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[Type 5] Description of a 5w4 please?

lemurgavel

New member
Joined
Nov 27, 2013
Messages
8
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
9w1
Instinctual Variant
sp/so
My best friend is a 5w4, and I'd really like to explain to her what a 5w4 is, but I don't know much about them.

So, could someone give me a good description of them, please?
 

Ene

Active member
Joined
Aug 16, 2012
Messages
3,574
MBTI Type
iNfj
Enneagram
5w4
We are as varied as snowflakes.

There are no two alike, yet from a distance, we appear the same.

We are observant and tend to be objective.

We tend to keep our cool most of the time.

We are the BORG.

Resistance is futile.

Prepare to be assimilated.
 

HongDou

navigating
Joined
Nov 23, 2012
Messages
5,191
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
6w7
Instinctual Variant
so/sx
Typewatch Enneagram Type Descriptions said:
Type 5(Head Triad)

Fives are intellectually curious types who love to explore what interests them. They frequently indulge in spending lots of time with what's impractical. While they put lots of effort into thinking about things they have deceptively strong feelings however. They state their points dispassionately and insure what they communicate is well thought out which make them seem less emotional than they really are.

Fives take it for granted they have an inherent ability to theorize and understand things more deeply than others, something they'd never say openly. They are never quite "fully there" in their physical presence however. Their sensitivity to emotional stimuli plus a lack of smoothness from their less developed instincts always makes them removed to some degree to better handle situations. They withdraw from their environment and detach emotionally from others to shut out intrusions in their time and space. From the safety of their minds they can intensify their investment in their mental activities. They feel planning sufficiently and knowing enough can enable them to survive and thrive in life despite being isolated. This overuse of their thinking center to navigate an intrusive world from a distance causes them to be both idiosyncratic in how they perceive reality and eccentric as others perceive them. This causes fives to exhibit a certain quirky cleverness.

Fives are far more sensitive than they appear. Being fear types they tend to feel a crippling anxiety that's usually only noticed by close family and friends. Behind their distant exterior often lurks feelings threatening to overwhelm them. They prefer their privacy where they can immerse themselves in whatever interests them. Their limitless curiosity causes them to be self-motivated to learn challenging things and delve into subjects they truly enjoy, to the point of compulsion even. More than any other type they are connisseurs of knowledge. As a result fives tend to have a few intellectual areas of interest they have a deep understanding in which they take great pride in. Many fives withhold their knowledge just as they withhold themselves however, hence the five stereotype of a reclusive expert that no one knows about.

Fives see an interdependent world that desires too much from them. It's not uncommon to see them cut out dead weight and live minimalistic lifestyles to separate themselves from the world. They feel people want more of them than they have of themselves to give. They are affected by others easily and withdraw because they don't believe they have what it takes to deal with other people's demands and expectations. They are equally aware of being a burden on others and withhold both themselves and their emotions from others. Expressing emotions can make them feel vulnerable as they fear that will backfire in front of people who clearly don't understand them. They don't care for superficial small talk and limit themselves to authentic people who do have the potential to understand them. At work they prefer to be given their assignment then left alone. Even in relationships they may withhold parts of themselves and keep many secrets. Simply put fives are fear types who are always wary of people or things that come with "strings attached". Because their instinctive center is weakest they fear "giving their power away" would lead to them being a "sitting duck."

This fear of being a "sitting duck" leads fives to focus on having power. They remove themselves from external activity in order to feel they have enough mastery of the situation to navigate it from a position of strength. They seperate what's important from what's irrelevant and have an unrelenting focus to get to the bottom of things. They delight in "checkmating" others' points that aren't as well thought-out as theirs along the way. Their intellectual curiousity for a subject is intense enough to eventually turn into mastery. They imagine scenarios to understand the world well enough to anticipate reality. They feel powerful trusting their own opinions over what society says. They think things are under control if they know enough. They think they can get on top of things on their own if they figure things out and plan sufficiently. They have delusions of grandeur that make them dream about how the world would be if they had the ability to set things. They feel powerful knowing that others haven't thought about stuff as deeply as they have and don't understand what they understand. This "claim" along with their borderline intellectual overconfidence is a cover on a more subconscious level for their heightened sensitivity and inadequacy though. It's one thing to create theories but quite another to put them into practice. They have trouble with simpler things that most people can handle spontaneously. They know how odd they are and always feel fundamentally apart from others.

In enneagram theory fives are thinking-feeling-instinctive in that order. This causes them to intensify their efforts thinking up scenarios to anticipate and handle reality at the expense of being engaged in the real world. Because they are instinctive center last it is easy for fives to become ungrounded and spin out of control. They encounter new people in spontaneous situations and instead of acting naturally they detach or "freeze" (a very minor form of shutdown) to intellectualize their emotions("How do I express this emotion?") instead of using their feeling center to express their emotions(fear that could backfire on them). Opportunities to reach out to others are missed and fives loses confidence in their ability to act naturally around people. They spend more time alone with makes them more out of touch with the world. This increases their loneliness and eccentricity which makes it even harder to relate to people, which makes them withdraw and isolate themselves even further. Once a critical point is reached their cynicism and disdain for humanity accelerates. The scenarios their imagination comes up with to understand the world become more disturbing and further removed from reality. Healthy fives though are able to both fully participate in life and contribute to an interdependent society while also being able to give more of themselves and handle greater degrees of emotional interdependency. Their greater engagement of life allows them to be more in touch with reality and better at anticipating things.

5w4s are more fantastical and mythologize about how they aren't human. They are natural iconoclasts and disidentification is central to their self-image. Seeing things the normal way that everyone else does just seems "wrong" to them. They don't get as openly awed and apalled as their 5w6 siblings since worldly reality often pales in comparison to the reality of their internal experience. They are both more "cloaked" and also more emotionally immersing than 5w6s. They indulge in epic language to relive their feelings as anything less would seem too trite for the richness and significance of their internal experience. They tend to be less argumentative than 5w6s and would rather be convinced than convince others. They are more sociable and whimsical than 5w6s and want to show you there's more to them than meets the eye.

The 5w4 inner landscape has a certain richness that's both a blessing and a curse. From being both in awe and terrified of just about everything they've contemplated their minds are anything but "normal" in the way they perceive things. They think they will always know more about others than others will ever know about them. They feel they are impossible to get to know and the most one can see is whatever persona they exhibit. Similar to core fours they transform this into their own brand of elitism.

5w4s being iconoclasts force their way to the bottom of things to find meaning, safety with the known and familiar be damned. They have a "counter" mentality in how they focus on the undersides and opposites of things: "It was so dark it became light"..."that abhorrent yet fascinating person". Paradoxes, illusions, the twists and turns of fate, and unexplainable phenomena are representative of "something" that underlies and supercedes current reality and makes it richer. The unseen is more important than the seen. What is intangible matters more than what is tangible. What isn't obvious matters more than what is obvious. What is counterintuitive and fits is more aesthetic and elegant and therefore more significant than what is intuitive and fits. If the pieces fit when they shouldn't it's "anything but coincidental" and can be traced to something meaningful. When something is counterintuitive and makes sense it feels like a deep insight that was divinely revealed to them, a rare and special treasure that shows itself once in a blue moon. Something that's intuitive and makes sense is a dime a dozen that can only pale in comparison.

5w4s tend to be more subjective than 5w6s. Their thinking process is less incremental and has more "illogical leaps". They search for that one angle of looking at things that magically makes everything make sense to them. They have a bias towards seeing underlying patterns that fit together aesthetically and elegantly as more real and therefore closer to the truth. They see a plethora of nonrandom things that just happen to line up towards a single conclusion as evidence of some "higher meaning" to support their conclusion, or even an indication of fate. Such a lining up of tells amidst random chaos couldn't be chance or random. There must be something there that isn't obvious but no less significant if not more so. This makes 5w4s more likely to see things that aren't there than miss things that are there. They tend to have occultic and esoteric areas of interest.

:D
 
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