SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 5 “Certainty Inward” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective
Enneagram Type 1 or PDP Pattern C-i | Pattern of Developmental Processing
PDP C-i: Certainty and Safety Sought Inward, Contain and Channel Aversive Emotions
Enneagram Type 5: The Observer/Investigator
Motivation: Certainty for Safety
Primary Emotion: Fear
Emotion Regulation Mode: DOWN-regulate (Contain and Channel)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Head, Cognitive Critical Thinking and Logic, Knowing and Perception
Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow (ALIEF): Head/Cerebral
Enneagram Type 5 Core Dynamics in Therapy
Growth, integration, and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:
- relaxing the pattern
- renewed aspirational intentions
- moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath
Stinginess vs Omniscience – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Stinginess
- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Holding on and holding back. Setting limits. Minimizing needs (inner control). Containing expression to preserve self. Observing, detaching, dampening.
- Low Integration: Leading with an internal Attendency within the Certainty Vector creates a challenge to integration as an attempt to predict in order to protect drives a focus of energy to hold tightly to what the anticipating head-based information processing constructs—a focus on accumulating that which can be channeled and contained as knowledge, space, and how one’s time is spent in effective and predictable ways. The vulnerability for excessive differentiation—of the individual from other people, of the head’s cognitive processing from the other somatic centers—may underly an experience of low integration for those with the C-i PDP.
Omniscience
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Knowingness from experience and action. Transparency of things past, present, and future. Everything necessary is known truly and directly.
- High Integration: As those traveling the C-i Pathway move toward enhancing linkage in the face of intense differentiation, the sense of harmony that begins to arise comes with a trusting that certainty is not something that is needed to be constructed, but rather a state of embracing uncertainty and allowing life and love to emerge. A full participation in experience innately involves taking risks and being open to this journey of life moving beyond the restriction of fear and into the adventure of possibility. Integration moves from the differentiation of a predictive cortical processing to a state of deep acceptance and ease with uncertainty.
Avarice vs Non-Attachment – The Emotional Dynamic
Avarice
- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Acquiring, hoarding time and space. Greed for these and knowledge, for what I cannot do without. You can never deplete me.
- Low Integration: Leading with an internal Attendency within the Certainty Vector creates a challenge to integration as an attempt to predict in order to protect drives a focus of energy to hold tightly to what the anticipating head-based information processing constructs—a focus on accumulating that which can be channeled and contained as knowledge, space, and how one’s time is spent in effective and predictable ways. The vulnerability for excessive differentiation—of the individual from other people, of the head’s cognitive processing from the other somatic centers—may underly an experience of low integration for those with the C-i PDP.
Non-Attachment
Moving from a cognitive habit of stinginess or inner control to mental awareness that all can be included and dealt with as it unfolds
Moving from emotional greed of one’s own time and space to opening to what is brought externally by the world that is really needed
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Knowingness from experience and action. Transparency of things past, present, and future. Everything necessary is known truly and directly.
- High Integration: As those traveling the C-i Pathway move toward enhancing linkage in the face of intense differentiation, the sense of harmony that begins to arise comes with a trusting that certainty is not something that is needed to be constructed, but rather a state of embracing uncertainty and allowing life and love to emerge. A full participation in experience innately involves taking risks and being open to this journey of life moving beyond the restriction of fear and into the adventure of possibility. Integration moves from the differentiation of a predictive cortical processing to a state of deep acceptance and ease with uncertainty.
Enneagram Type 5 Synopsis
Brief Description
Type 5 believes you must protect yourself from a world that demands too much and gives too little to assure life. Consequently, Observers seek self-sufficiency and are non-demanding, analytic, thoughtful and unobtrusive, but also can be withholding, detached and overly private.
Key Interventions
Help Type 5s appreciate the difference between detachment and non-attachment, realize that withdrawal invites intrusion, associate into experience and feelings, and move forward into life.
Somatic Profile
Type 5s tend to get stuck in their heads and avoid experiencing much in their body and emotions. It’s easy for them to become very “quiet” energetically, to the point that other people may have trouble sensing or feeling them. In particular, energy is withdrawn from the periphery of the body and collects in the core. Very sensitive to sound, touch, intrusion etc., they hold most of their tension in the gut rather than in the musculature, although the rib cage can become rigid or frozen depending on the level of fear in the body. They often exhibit the pattern of “going away” behind their eyes.
Communication Style
Content-focused, unemotional, factual, clear, analytical and terse, yet sometimes wordy. Others may perceive you as emotionally disconnected, aloof, overly-analytical and distant.
Behavioral Profile
- Strengths: Being scholarly and knowledgeable, thoughtful, dispassionate and calm in crisis, respectful, keeper of confidences, appreciative of simplicity, dependable and ascetic.
- Difficulties: Isolation from own feelings and experiences, especially in the here and now, detachment from life and possible withdrawal into minimization, pain of loneliness with a longing for connection, feelings of inadequacy, various failures to act, missed opportunities, avarice for time and space, confusing detachment with non-attachment, seeing requests as demands.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
Being considered not smart or factually incorrect. People not interested in the information that we have to share. Demands placed on us from others, especially emotional ones or those that infringe on our private time. An overloading of emotional input. Too much stimulation. Intrusions that might tire us. Needing time alone and not being disrupted. Not being able to restore our energy as needed.
Social Profile
Type 5s range from introverted to extraverted, but tend to be more on the introverted side due to their internal focus.
Enneagram Type 5 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
The original state of this transparent knowing This original omniscience lets the young child know things truly, unprejudiced by personal thoughts, feelings, opinions, or the slant which the point of view of her personality will take lets the child apprehend that the flow of a universal life energy meets all real needs. But for the Observer child, the world comes along and in effect harshly takes away this nascent state of knowing what really needs to be known by demanding too much or providing too little or both. So as an Observer child you experience, perhaps because of your innate sensitivity, that you will be depleted of resources by those who intrude upon you or withdraw from you. You experience that you know enough in the essential state to preserve your survival. so you protect yourself from intrusion and insufficiency by detaching and going into your mind compartment. You split off from feelings, emotions, and demands that can overpower you. The mechanism is called isolation of affect. As a result, you constrict your expression and conserve your energy by limiting impositions on your time and space and by going into your mind compartment where no one can intrude. You seek and hoard knowledge as a substitute for the original real knowing, or at least the potential for it. You fall into a state of avarice or greed for these things, for time, space, energy, and knowledge as ways to gain self sufficiency and to assure boundaries for protection from debilitating intrusions.
Of necessity, your attention gets organized around observing, detaching or disassociating from immediate experience, and segmenting or separating things and time. This detaching from feelings and desires is called isolation of affect. It helps you, as the Observer child, to minimize your wants, needs, and desires; it helps you sustain your boundaries and privacy. In the process your original capacity for knowing the scope and truth of essence goes far into the background, but from the standpoint of this basic proposition, your survival, so you believe, is assured.
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 5
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 5 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with knowing through the “heart” and the “body” compliments knowing through “mental models” and the over-thinking of the head becomes possible with awareness and practice. There is an ability for an emotional flow without a freeze response, and experiencing feelings in the here and now, not filtered through cognition. The Certainty system is balanced with a grounded Agency and sensing of self-sovereignty and the ability to lean into the Bonding heart-felt system of human connections and the acceptance of inevitable unpredictable nature of life and human relationship.