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What they don’t understand, they don’t meddle with.
Unredeemed FIVEs can take on schizoid traits;
Immature FIVEs think they can secure their lives by being informed about everything in as much detail as possible. But the information they pick up from the outside world and store up is never sufficient.
Part of the process of hoarding impressions and knowledge is that most FIVEs like to travel, since travel educates.
Little souvenirs and keepsakes help them as props for memory and afterward can serve as release mechanisms for reawakening the whole event in their imagination. Some FIVEs have a collection of “totems” that cover all the important phases and events of their life.
One of the defense mechanisms that FIVEs like to use is withdrawal. FIVEs are afraid of nothing so much as emotional engagement. The more immature they are, the more they shy away from feelings, sex, relationships that create dependency. When you touch a FIVE, he or she generally gives a start or jumps back.
Immature FIVEs are afraid of concrete commitments.
he knows that his ideas can destroy the world.
On occasion FIVEs can strike other people as snobbish and arrogant.
they may have friends and acquaintances in every one of these areas who never learn anything about one another. So long as they limit such partial relationships to the sphere intended for them and don’t try to interfere with the whole life of the FIVEs, they can be sure of getting attention and signs of devotion within the established boundaries.
Because they are afraid of being co-opted and of emotional overstrain, many FIVEs feel safe only when the temporal and spatial framework of a relationship is precisely staked out.
They can easily feel threatened by surprise visits and unexpected assaults that personally challenge them. The
As a rule you get something from a FIVE—if you get anything at all—only when you neither expect it nor ask for it.
In open conflict they have scarcely any defense mechanisms at their disposal—except for retreat...
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The root sin of FIVEs is avarice. FIVEs aren’t givers. They tend to hoard both their intellectual as well...
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The pitfall of FIVEs is emotional stinginess. They are stingy about themselves. They often fear that if they shared themselves, they might lose themselves. FIVEs can become misers like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
their primary experience in life often consisted in their not getting what they actually needed.
Early on they had to get used to being content with a little.
The greatest gifts of FIVEs are, as always, the reverse of their obsessions: they are contemplatively gifted, they understand connections, they invent grand intellectual systems.
FIVEs avoid emptiness. While outsiders often consider them mysterious and “deep,” FIVEs themselves are usually afraid that they are of little value and have little real wealth in them.
Immature FIVEs have to distance themselves; mature FIVEs can distance themselves.
FIVEs can look at a very tense emotional situation objectively and say, “Now I think the issue can be viewed from this side and from that.”
The invitation to FIVEs is wisdom. Wisdom is a deep knowledge of the connections of the world and life that must be won not only from thought but at the same time from real-life experience. Wisdom is reflected experience. FIVEs incline to “preflection”: they think before they act—or instead of acting. Reflection is the subsequent intellection processing of lived life. Part of the wisdom to which FIVEs are called is also trust in God’s dispensation. This means believing God capable of something greater than school wisdom ever dreamed of. It means letting mysteries remain as such instead of
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FIVEs have to fall in love passionately. Love is a drama for many a FIVE because in erotic attraction the longing for nearness crashes up against the at least equally strong—for them—wish for distance.
It can happen that a FIVE falls head over heels in love, but during the encounter with the beloved person he or she goes numb and doesn’t know how to behave. After all FIVEs often do not experience feelings until afterward.
“Learning to love” is one of the great challenges of FIVEs. FIVEs who allow themselves no passion, who will not allow themselves, at this one point at least, to be...
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We encourage all FIVEs to meditate on the Incarnation, that is, the commitment and passion of Christ, his passion for humankind, his readiness to get his hands dirty. Christianity can’t be translated into reality by sitting alone in your room with your books, which is what the unredeemed FIVE would most like to do. In Christ the untouchable God has been made flesh, the God who heals human beings precisely by touching them.
it’s a part or the continuation of my prayer life.”
on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions.
FIVEs simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process they make mistakes. It’s no mistake to make mistakes. But FIVEs—like some other types—are afraid of that.
Gestalt therapy or manual labor can be helpful.
They find psychic nurture in every encouragement that awakens inner messages, such as: “You can feel safe here. We’re glad that you’re here. You have a right to be here. You’re welcome. You belong to us.”
They come to their most profound gift of authentic wisdom if they renounce secretiveness and artificial mystification and expose themselves to the encounter with the mystery of other people, which reveals their own mystery and sets free their own treasures.
Temperamentally FIVEs would prefer being Buddhists rather than Christians.
Like all FIVEs, they have to take the step from seeing to acting.
In prison he wrote: “Not to do just anything, but to do what is right, and to dare; not to float about in the possible, but to bravely seize the real. Freedom is not in the flight of thoughts, but only in action. Move out of anxious hesitation into the storm of events, borne only by God’s commandment and your faith, and freedom will receive your spirit with exultation.”17 To this day his uncommonly clearsighted visions of the shape and mission of the church are waiting to be turned into reality. Among other things he thought it was important that the church be really poor and find its way to a
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SIXes long for certainty. They don’t want to deal with impenetrable shadows and shades of gray: they want a world divided into black and white and a clearly spelled-out truth they can take home with them.
Many SIXes report breaks in their life history: they couldn’t complete their studies or training. They are often overcome by a paralyzing fear of failure shortly before the examination; or they don’t make progress in learning because they have to scrutinize every detail and eliminate all contradictions.
Many SIXes produce situations in which they lose in the end. They are pessimists and anxious about success. If they never succeed, then the danger is not so great that envious competitors will appear on the scene. That is why SIXes “go around” success, pass it along to others, or set themselves goals so unreachable or megalomaniacal that failure is preprogrammed.
SIXes fight for their survival, but never for success,
If immature THREEs are notorious winners, SIXes are notorious losers.
Most SIXes have a hard time accepting praise. They suspect there’s a trick behind it, that they’re being suckered. If you want to be accepted by a SIX, you should incorporate a minimum of constructive criticism in your praise: that will make it more credible.
If they fall in with a trustworthy counselor or therapist, they’re ready to be led gradually and slowly to look their anxieties straight in the eye, so that they have a good chance of becoming increasingly more relaxed, more autonomous, and more free.
Such people scarcely need an occasion to fly off the handle. In extreme cases they can scream, curse, lie, or come to blows. They can’t bear much criticism or deviation from what they consider right. They doggedly defend their interests with every means available. This can lead to completely inappropriate modes of behavior.
Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, detectives, inspectors, police, writers of whodunits, and criminals take part in one way or another in the SIX game.
Helen Palmer calls the SIXes “devil’s advocates.”
The primary defense mechanism for SIXes is projection. SIXes often have a rich imagination for scenarios of apocalyptic terror and often anticipate the worst. Their mistrust leads to their tendency to project hostility, hatred, and negative thoughts onto other people, even when there is only scanty evidence for this.
The mistrust that they harbor against themselves leads to imagining their own negative motives present in others as well. Such programming leads to the classic scapegoat mechanism.6
False obedience is the rotten fruit of fear.
but the starting point of fear is the brain.
