, stinginess of love.

It does seem that for fours and fives, these wounds are really early. I know that's been the case for myself, that working with some of this material tends to be pre-verbal. It's really deep in the body.

Here, the author says, the wound in the bond usually occurs in the first months of life, when the baby has not yet established the differentiation between the world and themselves through the maternal bond. So there's a disconnection that runs very deep. A splitting is sometimes used as the word, a splitting.

The sexual five has locked themselves in, creating a safe inner world filled with ideations, theories, romantic fantasies, and utopias about the search for unconditional love. And that totem would be there too. So it's detachment. It's detachment.

Again, that detachment comes with many gifts of neutrality, of intellectual rigor and honesty, incredible categorization, gifts of making sense of data. But the five themselves are not in that world. And so the quality of the data is always sort of corrupted. The five really is living in a fantasy world.

Waiting for the right person to appear with whom they can exist and show themselves as they are, since this person in their fantasy will accept them unconditionally. And they will be able to live with the obtained security, everything they do not dare to live in the world. Waiting for that encounter, the only time they allow themselves to be themselves is when they are alone, feeling isolated in everyday life.

So there's this emotional non-dependence as sort of a basis for relationship, except for this imagined partner where there will be a full unloading of exaggerated dependence. And so the transformation story here, very similar to what we covered in the totem, first is sort of realizing the existence of this fantasy world. And abandoning the project of idealism, which, as covered extensively in the Totem chapter, can be really painful for the five.

Transformation begins when one leaves the world of reason and makes room for sensation, recognition of needs, inhabiting the body, body work, massage, yoga. Talk about Tai Chi in the last one. When one gives themselves permission to exist, and it is that sort of lower chakra, like right to exist work, right to be here, and leaving renunciation as a way of life, then a psychological change can occur, influencing their way of thinking.

The author here says, it's necessary to go through the process of psychologically killing the parents, which is certainly evocative. And what they mean is all the interjects we have swallowed about how we have to be and act will die, leading to paralysis and isolation compartmentalization.

That might be a little bit above my understanding this idea of killing the parents, but I mean, let's just connect with it. So the five in sort of this way of talking about it, the five didn't get some really basic stuff from their parents that didn't, it didn't take root in them. And so they don't have internal nurturing parents.

They don't even have necessarily a sense of, you know, there's not going to be like an inner critic necessarily, voicing that, but, the five builds up a defense mechanism. We've called it muffling or filtering or separation or hypersensitivity. And that's kind of their parent in a way.

That's sort of the parent that they've invented. And I think what this is saying is that that internal parent communicates a very deprived sense of self, a very weak or easily destroyed sense of self. And therefore, the five, and I think this would probably be true of the four, will, when we talk about interject, you know, I must, I must not need, I must not be needed or else I will be destroyed or else I will be annihilated.

That's sort of like the inner parental guidance. And it's all grounded in a deep sense of lack of safety. So those are the parents that have to be killed. That's how I take that.

See if this says anything else. When we finally begin to release the chains that bind us to our parents and feel more rooted in life, the heart also begins to open and the feeling of being the authors of our own destiny emerges, recovering the paternal or inner authority figure castrated by an excessively authoritarian family member.

Let's just see the Spanish there. It's a good translation. It's just a lot of parents here. So there's the recovery of the paternal figure who was castrated by an authoritarian family member.

And this isn't my area of expertise, this kind of like depth psychology or parent archetypes, but I want to try to contact it if we can. The internal parent that we were just talking about that the five develops is a parent that says, you are not safe. It is not safe. The world is not safe. You will not survive. You will be annihilated.

So recovering the inner father is recovering this sense of authorship, of sovereignty, of agency. And something happened in the five's journey that they didn't get that. And so they have to recover it. And part of that recovery process is by sort of undoing this, what they call authoritarian family member, which may or may not be external. It may just be this internal authoritarian parent figure.

That may have been self created by the actual absence of contact from the family. In other words, like, if the five was neglected emotionally by father and mother, then the internal parent that they formed may be this sort of authority that says it's not safe, you're not safe, etc.

And so that's the parent that has to be killed so that a healthy internal mother and a healthy internal father can be grown. We can leave behind the fear and guilt of existing.

Fear of annihilation, which is mentioned here, I think is there's something about annihilation that for me really clicks with the five. Overwhelm and annihilation, which is different from the four. I think the four can recognize annihilation in their own deepest fears, but the four is almost more concerned with like non-existence.

And again, that's that difference between the heart type and the head type or shame and fear. Being annihilated is like terrifying. Being invisible or being nothing or being broken, those activate the heart center more when I touch those.

Connection with the body as a path to the recovery of the senses is fundamental, especially body work as a way to recover lost vitality and energy. As one feels vital, they can go out into the world to meet others. The body is also where needs can be felt to be satisfied from there. In body work, it is important to recover the feeling of grounding and in this way, energy.

I think recovery of energy is an essential project for the five. You know, that's another way to look at the stinginess is the five is very energy conscious. And that will always be the case for the five. It's not like that's going to magically disappear. But, you know, I think it just comes over and over again how important body work can be for the recovery of energy.

Something has happened where when the five locked, you know, locked their heart in that chest, they locked a lot of their energy in there too.

We'll just touch on this last piece with the mother again, because this particular chapter talks a lot about interjection and internal parents. So I think it's good to just follow that thread all the way through.

Recovering the bond with the nurturing mother, once the interjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother is dead, helps to feel that there is no separation, that we are part of the same. Part of the same what?

I'm just gonna check the Spanish here. Yeah, it doesn't, it's sort of like the, we're all, we're all part of the same, we're all, we're part of the same, I don't know how you translate that. Parte de lo mismo. Que formamos parte de lo mismo.

I'll just leave it. Well, yeah, exactly. Here we have the introjected. So first of all, introjected as in self afflicted. Should we look up introjection just to double check our Freudian terminology? When I think about introjecting, I think Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes like a syringe, like a needle. It's like a self-injection of negative stuff.

And so let's look at these descriptions. Not the nurturing mother, but the introjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother. So there are contradictions there, right? How can something be absent and invasive? How can it be absent and demanding?

But I think the story here is again, through neglect or through some failure in the family system for the five to internalize their mother, there is an absence. There is a void. And there is an exposure, there is a lack of safety that is resolved through story, through interjection of deficiency, of particular lack of safety of risk of annihilation.

And, the demanding aspect is maybe pointing even more precisely to this trust quality that it's like, I must not trust just anybody or else I will be annihilated. I must only trust the most trustworthy. I must wait. I must save all my trust for that special mother, essentially, for that, for that special caregiver, the caregiver that I've, I've created a fantasy for, cause I never, never experienced it.

And so that's the demanding piece. Once that whole story subsides, then there's the opportunity to recover a bond with a nurturing mother. Again, internal, not like the actual mother, not the physical mother, but the mother who loves all her children. You know, the mother Mary, the mother of all beings.

And that's that feeling also that, you know, the four can find refuge in of the ordinary. And from there, there's a feeling of non-separation that we're all part of the same. And through that bond, the key to loving and being loved fluidly opens, wanting to stop feeling it only through the partner.

So then it no longer is bottled up in just the romantic partner, but can be seen through the lens of all relationships. Then finally, the sexual five can fill themselves with love to give it without exclusive or highly selective relationships and can love life and people in general, simply because they exist.

The work will involve expanding the circle of relationships where we can express our emotions and allow that flow to nurture spontaneously so we can see that exchange is necessary not to dry up.

And the chapter concludes with also just comment on not just relationship through human interactions, but also art, dance, poetry, stories, tales, so that this internal happening can be externalized, can receive an outlet.

Okay, so that is the sexual five, trust, confianza, and we will wrap up the five next time with the self-preservation five or the conservation five, which is refuge. See you then.