SUMMARY: Enneagram Type 5 (PDP Pattern 5) – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Motivation: Certainty for Safety
Attendency: Inward
Primary Emotion: Fear
Emotion Regulation Mode: DOWN-regulate (Contain and Channel)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Head, Cognitive Critical Thinking and Logic, Knowing and Perception, Makes Cause-Effect Associations
Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow (ALIEF): Head/Cerebral
Ennegram Type: The Observer/Watcher
SUMMARY: ENNEAGRAM TYPE 5 (PDP Pattern 5) Core Dynamics in Therapy
The following sections use "type" rather than "pattern" as the descriptions come from David's writings.
Enneagram Type 5 Core Dynamics in Therapy
Growth, integration, and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:
- relaxing the pattern
- renewed aspirational intentions
- moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath growth for 5
Stinginess vs Omniscience – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Stinginess -- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives
- Observing and understanding the environment through the mental center. Holding on and holding back. Setting limits. Minimizing inner needs (inner control). Containing expression to preserve self. Observing, detaching, dampening.
- Omniscience -- Cognitive Higher Capacity
- Knowingness from experience and action. Transparency of things past, present, and future. Everything necessary is known truly and directly.
Avarice vs Non-Attachment – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Avarice -- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity
- Acquiring, hoarding time and space. Greed for these and knowledge, for what I cannot do without. You can never deplete me.
- Non-Attachment -- Cognitive Higher Capacity
- Knowingness from experience and action. Transparency of things past, present, and future. Everything necessary is known truly and directly.
Enneagram Type 5 Synopsis
Brief Description
Type 5 believes you must protect yourself from a world that demands too much and gives too little to assure life. Consequently, Observers seek self-sufficiency and are non-demanding, analytic, thoughtful and unobtrusive, but also can be withholding, detached and overly private.
Key Interventions
Help Type 5s appreciate the difference between detachment and non-attachment, realize that withdrawal invites intrusion, associate into experience and feelings, and move forward into life.
Somatic Profile
Type 5s tend to get stuck in their heads and avoid experiencing the internal states of their body and emotions. It's easy for them to become very "quiet" energetically, to the point that other people may have trouble sensing or feeling them. In particular, energy is withdrawn from the periphery of the body and collects in the core. Very sensitive to sound, touch, intrusion etc., they hold most of their tension in the gut rather than in the musculature, although the rib cage can become rigid or frozen depending on the level of fear in the body. They often exhibit the pattern of “going away” behind their eyes.
Communication Style
Content-focused, unemotional, factual, clear, analytical and terse, yet sometimes wordy. Others may perceive you as emotionally disconnected, aloof, overly-analytical and distant.
Behavioral Profile
- Strengths: Being scholarly and knowledgeable, thoughtful, dispassionate and calm in crisis, respectful, keeper of confidences, appreciative of simplicity, dependable and ascetic.
- Difficulties: Isolation from own feelings and experiences, especially in the here and now, detachment from life and possible withdrawal into minimization, pain of loneliness with a longing for connection, feelings of inadequacy, various failures to act, missed opportunities, avarice for time and space, confusing detachment with non-attachment, seeing requests as demands.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
Being considered not smart or factually incorrect. People not interested in the information that we have to share. Demands placed on us from others, especially emotional ones or those that infringe on our private time. An overloading of emotional input. Too much stimulation. Intrusions that might tire us. Needing time alone and not being disrupted. Not being able to restore our energy as needed.
Social Profile
Type 5's tend to be more introverted due to their withdrawing energy (see energy flow Harmony Triads).
However, their social disposition is impacted by the three instinctual sub-types. Dominance toward self-survival or self-preservation is a focus based on me first which can lead to more introversion. Dominance toward bonding survival, the one-on-one focused relationships, tend to fall in the middle of the Introversion-Extraversion (I-E) scale. Dominance toward group survival, the social focus on groups and organizations, can lead to being more extraverted.
Enneagram Type 5 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
The original state of this transparent knowing This original omniscience lets the young child know things truly, unprejudiced by personal thoughts, feelings, opinions, or the slant which the point of view of her personality will take lets the child apprehend that the flow of a universal life energy meets all real needs. But for the Observer child, the world comes along and in effect harshly takes away this nascent state of knowing what really needs to be known by demanding too much or providing too little or both.
So as an Observer child you experience, perhaps because of your innate sensitivity, that you will be depleted of resources by those who intrude upon you or withdraw from you. You experience that you know enough in the essential state to preserve your survival, so you protect yourself from intrusion and insufficiency by detaching and going into your mind compartment. You split off from internal feelings, emotions, and demands that can overpower you. The mechanism is called isolation of affect. As a result, you constrict your expression and conserve your energy by limiting impositions on your time and space and by going into your mind compartment where no one can intrude. You seek and hoard knowledge as a substitute for the original real knowing, or at least the potential for it. You fall into a state of avarice or greed for these things, for time, space, energy, and knowledge as ways to gain self sufficiency and to assure boundaries for protection from debilitating intrusions.
Of necessity, your attention gets organized around observing, detaching or disassociating from immediate experience, and segmenting or separating things and time. This detaching from internal feelings and desires is called isolation of affect. It helps you, as the Observer child, to minimize your wants, needs, and desires; it helps you sustain your boundaries and privacy. In the process your original capacity for knowing the scope and truth of essence goes far into the background, but from the standpoint of this basic proposition, your survival, so you believe, is assured.
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 5
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 5 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a cognitive habit of stinginess or inner control to mental awareness that all can be included and dealt with as it unfolds
- Moving from emotional greed of one’s own time and space to opening to what is brought externally by the world that is really needed
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with knowing through the “heart” and the “body” compliments knowing through “mental models” and the over-thinking of the head becomes possible with awareness and practice. There is an ability for an emotional flow without a freeze response, and experiencing feelings in the here and now, not filtered through cognition.
