Hmm, thinking about myself, on the theory that I'm a 4, it makes sense both that I disintegrate to 2 and 7. Under stress I've been known both to engage in people pleasing and excessive self reliance behavior, and walking myself back from that has been necessary. But if I'm honest I've probably done more people pleasing.
But I don't know, I kind of feel like there's a bit of all the types in me at times and sometimes I may be engaged in behavior that classically belongs to a type and then looking at how those types unwind things may be useful.
I know your theory here tries to stick to what helps a person get out of the spiral and that makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if it's instead all connected and depending on the situation someone will move to a different type expression, but some of those moves are more likely than others depending on type, so it starts to look like these lines exist when they are actually more like statistical patterns.
Love this - there are many instances I find where for categorizing subjective phenomena makes more sense to me if I consider it as a spectrum with statistical clumping around certain areas. Categorizing emotions, assessing meditative states, etc.
The statistical patterns idea predicts something different, right? It suggests that there's a much wider range of behaviors we'd expect someone to display in stress and that would also be helped more by their core type's unwinding strategy than by the eight other available methods of the Enneagram. So e.g. if I were to display something that looks like type Three behavior under stress, and that's most fitting to think of specifically that way, and that behavior dissolves in contact with the "clear the Head, then open the Heart" approach, then that'd support your model in favor of the one I've sketched. Yes?
I think so? I still only have the vaguest sense of how to operationalize an instruction like clear the head open the heart but if say I was getting really competitive in a destructive way I'd probably ask myself something like "why do I feel the need to win? what would it look like if I didn't win? how would i feel if someone else won? would that be okay?" to get myself to see the false narrative of "I must win" is become trapped in.
Interesting. I would consider myself a 7, and in the past I've considered how integrating to a 5 makes sense in theory --i.e., stop avoiding and focus on one thing --yet it hasn't been useful to me in practice.
What resonated with me was leaning into the pain-- accepting it. Which, is 4 behavior, and that seems to line up with the alternate model shown here. If 4 disintegrates to 7, then 7 should integrate to 4.
To be honest, I'm not sure whether there's anything to the idea of "Integration". I don't know what the mechanism would be, or how we'd check. It's supposed to be something that naturally arises when you become Healthy and as you stabilize in the Healthy range. What would be different if that were false? How would we tell?
Not to dismiss it if it's actually useful to you! I've just never understood how they're supposed to be useful. Or how I could tell that they're describing anything real. As opposed to, say, exhibiting Healthy qualities of ALL the types as a result of becoming more Healthy.
A great essay that I’ve been reflecting on. The crux of it seems to be: “it’s possible for you to run the experiment and come to a clear conclusion, but not be able to show me the results as clearly as you know them. I probably can’t replicate your experiment since my type is probably different from yours. I also can’t directly see whether & how your subjective experience improves. I can hear your claims, and those matter, but I also know that people can fool themselves. You might be able to tell you’re not fooling yourself, and yet not be able to show me how you know in a way I can trust as deeply as you do.”
This is a problem common to all subjective science. With objective science, the method of double-blind peer reviewed studies has been adopted as a means of solving the analogous problem in that field. What’s the best solution here?
I think it's an open question! The best I've got so far is, make the crucial subjective experiments easy to replicate. Make the models easy to examine, the logic of what they necessarily predict clear, and the method of doing the experiment straightforward. The more clear all this is, the better!
But I think there's a lot of progress to be made here. Subjective scientific methods are under-developed in my opinion. Which means there's a lot that individuals (like you and me) can do!
Hmm, thinking about myself, on the theory that I'm a 4, it makes sense both that I disintegrate to 2 and 7. Under stress I've been known both to engage in people pleasing and excessive self reliance behavior, and walking myself back from that has been necessary. But if I'm honest I've probably done more people pleasing.
But I don't know, I kind of feel like there's a bit of all the types in me at times and sometimes I may be engaged in behavior that classically belongs to a type and then looking at how those types unwind things may be useful.
I know your theory here tries to stick to what helps a person get out of the spiral and that makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if it's instead all connected and depending on the situation someone will move to a different type expression, but some of those moves are more likely than others depending on type, so it starts to look like these lines exist when they are actually more like statistical patterns.
Love this - there are many instances I find where for categorizing subjective phenomena makes more sense to me if I consider it as a spectrum with statistical clumping around certain areas. Categorizing emotions, assessing meditative states, etc.
I like how you're thinking!
The statistical patterns idea predicts something different, right? It suggests that there's a much wider range of behaviors we'd expect someone to display in stress and that would also be helped more by their core type's unwinding strategy than by the eight other available methods of the Enneagram. So e.g. if I were to display something that looks like type Three behavior under stress, and that's most fitting to think of specifically that way, and that behavior dissolves in contact with the "clear the Head, then open the Heart" approach, then that'd support your model in favor of the one I've sketched. Yes?
I think so? I still only have the vaguest sense of how to operationalize an instruction like clear the head open the heart but if say I was getting really competitive in a destructive way I'd probably ask myself something like "why do I feel the need to win? what would it look like if I didn't win? how would i feel if someone else won? would that be okay?" to get myself to see the false narrative of "I must win" is become trapped in.
Interesting. I would consider myself a 7, and in the past I've considered how integrating to a 5 makes sense in theory --i.e., stop avoiding and focus on one thing --yet it hasn't been useful to me in practice.
What resonated with me was leaning into the pain-- accepting it. Which, is 4 behavior, and that seems to line up with the alternate model shown here. If 4 disintegrates to 7, then 7 should integrate to 4.
To be honest, I'm not sure whether there's anything to the idea of "Integration". I don't know what the mechanism would be, or how we'd check. It's supposed to be something that naturally arises when you become Healthy and as you stabilize in the Healthy range. What would be different if that were false? How would we tell?
Not to dismiss it if it's actually useful to you! I've just never understood how they're supposed to be useful. Or how I could tell that they're describing anything real. As opposed to, say, exhibiting Healthy qualities of ALL the types as a result of becoming more Healthy.
A great essay that I’ve been reflecting on. The crux of it seems to be: “it’s possible for you to run the experiment and come to a clear conclusion, but not be able to show me the results as clearly as you know them. I probably can’t replicate your experiment since my type is probably different from yours. I also can’t directly see whether & how your subjective experience improves. I can hear your claims, and those matter, but I also know that people can fool themselves. You might be able to tell you’re not fooling yourself, and yet not be able to show me how you know in a way I can trust as deeply as you do.”
This is a problem common to all subjective science. With objective science, the method of double-blind peer reviewed studies has been adopted as a means of solving the analogous problem in that field. What’s the best solution here?
I think it's an open question! The best I've got so far is, make the crucial subjective experiments easy to replicate. Make the models easy to examine, the logic of what they necessarily predict clear, and the method of doing the experiment straightforward. The more clear all this is, the better!
But I think there's a lot of progress to be made here. Subjective scientific methods are under-developed in my opinion. Which means there's a lot that individuals (like you and me) can do!