More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 11 - December 22, 2022
The Self-Preservation Seven finds security through a gluttonous search for pleasure, satisfying opportunities, and cultivating a network of allies. The Social Seven expresses a kind of anti-gluttony by being of service to others. The Sexual Seven channels gluttony into an idealistic search for the ultimate relationship and the best imaginable experiences.
gluttony expresses itself in the Self-Preservation Seven in an excessive concern with making a good deal at every opportunity.
The dominant traits of the Self-Preservation Seven subtype stand out as a love of pleasure and a self-interested focus on getting what they need to feel secure. In seeking security, however, they can often confuse desires with needs.
While the Self-Preservation Seven character resembles a “playboy” or “playgirl” type of person—an enjoyer of food and sex—the Sexual Seven can be content with the perfume of things.
spiritual aspiration is not so common in Self-Preservation Sevens; they often reject religion and tend not to believe in anything. They’re more practical, more materialistic, and more rebellious than the other two Seven subtypes.
In their efforts to work against gluttony, Social Sevens can actually be too pure. Their efforts to attain purity can extend to worrying about their diet, their health, and their spirit. Interestingly, Naranjo notes, these Sevens are often vegans.
Part of the ego strategy of this subtype is that they want—crave—to be seen as good for their sacrifice. They have a hidden gluttony for the acknowledgment of their sacrifice—are hungry for love and recognition—and this hunger can be insatiable. These Sevens use their sacrifice to cover up defects and shortcomings and to invite recognition and admiration or love, because they don’t feel right legitimizing and acting on their desires and whims. Their sacrifice and service is the price they pay for their neurotic need for admiration.
(New Age culture is a Social Seven culture.)
Sexual Sevens are dreamers with a need to imagine something better than stark, ordinary reality. These Sevens have a passion for embellishing everyday reality, for being too enthusiastic, and for idealizing things and seeing the world as better than it actually is. Their gluttony gets expressed as a need for idealization.
Sexual Sevens express a need to fantasize, a need to dream, or a need for rose-colored glasses. These Sevens have a tendency to be too happy.
Sexual Sevens plan and improvise a lot. They believe that they can do everything, and they feel a need to plan or mount successful strategies that will ensure their pleasure.
Sexual Sevens fall in love very easily, but they’re not as interested in having sex with someone as they are in attaining a kind of idealized ultimate connection.
For the Sexual Seven, earthly things take effort, and can therefore feel boring or tedious, whereas the mind works so easily and without friction. It’s so much easier to imagine doing something than to actually do it.
ULTIMATELY, AS SEVENS WORK ON THEMSELVES and become more self-aware, they learn to escape the trap of pursuing more superficial pleasures and avoiding the enjoyment of a deeper experience of themselves.
learn to endure the pain involved in inner work with the understanding that true joy, contentment, and aliveness come from facing what we tend to run away from and integrating what scares us.
Notice what your visions of the future look like and how they might function as a way to escape (or compensate for) what’s happening in the present.
The Seven personality is the prototype of the way all the personalities—to one extent or another—protect us from bad feelings by helping us focus on and generate good feelings. And while this is often necessary in childhood, in order to have healthy relationships and to become all we are meant to be as adults, we must see how our early defenses against pain have come to represent obstacles to a fuller expression of who we are.
When we (consciously or unconsciously) decide we are only going to experience the positive side of life, we prevent ourselves from going through the “dark night of the soul” that is a part of any inner journey of waking up and coming home to the true self.
anxiety is an inherent part of being free, not something you escape by seeking unlimited freedom.
Sevens grow through learning to really “be with” their friends’ and partners’ down moods and painful struggles as well as with their joys.
When they can balance the potential for over-control at the One Point and the under-control natural to the Seven, they can achieve the “perfect” blend of seriousness and lightness that can represent a higher and healthier level of development.
Navigated consciously, however, a Seven can use the move to Five developmentally, establishing a healthy balance between the desire to be involved in the stimulation of the social world and the need to rest and reinvigorate through a healthy withdrawal from the social scene.
Sixes have excellent analytical minds and they can be extremely loyal and steadfast friends to those they trust. They are good strategists, troubleshooters, and problem-solvers.
while Sixes are great critical thinkers, they can get stuck in doubt, endless questioning, and overanalysis. They excel at planning and preparation, but can focus too much on worst-case scenarios and what might go wrong, so much so that they can fail to move forward and take action.
Each of the three types based in the head center have a relationship to an early experience of fear that gave shape to their personality. Whereas Fives become detached and minimize their need for others, and Sevens focus on what is positive and exciting, Sixes try to understand threats and uncertain outcomes so that they can prevent something bad from happening.
Through imagination, Sixes develop a radar for trouble that they can’t turn off. While this habit makes them highly intuitive and analytical, these tendencies can also get skewed toward worst-case scenario thinking, projection, and self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sixes both wish for a truly good authority (sometimes unconsciously) and question and rebel against the authorities in their lives.
Sixes also tend to naturally focus positive attention on underdogs and underdog causes because they understand what it’s like to feel vulnerable and threatened by authority figures who might seek to dominate or oppress others.
Sixes typically question or oppose people who express strong opinions. They habitually focus on alternative views or contrary positions as a way of getting to the truth, fleshing out the complexity of an issue, or challenging or testing people by promoting a view that has been denied or left out.
Sixes’ over-focus on thoughts about what might go wrong can lead to self-sabotage and self-fulfilling prophecies, as creating fearful scenarios in your mind and acting on them can have the unintended effect of manifesting your fears.
Type Six “is not only an intellectual type, but also the most logical of types, one who is devoted to reason.”
doubt and ambivalence reflect the ongoing inner conflict a Six experiences between pleasing others and rebelling against them, admiring others and trying to invalidate them.
the fear and anxiety characteristic of the Six personality can have the effect of actually creating problems and negative circumstances where none existed in the first place.
Being preoccupied with imagining what might go wrong as a way of exercising control in the world means they don’t always recognize their own authority, strength, and capability when it comes to handling problems. (This is especially true of Self-Preservation Sixes.)
When perceiving danger and risk, Sixes often believe they are just seeing what’s out there, and assume that whatever fears are fueling them are realistic and evidence-based. However, they may not fully see how active their imaginations can be in catastrophizing or seeing threats that aren’t really there.
Perceiving the world as dangerous, Self-Preservation Sixes seek friendly connections and alliances, and to do this they endeavor to be friendly, trustworthy, and supportive—as good allies are supposed to be.
As the most phobic of the three Sixes, the avoidant Self-Preservation sub-type equates love with protection, and in looking for love they search for a source of security to compensate for an inner sense of insecurity. This Six wants to find a strong person to lean on, and they may be excessively friendly and giving as a way of preventing an attack from outside.
the Self-Preservation Six attracts the affections or protection of somebody strong—the more forceful presence of another helps them to feel safer.
In coping with anxiety, the Social Six consults the guidelines associated with whatever authority they adhere to. They focus on knowing what the benchmark is and on obeying the rules of the game. They feel a need to know all the points of reference—what the party line is, who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are.
Consciously or unconsciously, Social Sixes fear the disapproval of authorities and believe the way to be safe is to do the right thing as determined by an authority. And knowing what the right thing is means having clear rules that tell you how you should think and act.
choosing the wrong authority can be a problem for Social Sixes: “Instead of believing in the person who is right, they tend to believe in people who speak as if they were right, and who have the special gift of making themselves believed.”
In contrast to the Self-Preservation Six, who gets stuck in ambivalence and can’t make decisions, Social Sixes have an intolerance of ambiguity. They fear ambivalence and have little tolerance of uncertainty, because to them, uncertainty equals anxiety.
Social Sixes can tend to be controlling, impatient, judgmental, and self-critical.
it wasn’t just that I had rules to follow; it was that the rules actually brought me in touch with a sense of purpose and comfort.
The countertype of the Type Six subtypes, the Sexual Six is the most counter-phobic Six, the one who turns against the passion of fear by assuming a stance of strength and intimidation. Instead of actively feeling fearful, these Sixes have an inner belief that when you are afraid, the best defense is a good offense.
Courage means having the will to know who you really are and who you may become, even when this leads you through your fears and all the other painful and scary emotions you had to go to sleep to (and relegate to your Shadow) in order to survive when you took on your personality in childhood.
TYPE FIVE REPRESENTS THE ARCHETYPE of the person who withdraws into thinking and detaches from feeling as a way of taking refuge in the inner world. This functions as a way of finding privacy and freedom in a world that seems intrusive or neglectful or overwhelming. The central drive of this archetype is to find security by minimizing needs and using resources economically so that external demands can be limited and controlled. In Fives, the natural human need for people can be displaced into a thirst for knowledge, such that internal support comes through information and firm boundaries
...more
Naturally austere and laconic, Fives are minimalistic and economical in the things they do, which reflects their concern with making the most of what resources they have and an ability to get by on limited supplies.
Fives become adept at avoiding situations in which fear might arise.
Fives minimize their needs and adopt an economical way of being. This leads to a tendency to withhold limited resources, and to a “greediness” or hoarding mentality when it comes to time, energy, information, and material supplies.
