Complaints about the enneagram personality type system

1:52 PM 12/7/10

I'm taking a break from whatever I was doing, and writing a blog instead. This is a form of entertainment. It's not really useful. I am in the to-do list mode right now.

I went through some old mail and garbage that was piled on the floor. The most helpful thing that I've been doing has been to think and plan about what's causing this backlog of junk to pile up. I've been writing in my notebook my thoughts about what's causing it and what needs to be done.

There's also a bunch of contaminated laundry and I need to make decisions about how to prevent this in the future. It's not just an ordinary pile of laundry. It has drug residues on it, and when I wear the contaminated clothes, I have symptoms, like insomnia, or fatigue, or swelling in my face, for instance. If I wash the clothes, the residue spreads around to the other items in the laundry, and instead of being a small spot on one item, it becomes a total coverage thin film over the inside and outside surfaces of all items, because the washers don't use fresh water constantly, they reuse and recycle the dirty water around and around for most of the wash.

Ideally, I'd like to wash the clothes in a running stream, except that would make them all mud stained, and I wouldn't be comfortable using soap in a stream and then watching the soap foam just float away down the stream. It would have to be some kind of environmentally nontoxic soap, I guess. I don't happen to live next to a running stream the way I used to. And that stream was full of duck parasites and snail parasites anyway. I used to get them crawling into the skin of my legs every time I went by the duckpond. It took a long time for me to figure out what it was and where it was coming from. I don't want parasites in all my laundry.

I need a secretary. The secretary will do the routines, once I've set up a system for doing them, and rules about what to do. I sort of emailed one of the people who responded to my craigslist ad, but she went home for thanksgiving, and then I started working on the pile of trash by myself, with encouragement from 'the voices.' Then I felt like I didn't really want to ask for help anymore, because I was doing it myself. The severe chronic fatigue was reduced, because I guess the rain might have washed away the pesticides outside the apartment. That's my theory. For whatever reason, the extremely severe fatigue has been reduced, and I am able to do a little bit of work by myself again.

The secretary should give me a permanent division of labor. There is stuff that doesn't require my judgment, my special knowledge, or my opinions about things, or my sentimental feelings (for instance, nobody could decide for me which contaminated objects I should throw away, and which I should keep, because I'm keeping sentimental items from childhood even if they're contaminated, and I'll work on them, somehow, later). The stuff that doesn't require much judgment, where you can do it by following rules, should be done by somebody else, to save my time for things that require my thinking. The secretary is a household servant, too, if I'm only hiring one person, because she will have to do the laundry too. If I could afford to hire a bunch of people then I'd have someone cook my special diet foods for me, too. That's postponed for now.

It would be really nice to know that the brainless routines are all being done by somebody that I'm paying to do them. I would feel much less anxious when I needed to think about long-term plans and goals and other things that can only be done by me.

(Yes, I'm definitely in 'Three Mode' right now.)

Oh, about the enneagram and trying to overlay other personality typing systems onto it, I have an example. Some other psychologist observed that children could form a connected, disconnected, or ambivalent relationship with their parents. In the back of one of the Riso and Hudson enneagram books, they overlay that system onto the enneagram, making nine combinations that fit into the system. I'm going to show how that can be questioned.

They made nine combinations of connected, disconnected, and ambivalent.

One: disconnected from protective figure
Two: ambivalent to protective figure
Three: connected to nurturing figure
Four: disconnected from both parents
Five: ambivalent to both parents
Six: connected to protective figure
Seven: disconnected from nurturing figure
Eight: ambivalent to nurturing figure
Nine: connected to both parents

Well, this is an obvious question that I thought of the first time I ever read this. Why doesn't EVERYONE have some kind of relationship with BOTH parents? Why do some of them focus on only one parent, and not both?

Maybe you could argue that Threes, for instance, always have a connected relationship to 'that which is nurturing,' an abstraction, no matter who it comes from. So you would look at both your father and mother, and you would pay attention to all of those things which had to do with nurturing, and you would connect to those things, no matter who they came from, no matter where they came from. You would look for nurturing from both your father and your mother, and also, all of society, and all of your friends, and everyone you knew. 'That which is nurturing' is an abstraction.

How do you define 'nurturing?' I define this as things like teaching, giving things, feeding, loving, and understanding feelings. That's based on my understanding of what I've read. Give something positive.

There's 'positive' and there's 'negative'. Give something valuable. Avoid something harmful. The nurturing figure gives that which is good and valuable, and the protective figure helps you avoid things that are harmful. These are 'functions' and they are also an abstraction.

Still, even if you say that 'the Three only focuses on that which is nurturing, no matter who it comes from,' I disagree. I focus on things that are protective, too. I'm interested in protecting myself and others against danger.

You could make combinations where everybody has some kind of relationship with both the nurturing and protective figures.

Imagine that this is a Three, and it has to always be strongly connected to nurturing. Here are the possible combinations.

A. connected strongly to nurturing, connected strongly to protective (this is the 'connected to both' category described by Riso & Hudson) (This fits with 'disintegrating towards Nine.')
B. connected strongly to nurturing, connected weakly to protective (this fits with 'integrating to Six.')
C. connected strongly to nurturing, disconnected from protective (this kind of fits with 'Three with a Four Wing,' but not perfectly. Technically, to be a Four, you have to be disconnected from BOTH. This technically would be more like a 'Three with a One Wing.' Or 'integrating to One,' or 'disintegrating to One,' or whatever someone would want to call it.)
D. connected strongly to nurturing, ambivalent to protective (this fits with 'Three with a Two Wing.')

That's assuming that they have a strong relationship with one figure, and the relationship with the second figure is weak or temporary or unstable somehow.

But instead, you could assume that they have a 'strong' relationship with both figures. After all, what does the word 'strong' or 'weak' really mean? How would you define that? It might become meaningless if you look at it too closely. All of this becomes very complicated, or meaningless, when you examine it very closely. Sooner or later, it's more useful to look at the real world instead of these abstractions.

That's where the nine types originally came from. Somebody somewhere, long ago, OBSERVED nine types of people. It just happened to be nine, and I don't know why. Some other people observed FOUR types of people, some other people observed THREE types of people, and so on, but they all were observing something by looking at the real world and then drawing some kind of abstraction or category from it. That's not easy to do. It's much easier to sit in your monastery, or at your computer, or with your notebook in your room, and draw lines on top of the symbol and try to explain how they might mean something, or use a 'mathematical' approach and make 'combinations' of all the different possible types so that it matches up with your nine types, and their 'wings', and their 'directions of integration and disintegration.'

You can do that with all nine of the types, and I'm guessing that you will probably cover the 'wings' and the 'directions of int/disintegration' for all of them that way. But I'm not even saying that's legitimate, I'm just saying that it can be done. I'm not saying that I approve of it. Actually, I don't. I think somebody should do some more work on this by looking at the real world instead.

You can see by now that I don't like the idea of 'wings,' and I don't like the idea of 'direction of integration / disintegration.' I think that those are ideas that came from taking abstractions too far from reality, without looking directly at reality. It's pretty and it's cool to draw lines connecting the numbers together in the symbol. Somebody did that, and said, 'This is so cool, it HAS to be true.' Coolness doesn't mean something is true. Somebody said, 'Truth is beauty, beauty truth,' (or maybe it was 'beauty is truth, truth beauty?') and they thought that connecting the numbers in a special pattern was beautiful, so it had to mean something.

That's how they invented the direction of integration and disintegration. They found ways to make all the numbers connect together in the line drawing. It didn't come from directly observing people and then saying, 'Hey, what an amazing coincidence, if you record all of these observations onto the symbol itself, it JUST SO HAPPENS to connect all the numbers together in this really cool, beautiful way!' No, somebody made a line drawing, and then said, 'How can I look at reality and imagine that these lines exist in the real world, so that I can justify drawing these pretty lines on the symbol and justify why it feels so meaningful and important and exciting?' And then they interpreted the real world according to the lines in the drawing.

The 'wings' are like that too. Somebody said that you 'blend in' with the types next to you, like the colors on a color chart. It looks cool when you draw it visually on the symbol. Anything that visually looks cool MUST be true in the real world, because beauty is truth. It HAS to really mean something! (they think.) But actually, I think that any number could be next to any other number, and you could perceive that person 'blending in' with any other type at all. You could say that a Three is sometimes blending in with the characteristics of an Eight, even though it's on the opposite side of the symbol and is nowhere near it, because sometimes, a Three might resemble an Eight, act like an Eight, or have attributes in common with an Eight. (Here's an example: Threes and Eights are both 'aggressive' types, along with the Seven. So shouldn't they all be side by side blending in with each other and sharing some of the characteristics of each?) But no, the ONLY types that you can 'blend' with are the two on either side of you. As a Three, I could blend with the type Two or the type Four. I'm not allowed to blend with a Five or anything that's out of reach.

Meanwhile, Helen Palmer or whatever her name is, one of the authors who has a different writing style than Riso and Hudson, said that everybody sometimes shows behaviors and attitudes of every other type in the enneagram, because every enneagram type is doing something that all humans universally need to do! We don't do ONLY our one, small, limited little thing. Sometimes we need to worry about the basic fears and basic desires of all the other types, too. ('Basic fear' and 'basic desire' for all the types is listed in the back of Riso and Hudson's orange book. That's in the Levels of Development chart.) You can temporarily do something that resembles some other type, however, you will primarily, most of the time, tend to behave like your own type. That's much simpler than all this stuff about directions of integration, and wings.

So I don't believe in the existence of 'Wings' or 'Direction of integration or disintegration.' I think that those are misleading ideas. They might have SOME connection to reality, but I'm not convinced, and I want to see a better explanation that comes directly from reality itself, not from lines on the drawing or an analogy to a color chart. It would actually be nice to just FORGET that I ever LEARNED all that stuff about integration, disintegration, and wings. 'They,' the voices, are always using that stuff when they are forcing me to think their fake, unoriginal thoughts, to prevent me from thinking or observing or originating or understanding anything on my own. It's almost as harmful as when they force me to have a song running through my head. It distracts me and prevents from thinking and seeing anything in the real world.

It would be better to describe something as an 'unexplained variant.' Some Threes are different from other Threes, for unexplained reasons. Leaving something 'unexplained' is cumbersome, and people don't like to do it, but it prevents you from making up false explanations that sound good and mislead people. Some people's enneagram type is so obvious to everyone that you can look at them and you know right away that they're a type One, or whatever. Other people are so hard to tell, that they can go months or years around and around the enneagram, 'trying on' every single type to see which one fits, and never really know for sure. They are an 'unexplained variant.' For whatever reason, it's hard to recognize them. Further knowledge is needed.

Anytime I make a mental list of possibilities, I always include a category called 'Other' or 'none of the above' or 'unknown,' something like that. It's the catch-all category for everything that's hard to explain, everything that doesn't easily fit into the main categories. No matter how sure you are, no matter how 'logical' something is, I still think you should always have an 'other' category, just in case.

Let's give an example. You could talk about material reality. Objects either 'exist' or 'don't exist.' They are real, or not real. That seems logical, doesn't it? Everything has to fall into those two categories. That's all that there can possibly be, right? But no, I'd like to add 'other' to those categories, just in case. Perhaps that category includes 'unsure' things. It could include 'hypothetical' things. And so on. So there's 'real,' 'unreal,' and 'everything else that's hard to put into the first two categories.' 'Other' should always be a category even if you don't put anything into it.

I'm just writing this for my own entertainment. If I wanted to fight about it, I could go to an enneagram forum. Rude people in forums annoy me. There will be some know-it-all who answers me and says that this question has already been dealt with, blah blah.

That's what happened when somebody, an unknown person using the same screen name that Curtis uses, who might or might not have been Curtis, went to a mythbusters forum and made a comment about Indiana Jones, who climbed inside an old refrigerator to hide from a nuclear blast. I saw that movie too, and I thought the refrigerator thing was unbelievable. Well, Curtis, or someone who happened to have the same screen name that he uses, made that comment, and then somebody answered him right away with a 'You are a moron for asking this question' type of attitude, and I was very annoyed about that. The person said, 'This has probably been asked a thousand times, go search for it in the other forums, blah blah.' I don't like people who are mean to people in forums. (And yes, I know, I used to be mean to people in chatrooms, long ago. That's true.) But anyway I could go fight with trolls like that in the forums if I wanted to.

I think that 'paid disinformation agents' really exist, and also, people who are unwitting, unknowing puppets who serve the purpose of spreading disinformation, without being paid to do it. Probably, anyone with new, original insights into psychology is being suppressed, in places like internet forums, because 'they' don't want people to understand their own minds, and use the knowledge to fight back against mind control, and recognize their own selves and distinguish them from the outsiders. 'They' don't want people to have the power to control themselves. I haven't seen much original work in psychology in the past few decades. I've seen garbage like 'The Secret,' where if you wish for something, pray for it, and visualize it, then the magical synchronicity of the universe (the puppeteers controlling other people) will make it happen, and you'll start to see amazing coincidences. ('I was just thinking last night about a long-lost friend from high school who I haven't spoken to in decades, and the very next day, she called me on the phone!')

Oh, and I haven't refilled my Straight Talk phone (and I actually have two different phones, and have to decide which one I like more and will use) this month, and the voices are bugging me about it, saying that Curtis is trying to text me. I doubt that Curtis has been trying to text me. However, he wrote his cell phone number on Facebook in a place where I was able to see it if I snooped around and read the conversations that he was having with other people.

So I found that, and felt a sick, terrified anxiety and excitement in my stomach - I have this information, but I shouldn't, and I 'stole' it, but he allowed me to be his facebook friend, which means that technically I'm allowed to see it.

Text message conversations and phone calls haven't gone very well so far - some of the text conversations we had in the past have caused some problems and some distrust and hurt feelings. And he doesn't usually answer my messages, and also, 'they' force me to write him these long, emotional, puppet text messages, and a while ago I was using a phone that allowed me to write a five-page message as a single message, and since I wasn't familiar with how texting works, I didn't realize that it was going to send him these five-page messages as FIVE SEPARATE TEXTS instead of one long text. So I always sent him these really long messages, not realizing that on his end, he was going to get 'buzzzzzz.... buzzzzzz..... buzzzzzzzz..... buzzzzzzzz... buzzzzzzzzz...' five separate times, one after another. It annoyed me very much when I found out about that. I thought I was sending only one five-page letter. So that caused one of the hurt-feelings incidents to happen, because he sent me back an annoyed reply telling me to stop, and of course, I was being forced to do this on a day when something really bad was going on with him and Carrie's family, when her grandmother died, so it was the worst possible time to be spamming his phone and bothering him. That's the kind of thing I want to avoid, so I haven't asked him for his phone number again, but now, I saw it and I collected it - AGAIN, even though I've wanted to prevent myself from having that information.

So I am afraid to try texting. But that's the easiest way to reach him, especially since Facebook has been changing so that it no longer works AT ALL in my browser - either the hackers are screwing it up and it would be fixed if I cleaned up my computer, or else Facebook itself is reprogramming their site so that it's less and less compatible with non-microsoft browsers. Either way, it doesn't work at all anymore, and I can't even see anything written on the page AT ALL, I just see a blank page for everything I try to view on facebook, and no links, and no way to send an email, or anything like that. That actually started with something that I suspected was a hacking incident. Fixing the computer is on my to-do list, but of course, it's being postponed, like EVERYTHING on my list, because other things are more life-or-death than that.

That's it for now... Maybe I'll read for a while, or try to go do something, instead of griping and complaining about the enneagram and other things just to hear myself talk.