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once Eights have delivered their ultimatums, even if they were uttered impulsively, they feel that they must follow through with them. To back down or soften their stance feels like weakness—and potential loss of independence and control.
Left unchecked, the desire for control can cause Eights to see significant others as possessions.
Feelings of rejection may also lead Eights into some of the darker aspects of Type Five. They can become extremely cynical and contemptuous of the beliefs and values of others.
if Eights can recognize the truth in these fears, they may begin to turn their life around and move toward health and liberation. On the other hand, they may become even more belligerent, defiant, and threatening and desperately attempt to stay in control at any cost.
The suggestion to get in touch with your feelings may be something of a psychological cliché, but in your case, it is a helpful one.
Vulnerability lets others know that they matter, that you care about them.
Grief work is very helpful for Eights. You are not the kind of person to sit around feeling sorry for yourself for long, but if you are suffering, it is important to find constructive ways of grieving your losses and hurts.
Find people you can really trust, and talk with them about matters that are eating at you.
Take some quiet time to restore your soul.
centering practices are tremendously helpful to reduce your stress levels.
Eights work hard and play hard. A little restraint on the intensity levels in both departments can help ensure that you will be around longer to enjoy your life in deeper and subtler ways.
Examine your expectations of rejection. Do you notice how often you expect people not to like you, or feel that you have to behave in ways that will head rejection off at the pass?
Eights are people of action and practical intuition.
A key element to their leadership is their practical creativity.
Eights are able to see possibilities in people and in situations;
A key word for Eights, therefore, is empowerment.
Honor is also important to healthy Eights: their word is their bond.
Eights want to be respected, and healthy Eights respect others and the dignity of all creatures.
control is not really a healthy Eight’s ultimate goal; rather, it is the desire to have a beneficial influence on people and on their world.
Eights become actualized and remain healthy by learning to open their hearts to others in the manner of a healthy Two.
they need to reconnect with their hearts to see how much they care about people.
Integrating Eights make outstanding leaders because they clearly communicate their profound respect and appreciation of other human beings.
As Eights are able to allow their vulnerability to surface, they learn to come to Presence again and again and gradually let go of their self-image of always needing to be strong and in control.
The Essential core of the Eight cuts through the falsehoods and niceties of the personality, bringing forth a simple, unself-conscious embodiment of truth.
Eights also long for the innocence they knew as children—an innocence they felt they had to leave behind in order to be strong.
When Eights give up their own willfulness, they discover the Divine Will.
The liberated Eight has the power to inspire others to be heroic as well, influencing people possibly for centuries.
PERSONALITY TYPE NINE: THE PEACEMAKER BASIC FEAR: Of loss and separation; of annihilation BASIC DESIRE: To maintain their inner stability and peace of mind SUPEREGO MESSAGE: “You are good or okay as long as those around you are good or okay.” The Easygoing, Self-Effacing Type: Receptive, Reassuring, Agreeable, and Complacent
They are often spiritual seekers who have a great yearning for connection with the cosmos, as well as with other people.
They work to maintain their peace of mind just as they work to establish peace and harmony in their world.
Nines are either in touch with their instinctive qualities and have tremendous elemental power and personal magnetism, or they are cut off from their instinctual strengths and can be disengaged and remote, even lightweight.
To compensate for being out of touch with their instinctual energies, Nines also retreat into their minds and their emotional fantasies.
Nines can have the strength of Eights, the sense of fun and adventure of Sevens, the dutifulness of Sixes, the intellectualism of Fives, the creativity of Fours, the attractiveness of Threes, the generosity of Twos, and the idealism of Ones. However, what they generally do not have is a sense of really inhabiting themselves—a strong sense of their own identity.
Being a separate self, an individual who must assert herself against others, is terrifying to Nines.
Nines demonstrate the universal temptation to ignore the disturbing aspects of life and to seek some degree of peace and comfort by numbing out.
Nines tend to focus on the bright side of life so that their peace of mind will not be shaken. But rather than deny the dark side of life, what Nines must understand is that all of the perspectives presented by the other types are true, too.
They must remember that the only way out is through.
young Nines learned to cope by dissociating from the threatening and traumatic events around them and by adopting the role of Peacemaker or Mediator during family conflicts.
“If I show up and assert myself, I am going to create even more problems, so if I stay out of the way, the family will stay together.”
Nines grew up feeling that having needs, asserting themselves, getting angry, or creating difficulties for their parents was not allowed. As a result, Nine children never learned to assert themselves adequately or, by extension, to actualize themselves independently of their parents and significant others.
They also learned to repress anger and their own will so completely that they became unconscious of even having anger or a will of their own.
THE NINE WITH AN EIGHT-WING: THE REFEREE
ability to be agreeable and to comfort others with endurance and strength.
THE NINE WITH A ONE-WING: THE DREAMER
imaginative and creative, often able to synthesize different schools of thought or points of view into a vision of an ideal world.
Self-Preservation Nines prefer simple pleasures that are readily available—eating
They are usually not ambitious, although they may be quite talented. They generally deal with anxiety by getting involved in busywork—puttering and routines—and may use small tasks to avoid dealing with bigger projects.
Nines’ inertia shows up most clearly in this variant.
Apathy and self-neglect can cause Self-Preservation Nines to have difficulty mobilizing themselves to obtain what they really want or to take care of their genuine self-preservation needs.
these are the Nines most interested in bringing people together and in making peace. They like to be involved with others, to be part of whatever is going on, but they also resist having too many expectations placed on them.
