SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 6 “Certainty Dyadic” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective
Enneagram Type 6 or PDP Pattern C-d | Pattern of Developmental Processing
PDP C-d: Certainty and Safety Sought Inward and Outward (Dyadic), Experience and Express Aversive Emotions
Enneagram Type 6: The Loyal Skeptic/Questionner
Motivation: Certainty for Safety
Primary Emotion: Fear
Emotion Regulation Mode: Up-regulate (Experience and Express)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Head, Cognitive Critical Thinking and Logic, Knowing and Perception
Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow: Head/Cerebral
Enneagram Type 6 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
Cowardice vs Faith – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Cowardice
- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Seeing danger/threats and lacking or mustering fortitude and bravery—vigilant, scanning, imagining, doubting, projecting.
- Low Integration: Excessive differentiation of the certainty Vector yields an intense and persistent activation of a “checker” system scanning, alerting, and motivating the individual to assess and address potential dangers and ultimately to imprison an individual in avoiding or ignoring fear.
Faith
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Providing a model that shows things can get done. Seeing/realizing what really needs doing and what doesn’t. Functioning does not depend on effort/efficiency of the doer. Things work out according to natural law.
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- High Integration: Linking a sense of trust in the universe, a “faith” that life will unfold well, to the useful checker system that manages the real risks in a more integrated way that balances reasonable concern with the intellectual realization that life inevitably has risks.
Fear vs Courage – The Emotional Dynamic
Fear
- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Alert, apprehensive, tense, fearful, mistrusting, wary. Away from fear (phobic), against fear (counter-phobic), and/or avoiding/fear of outcome.
- Low Integration: “Emotion” includes our sense of meaning, motion, and relationships. When excessive concern about danger fills our meaning-making minds, our actions, and our interactions with others, an excessive pessimism—”seeing the difficulties with every opportunity”—can imprison our freedom to be and act freely in the world.
Courage
- Emotional Higher Capacity: Recognition of responsibility for one’s own life/existence. Moving appropriately to preserve life. Facing fear by going into it, not against it or away from it. Meeting danger with firmness or purpose.
- High Integration: By embracing with acceptance the reality of risk and the necessity for reasonable concern and caution, courage emerges enabling life to be lived with enthusiasm and efficacy even in the face of fear. Rather than avoiding the emotion of fear, the experience and express regulation mode can allow fear to be faced—“to feel and deal”—and live more freely.
Enneagram Type 6 Synopsis
Brief Description
The Type 6 believes you must gain certainty and security in a hazardous world that you just can’t trust. Consequently, Loyal Skeptics are themselves trustworthy, inquisitive, good friends and questioning, but also can be overly doubtful, accusatory and fearful.
Key Interventions
Help Type 6 notice the preoccupation with hazard and the accompanying over-imagination and projection, pay attention to what is already all right, become their own authority, and develop greater trust in themselves and others.
Somatic Profile
The nervous system of Type 6 is highly reactive – the flight or fight, fear/aggression mechanism is easily triggered. The cautious or phobic Sixes tend to withdraw, either by physically leaving situations or going up into their heads – fear is layered on top of aggression. The counter-phobic Sixes have aggression on top of fear and tend to accumulate more muscular tension and rigidity. With many Sixes, the eyes can be either suspicious and guarded, or fearful and protruding. The diaphragm and neck/throat are control centers, which can result in a halting or stuttering style of breathing and speaking.
Communication Style
Rapid or hesitant, thoughtful to the point of over-explaining, questioning, doubting and engaging, yet often contrary and information-oriented. Others may perceive you as overly concerned, pessimistic, challenging, doubting even to the point of seeming accusatory, and controlling.
Behavioral Profile
Strengths: Being thoughtful, warm, protective, devoted to others, trusting as faith develops, intuitive, sensitive, loyal, fair, witty and full of ideas.
Difficulties: Ambivalence over “everything,” leading to inaction, avoidance, procrastination, and incompletions, difficulties with authority, both in cases of obedience and rebellion (e.g., trouble with the law), seeing fearful possibilities everywhere which displeasures life, magnifying external power, dangers, and harm in a hyper vigilance which limits possibilities, over-imagination, especially regarding anger and motives of others, leading to situations in which misreading and mistrusting occurs , seeing the hidden and ignoring the obvious, creating opposition in order to take action.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
All failures of trust and untrustworthiness. Betrayal. Being cornered. Being controlled or feeling overpowered. Interactions with others that feel too unreliable or that feel unsafe. Discrepancies in other’s speech or behavior and inconsistencies. Being accused of something unfairly and/or wrongfully. Others’ lack of responsiveness. Giving others warnings and advice that they do not take seriously. Lack of respect and/or a lack of integrity as seen in others.
Social Profile
Type 6’s range from introverted to extraverted. In addition, their social disposition is impacted by the three relational sub-patterns.
Enneagram Type 6 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
Holy faith is nothing mysterious; it just means that nothing can destroy essence, not even death. In fact, essence by definition is that which underlies all material manifestations, is permanent and unchanging. Everything material appears, disappears, changes in form and characteristics, virtually moment to moment. It may be that the only thing that is constant is change. You are not the same today as you were yesterday or you will be tomorrow. Simply observation of your internal state confirms this. Observing an infant also attests to this. Subjectively speaking, the growth and development is a miraculous experience.
This original state of faith in self, others, and the universe is damaged by a world that is experienced as threatening, dangerous, and unpredictable. You just can’t count on it. You can’t have the original secure trust.
Consequently there is a fall into fear and doubt. Since you can’t trust the environment, it is smart and logical to fear it, doubt it. As a replacement for faith, for the permanent security of essence, you naturally pick security and certainty. You stay out of harm’s way as best you can. It only makes sense. You defy security, you face dangers and create your own certainty or you seemingly contradictorily do the opposite. Here the logic is better to face the danger than feel fear. The only thing worse than facing danger is trying to flee them. Thus the Loyal Skeptic presents with an often confusing spectrum of behaviors ranging from phobic avoidance of potential harm to counter phobic confronting it. Alternating meek or bold, cautious or outrageous, cowardly or courageous, escaping or battling perennial dangers. Common to extremes or approaches is the attempt to reduce insecurity and uncertainty and hence quell the fear and doubt. If your flight or fight works well you might not even know you have fear.
Both approaches require that you are vigilant, alert, apprehensive. Internally you constantly question, you become skeptical and apprehensive. attention must go to scanning the environment for evidence of threat and danger. It is like looking at the world with a negative spin through glasses that magnify the danger (negative). Attention is divided, referencing to self and others. This proposition requires an active imagination, ability to make inferences and discern hidden implications. If you are a Loyal Skeptic, you unwittingly project your inner concerns, doubts, aggression to people and situations outside of you which helps to explain and therein reduce the inner fears. You don’t know you are catastrophizing worst case scenarios or getting accusatory over normal changeability. You are sensitive to authorities, as they can protect you or damage you. Doesn’t it make sense that a doubting mind both wants a benevolent authority and lacking that want to bring the authority down.
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 6
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 6 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a cognitive habit of cowardice/doubt to cognitive awareness that the world can be accepted as is without doubt
- Moving from emotional fear to emotional courage with guiding oneself and with external real danger
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with faith that people, life, and the world will somehow come through for the better softens the over-thinking, over-questioning, and over-doubting habits becomes possible through awareness and practice. Then, there is an ability for an emotional courage unencumbered by a reactive freeze/flight response, and knowing in the body what to do in the event that real danger presents itself. The Certainty system is balanced with a grounded Agency and sensing of self-sovereignty and the ability to lean into the Bonding and feeling system of faith in the care and support of human connections.