Refuge and the Self-Preservation Five

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Sunday evening. We're getting a lot of rain in New York, so we've got hot, muggy weather. And it's a good time to seek refuge, and so that's the keyword of the Enneagram Type 5 self-preservation, or in Spanish, conservación, or refugio. Beautiful word in Spanish, translated neatly to refuge.

But let's get right into it and find out what keyword makes most sense for us. This is a really wonderful chapter, so I am going to go deep on it because I actually think this is... The self-preservation five is the fiviest of the fives subtypes. And so I want to go deep on this. It's also the best written chapter, in my opinion, because it goes into more of the five in their less integrated state. I've also had a glass of wine, so I'm amped up to do this. So let's see how it goes.

The need to retreat is a clear characteristic for the conservation type five. However, it must be taken into account that each subtype of the five has some of that, a need to withdraw. In the case of conservation, the passion has a lot to do with finding refuge, erecting high walls that separate them from a world that can invade them, that can take them out of a small precious world hidden inside them. The idea of self-conservation becomes clear if we imagine them as firm supporters of retreating into a cave.

The five conservation extremely limits their needs and desires as each desire could mean a status of dependency for them. Like every conservation subtype, this one is also linked to survival in the concrete, attached to objects in personal space, but as a five, which is the most mental of the mental characters, it is in thought, in incessant reflection on the way to survive and live by limiting external disturbances where they find the greatest refuge.

So already just like really wonderfully lucid writing. I think we're seeing themes again of why Buddhism... might appeal to a five, a practice that literally talks about going into a cave. And then we're also starting to touch on a few different metaphors. We've talked about the cave, but then we also talk about high walls. And at least one of the popular Enneagram organizations, I forget which one, calls this subtype castle is their keyword.

And I think castle is I wish there was one word for castle meets cave. Refuge, the problem with refuge is it's a little bit hopeful, and so you might actually think that. You might get away from what the passion is trying to do here. It is not a successful strategy. None of these strategies is ultimately successful. Instead, it's a self-perpetuating strategy. Retreat, you know, retreat is actually not a bad keyword. Refuge is also fine.

It's a radical act of separation. It's a removal from the possibility of invasion. But castle and cave, maybe these are sub-subtypes. Cave is an act of renunciation. Cave is private. Cave is... retreating and then castle is more of a fortress defense it so castle is prepared for interaction and heavily boundaried we think about moats we think about spires we think about little little windows for archery to stick through Cave is removing oneself from the possibility of interaction.

So there are two different versions of refuge, and I think this subtype covers them both. Castle, and I think we'll cover this later, castle does a good job of describing, maybe part of this is just like, do you have a family or not? Because the family-oriented SP5, you can't have a cave. I mean, you can have a castle and you can have a man cave in your castle. And man cave is a perfectly good thing to have in the back of our heads here for the five.

I think men who have their man cave are accessing their five. It's probably, you know, and okay, so let's just touch on that. If you have a man cave, are you a five? No, not necessarily. You might be a five. But the, I think this is maybe a good point to touch on masculine feminine energy in Enneagram. According to Naranjo Naranjo. Roughly speaking, the left side of the Enneagram is masculine, the right side is feminine.

So five, six, seven, eight have more masculine energy. Not that women can't be those numbers, they just have more masculine energy. And then a five connects to all those. A five is the wing of a six, and then a five goes to seven and eight, and seven and eight go to five. So all of those numbers may have times where they want this cave-like retreat. And I think for people in relationship with a man who needs to withdraw, these are classic, at least in the U.S., like classic gender stereotypes, the man cave. I think learning about the SP5 and the passion of refugio, refuge, is instructive.

So let's go deeper. The transformation in the social preservation five by Jose Ignacio Fernandez. I got to know the Enneagram in 1998 and had a great impact on me. I'm not going to diligently read all of this. I'm going to skip it. How the process starts seeing the cave that I'm in. At first, the main work for ego healing consists of becoming aware of one's own vengeful attitude towards the world, which manifests itself with separateness. It involves undoing the victim image that judges the world as hostile, inadequate, hypocritical, ignorant, brutal, etc. When this issue becomes clear, one becomes aware that withdrawal and hiding are forms of aggression toward others.

And I think this is a really important point for the five that I don't think came up in the previous subtypes. becoming aware of one's vengeful attitude toward the world one's one has certain beliefs about the world that are maybe not so obvious to the five the five might think that their separateness comes from a quirkiness or an introversion or an inborn innate inclination But according to Jose Ignacio Fernandez, connecting with this vengeful, the world is not merely scary, the world is brutal, hostile, full of idiots, but full of dangerous idiots, potentially.

The process also involves becoming aware of one's own vulnerability, hypersensitivity, and fear of being crushed, and realizing that these difficulties are so great that they lead to avoidance and disconnection. It is about seeing how little life one has that the choice to manage with little implies living little. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life.

In the end, it's about seeing that there's great passion for not wearing oneself out, for conserving one's energies. That's why the SP5 is the five-iest five, conserving one's energies, as there's no faith in being able to obtain more. It is necessary to identify the unattainable ideal of the self. This unattainable ideal then harkens back to our talk about the social five, totem.

Yeah, so fives want to avoid conflict. That's why they're going to the cave, to the castle, to the fortress, to the refuge. So why is that? Conflict is experienced internally, and it is necessary to see the toll this entails. This is really starting to point now to the energy deficiency that five experiences. On the one hand, the price is self-aggression by internalizing anger, internalizing rage, also killing the other internally, the inner beheader.

It is useful to recognize the mechanism by which, when what is perceived as a particularly painful aggression occurs, a great resentment develops internally, which, however, the conservation five barely allows themselves to express outwardly. I mean, I would go farther to say they barely allow themselves to experience internally. The most common consequence of this resentment is withdrawal.

resentment is a constant so um and let's let's listen to this quote from Ignacio Fernandez I have indeed left many relationships after feeling hurt by something the process is always very similar first something happens that hurts me I do not express it I keep it inside and later I start to have feelings of rejection or devaluation toward that person and I withdraw stop having contact with them Normally, the person in question never knows the reason for my withdrawal, says Ignacio Fernandez.

So again, we now are connecting back to the self-preservation for whose passion or whose keyword is tenacity. And we can see the connection here, this self-aggression, this biting, this clenching. The difference seems to be that where the self-preservation four will, from time to time, explode. That that rage is never really... It's bottled up, but it's quite alive.

For the five, and the SP5 in particular, there's more of a self-killing, a deadening that happens. And it's dual. It's... If you hurt me, I have to do two things. One is I have to behead the other. I have to behead you. I have to defang the other. It's not that they hurt me. There is hurt. And I'm not going to experience that hurt.

So instead, there's sort of there's the experience of aggression, but maybe it's sort of uncoupled from the other. Take Jose Ignacio Fernandez's example. He starts to, it's almost like, I almost feel like you get impersonal about, you know, you get impersonal about hurt and aggression and devaluation. So who's rejecting who? You know, his partner offends him. And then he's sort of just like left with feelings of rejection, left with feeling of devaluation that he ultimately feels toward that person.

But wait, they were the one who rejected you. They hurt you. But it's almost like the five kind of moves into this world of phenomena. Not you hurt me, but there is hurt. Not you rejected me, but there is rejection. And then the five almost sort of then grabs the rejection. Like, well, I guess I have to leave this person. So their responses aren't as, they don't feel like detonations to me.

They don't feel like, okay, there was a wound and now I'm holding it and then I'm going to explode back at you. That might be more of a flourish response. It's less explosive, but there is a seething quality to it. And I think what Ignacio Fernandez is pointing to here is starting to open up that resentment, which the four swims in resentment, but the five has to start to admit that there might be some resentment that starts to point to the differences between the two.

The typical way of living the conflict is to inhibit the response, sometimes changing it for the opposite behavior to what is felt. Okay, so it's just what we're talking about. For example, when someone unexpectedly shows an aggressive and demanding attitude toward a conservation five, they may accept what is demanded of them to escape the pressure, but at the same time begin to feel a sense of anger inside for not having reacted in a way more in line with their desires, displacing the action.

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. You know, there's this feeling of abandoning oneself, right? So you hurt, you know, you say, you demand something of me and you accuse something of me and it's so hurtful, but I kind of do it. I take it seriously. Okay, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm going to do it. And then I'm just left with this like feeling of injustice or feeling of abandonment or rejection, right?

But it's not just that you rejected me. It's also I abandoned myself or rejected my own. Hey, that's not right. I'm standing up for myself. But then the anger can sort of morph in any number of ways. In all likelihood, I'm not going to hold on to it as that was me abandoning myself. I'm going to hold on to it as I'm angry at you. But I'm not going to express that anger. I'm just going to withdraw back to my cave.

Clandestine action, acting in secret so that their actions do not compromise them, becomes a way of avoiding confrontation and avoiding generating expectations or relationships of dependency. The hyper-adaptability manifests, for example, in a compulsive way of saying yes to an external demand if the refusal can be uncomfortable or lead to conflict.

So this starts to point to the passive aggressiveness of the five. And it's how would you, I don't know if other, maybe we'll get into this. I don't know if other people would experience fives exactly as passive aggressive, but the five is passive aggressive in the sense that, you know, you ask them to do something and they say, yep, I'll do it. And then they don't do it. Or you ask them to do it and they do it, but they do it with resentment that's private.

Or they kind of maybe half do it. And so there's this... And I don't think it's necessarily conscious passive aggression. I think it's the five's way of... Finding a way to meet the needs of others without losing oneself, without having to leave the cave.

Let's see what else Ignacio Fernandez has to say about this. There's an internal idea of not wearing oneself out by paying attention to things that are trivial to oneself and resistance to remembering such things. The tendency to anesthetize oneself, to forget, and to mental confusion is another notable trait of this character. Appearing invisible, playing deaf, that was a way to hide from my own sense of discomfort of perceiving myself as a coward, a fearful person who, at any sight of threat, would run to hide inside the house.

I never knew if my perceptions were correct, if my reactions were appropriate, if my feelings were acceptable, said Luciano, describing his childhood. So that's interesting. So that speaks a little bit to the core number of the head triad, right? The six. Cowardice, fear. I mean, which is sort of the most relatable reaction to fear. There's fear, so I'm going to hide.

And so refugio, refuge, has a taste of that. But the five's version of refuge isn't directly fear from threat, running inside the house from a threat. It's more complicated than that. And Luciano points to it. Is this a threat? I'm not sure, I have doubts, so I need to retreat into my world of thinking and question my perceptions, question what's real, question what's not real, and retreat potentially physically into a man cave or a woman cave, but also potentially into a mental cave of thoughts.

And then maybe try to communicate with my partner in that mental realm, which no one will ever meet you there. That's your own thought fortress, your own thought castle, your own thought cave.

Seeing one's own withdrawal as aggression helps. Yeah. The five isn't aware of how aggressive or passive aggressive their withdrawal can be. It hurts others, this withdrawal from contact.

The avarice of time. Not wasting time is an obsession. In the self-preserving five, there's a passion for making the most of time, but without a clearly defined purpose. I'm laughing at recognition. It is rather something diffuse that is connected with when wasting time. This character needs to see to what extent they feel attached to objects and safe places, even transferring their emotional bonds to these. Something similar also happens with the fewer relationships they establish. Although they have little awareness of their attachment to them, they often feel great attachment and possessiveness.

That tends to be particularly true with family. I'm not sure if that'll come up here. I think it will. The SP5 also needs to realize the great attachment they have to their own intuitions, ideas, or deductions, and the impoverishment that entails by clinging to them, closing themselves off to others' point of view, realizing that many times criticism or disagreement with these ideas are experienced as personal devaluation and aggression, and also how this leads to a reaction that can be of offense or arrogance, but also of self-devaluation.

starting to connect. The first point of reconnection with oneself is to recognize one's own needs. And that's the same for two. but it leads in really different directions. During my first year of therapy, I lived through a situation that was decisive for me. I remember a night with my partner when suddenly I started to see her cry. I don't understand anything. Then after a few moments, she tells me that she's decided to leave me.

I'm left in suspense and I begin to think, well, it's okay. I'll meet others more interesting. I'll be free, better, and things like that. However, after a few moments, I begin to feel very great pain and infinite pain. Something inside me said, you see, it has happened to you again. You've lost it again. Then I felt that I was playing everything in that moment and I cried like never in my life. I literally felt like I was breaking inside. That also reached her heart and the relationship continued. It was the first time in my life that I realized that I needed another person, says Ignacio.

And again, if we want to take a kind of a slightly pastiche view and go back to the man in his man cave, does he appreciate his wife? Probably not. He probably takes her for granted and then she threatens to leave and maybe does leave. And then for the first time he realizes how dependent he was on, on her. Um, um, and, and so the, the SP five, um, They haven't neglected their own needs. They've just been unaware of their own needs.

And so in the story that Ignacio is telling here, he was getting his needs met unconsciously by his partner. And it wasn't only until the threat of her leaving was presented that he started to see, I'm going to lose her again. Now, I mean, the story is ambiguous in the sense that one interpretation is for the first time he became aware of how much he needed her and made adjustments to keep her.

That sounds like that's the case here. But there's another story, which is that... if the five is to truly be left alone and have to fend for themselves, then they're going to come face to face with the absolute futility of their survival strategy, which has been to not have needs. It's a fantasy. I won't need other people. I won't have needs. The paradox of surviving alone is that you have to rely on other people, the friendship and love and support of other people, your neighbors, your friends, your neighborhood, your church.

So there's no such thing as living alone. And the five, maybe in relationship, had a fantasy of living in their cave, but they were actually getting their needs met, just as maybe a monk in a cave is getting food dropped off at the mouth of his cave every few days. And so it doesn't mean that the five should stay in that relationship, that Ignatius should stay in the relationship, but Ignatius is going to have to reckon with his needs either way.

Either the way that his partner was meeting his needs and he wants to keep that, or the way that he now needs to figure out a way to actually get his needs met that she wasn't doing.

Taking care of the body, appearance, and personal image, realizing that is not something for others. Another case of that, allowing oneself to please others and oneself. All of this is fundamental. Taking care of myself, treating my body with love and delight. We've talked about body a lot in the five. Nutrition. There can be a lack of interest, neglect, eating for the sake of eating. Other times it can be compulsive eating to fill the void. And again, these are things that can show up for the two as well.

I guess these are behaviors or lack of behaviors that can emerge when one's just not connected with one's own needs. Now here's something not two-ish. At first, there's a great disinterest in people in general. For example, wasting time getting to know someone is not interesting for something, who is not interesting for something. The change comes by paying attention to names, to the trivialities they tell one, but it is about loving attention.

And one must learn to say no when one really doesn't want to pay attention. Experiencing situations of joy, jubilation, uncontrollable laughter, spontaneous play. Those are other elements of transformation. Not taking things so seriously. Go back to the ivory tower or the sexual five who wants the one. Not taking oneself so seriously is an attitude that also helps. Experiencing pleasure helps. Realizing that one can only enjoy from trust in the other. Experimenting with one's own assertiveness.

Here anger comes up. When the anger is so characteristic of the Conservation Five, I guess that goes back to the resentment, the quiet resentment. When the anger comes into play, consisting of punishing in silence, not speaking, showing a bad face. So it's withdrawal, but it sounds like there's withdrawal with resentment there.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think the five has to connect with their anger usually. I'm not sure if they recognize the anger in their behaviors because it won't show up necessarily as anger. But if we have an argument and I withdraw to my room and close the door without explanation, that is an act of aggression. And I think the five has to see that. It might not come easy.

Showing oneself more, coming out of the cave, just having conflict and realizing that for many types, having the conflict and expressing the anger, expressing the hurt, that's relationship, that's contact, and that's what the other person wants from you.

Sometimes the fear of generating expectations in others is so great that there is an intentional concealment of oneself, hence the appearance of being strange. The work is to realize that one can share information about oneself, one's opinions, emotions, tastes, while reserving a space of intimacy.

That's interesting. Yeah, I do think that the five struggles with balance there in going back to the core wounds of the five relating to contact and boundary that One of the ways to look at the five's childhood wound is either there was an invasion of the five's space, that they're hypersensitive and somehow the parent or somebody intruded, invaded too much and they had to withdraw. Or the opposite, that there was neglect and there was not healthy.

In either case, it's a lack of healthy contact. And so I think the five can reenact that in a way as described here of like, either I'm not going to give you any of myself or I'm going to give you all myself. And you've got to love all of it. And if you don't like all of it, it's like, well, no, you can share this much and keep that much. And that takes a lot of practice, I think, for the five to develop a sense of a healthy boundary there.

Sometimes there is a desire to share everything intimate and is about being able to share the space with whom one wants and when one wants. Detaching from cherished objects and safe places is a big step forward. Transformation consists of feeling more alive, acquiring a new version of oneself in the world. It is also discovering that life hurts And above all, it is discovering what love is. And this is a great discovery. It opens the door to living relationships more intensely, developing trust. From there, there can also be a new intuition of what spirituality truly means.

Taking one space. Hmm. Pretty much just repeating quite a bit of what we've talked about. But yeah, taking one space. I mean, this goes back to a right that the four and the five both struggle to connect with, which is the most basic right. I have the right to be here. I have the right to be here. I have the right to take up space.

Refuge is intimately tied up with not feeling the right to take up space. I can contact this a lot where it's like, I feel like I have to be small until I'm in my space and then I can sprawl because I've been holding in because it's not safe and because I'm not safe. And if I were to be myself, then something bad would happen.

Often will be necessary to do what is most difficult for conservation five teaching groups leading therapy groups doing individual therapy giving lectures leading a team to name a few examples.

Some comments about sexuality and letting go of sexual fantasy and this goes back to the sexual five right like. Sexuality and fantasy are so linked for the five and so kind of ordinary sexuality, ordinary wanting, ordinary desire. Connecting with one's masculinity or femininity or both. Recovering one's own aggressiveness.

For me, says Maurizio, it is allowing myself to do crazy things, giving myself the luxury of saying what I think, allowing myself a bit of narcissism, self-promotion, self-indulgence, giving myself a break, a satisfaction.

Let's hear again from Ignacio on blooming. During my therapeutic process and my training as a therapist, I went through several phases. At first, it was something I did for my own growth, I never imagined being a therapist. Later, the desire to be a therapist someday appeared in me as I realized how much it helped me to be connected. But I saw it as something distant, someday when I had sufficiently prepared and obtained the necessary titles. Finally, I started to practice as a therapist with my current resources.

first it was organizing and leading a zen meditation group then the idea of doing a gestalt workshop arose then a series of bioenergetic workshops next someone asked me for individual therapy then a colleague sent me another patient throughout this process i could experience my fears my insecurities my ignorance but i also discovered that i had many more resources than i believed and increasingly trusted myself signal nasa you know i've been meaning to write about this um but i'll just mention it here in my own work

moving into independent practice and coaching, I've come up with like three arenas of my practice. And I call it the stage, the field, and the lab. And so the stage is if I'm going to be teaching or running a workshop, teaching what I know. And that speaks to my threeness. I'm teaching, here I am, I'm teaching. I'm conscious of the image that will help people learn and it's a one-to-many thing. So there's sort of a slightly on quality.

Then there's the field, which is one-on-one work, either as a client or as a coach, which is deeply intimate work. It's interesting, this also goes to social-sexual self-preservation. So the stage is social, the field is sexual, it's one-on-one, it's intimate, it's intense, it's open, the boundaries are less sharp.

And the field is also where a lot of the magic happens. It's like the frontier. And then there's the lab, which is what I'm doing now. It's like translating neuronal or reading some new thing or learning some new methodology or coming up with a new theory or planning some idea. And that's my refuge. That's my cave.

And my own, even though I think of myself as a four, this is interesting. I think... This is a good example of where the instincts and the Enneagram converge. I definitely feel like my home base is four, but my home base is also self-preservation.

i i mean also maybe that's just a self-preservation thought but like when you really feel unsafe don't you want to be by yourself i guess some people maybe truly seek safety in others but for me when i feel like my most threatened i just want to be by myself in the lab so that's why i like that's why i love doing these because it's like when i'm having a

when I don't have the energy to do stage work or do field work or build out those practices, I can just be in the lab here. Of course, there's a little stage quality here. I'm talking to, I don't know if anyone's listening, but this is lab work. I mean, at some point, maybe I'll do some more deep, more prepared work, but this is pretty, this is just like if you were sitting next to me doing lab work with me.

So going back to the five, then I think the five, especially the self-preserving five, they love being in the lab, but I think all fives are lab people. And so maybe the five can feel into, as Ignacio was describing, workshops, meditation groups, dinner parties, just subtle ways to like get out. And then they can think about it through the lens of the lab. Well, I can't sit in the lab forever. I've got to apply some of these things in the field. So I'll practice some conversation starters, you know, or learn about conversation starters, then I'll have a dinner party and I'll practice some of that. I think that'd be very five-ish. That would be like a nice way for a five to start to step into some of these things.

Leading, motivating, taking the reins, in any case, from a purpose with personal meaning or transformative elements. Healing, helping others to heal is another step. From where one is and with one's own resources, whether as a therapist or as a teacher, parent, sibling, friend, or whatever, this can lead to connecting more and more frequently and counteracting the tendency towards self-absorption.

Finally, it especially helps to work and balance the three loves through relationships, giving more space to compassionate maternal love, and recovering, giving life to erotic love or love, I don't know, these three loves. That's not, we've got enough going on. We don't need to learn about the three loves right now.

Okay, so that's it for the self-preservation five, which I think refuges a perfectly reasonable definition word for it. I just want to, what I would add to it is from my working with some fives, especially fives who have families, they really lean hard on, you know, fives don't need many relationships, but as we saw, there are a few relationships where they really depend kind of on all of their needs getting met. There's a high dependency.

And so a five in their midlife with family and kids, they're more of a castle five. We need our fortress. All I need to do is make sure that we're good. So that's, I think, the only limitation of kind of cave or refuge. And let's just see if we can kind of name, we've captured it, I think, in the other subtypes, but why does this break down? And paradoxically, why does it break down is also the same question as how does this self-perpetuate?

So I must withdraw to my refuge when I'm in threatening relationships or when I'm hurt. When there's contact that is unpleasant, when there's friction in contact, I must retreat to my refuge. That's our key word, refuge. where that hurt, aggression, contact won't happen. And I must remove my needs. I must be strange. I must not show up as whole. And then what happens?

Well, I think there's two things. One is the other person is going to feel deeply Actually, they'll feel like there was aggression there, reciprocal aggression. And so if they're a seeker, they're going to come back and say, hey, don't walk away from me. We need to talk about this. And so that's one way that refuge will break down is refuge is an act of aggression. But because it's not visible to the five, they'll be so perplexed and concerned. I'm just trying to get my own space. Why is this person chasing me?

And then the other problem is that they will retreat into a place that's a fantasy place. You can't go through life not needing things from other people. You can do it for a little bit, but you can't do it forever. You're going to get sick. You're going to get horny. You're going to get lonely. You're going to need sugar. There's going to be a flood and you're going to need someone to bring you food.

And what's gonna happen then is the five is gonna come out of their cave and they're gonna be a little bit weird because they haven't had the practice and they're gonna need something. But the way they need it is gonna be quote unquote ugly or gonna be like, it's like the, just imagine someone who comes out of their cave after years, I'm like, I need this. It's like, whoa, you're not showing up in healthy ways.

So exactly because they've withdrawn so much They won't know how to, they just don't, they won't be equipped to have healthy friction. So then they'll come with some need and it's going to be overwhelming. You know, in the case of a partnership, they might dump out all their stuff. In the case of a party, they might be like way too on whatever it is and they'll get disappointed. the contact will disappoint them in some way. They'll be hurt. They'll feel rejected. It'll be really deeply rewounding. And they'll say, see, this is what happens when I come out of my cave.

So that's the passion. That's the passion of refuge, which is inside the passion of avarice, of stinginess. So we covered the ivory tower, the totem, which is, you know, one version of refuge. We covered the confidant or trust, which is putting all of, you know, seeking the other to complete you and be your refuge. And then finally just refuge, you know, a cave, a mental cave or a physical cave, some version of withdrawing into safety.

And so with that, we complete the five. Okay. And again, you know, this is really more focused on the passion. So I'm sorry if I didn't give people enough of like the, the healing journey. But I think these chapters did quite a bit there too. And really the project here is just to translate, not do too much beyond that.

So next time we'll move into the six and start to talk about fear, angst, and doubt. all of the qualities of the six and, you know, as the core type of the head triad, we'll bring in all that fiveness, but then see that the six has quite a different set of ways of engaging with what's fundamentally sort of the same starting place, which is the world is scary. Okay, so look forward to that. See you next time.