Like Marm said, being a non-reactive 6 would mean that you are not a 6, because 6 is essentially the reactive heart of the enneagram. I'm sure you have read how 6s can have a tendency to be followers and latch on to others as opposed to trailblazing on their own, and that ties into reactivity. Essentially what being reactive means is that instead of originating your own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors from the core of your being and your personal drives, you tend to respond to your environment.
This results in your environment playing a
huge part in your well-being: especially for a Sexual Six, who will be very attuned to others' energy, your thoughts, moods, and actions will often be based on how someone else has behaved toward you or what someone else thinks of you or how someone else might respond to you - your family, close friends, and significant other in particular. Your mother barking at you in the morning, even on an otherwise good morning, can really upset your mood that day. Your boss asking you to do a little better on a certain project can throw you into a mindstorm of analysis of whether you are good enough at your job and whether you are going to lose your job and how you need to work harder and what you need to do better and whether you should be looking for new jobs and so on. Being a 6, especially with Ne, is being an expert at creating variations on a theme: given one point, you expand to a thousand questions - many of which undermine your sense of personal stability.
If you are always responding to something else, you rarely have time to create your own person, to choose your own mood, to chart your own course, and to believe in the stability of yourself and your reality - because to a highly reactive person, reality is always determined by someone or something else. So that is the challenge for a 6: to stop reacting to everything in the environment (for Sx, this means people, especially) and to move to point 9 by understanding that every minor change in your environment does not
have to throw your mind into crisis troubleshooting mode. Both 6s and 9s need to be more self-assertive, like 3s, but 6s need to delve into conflict less and trust more, while 9s need to stop denying and avoiding conflict.
Rim over on PerC gave this comparison:
6w7
vs
9w8
Which do you feel like more
inside? I probably look more smiley-happy-go-lucky on the outside, but inside I'm usually channeling the top picture. More serious, more concerned, hellbent on analyzing everything. My boyfriend once pointed out (rather astutely of him) that it seemed like I saw my life as crisis after crisis. I did! (I do!) I can divide my life up into time segments based on what major problem I was confronting at the time. I can base my
week on what minor problems I'm confronting. And that seems totally normal to me... the problems don't seem
bad, just pressing. They make me feel nervous and unsteady - because I'm a reactive person.