When our fears become a self fulfilling prophecy?

[Azure Flame]

Do you think its safe to say, that no matter what enneagram you are, when you act on your core fears, it often times will only confirm them?

In a nutshell, its only a problem if you perceive it as such?

 

[skylights]

Yes, though I think it's a balance, and the best strategy is to walk a middle path of realism.

As a 6, I tend to lean too far to making self-fulfilling prophecies out of fears. It happened fairly often in my relationship at first, that I would harp on a perceived issue so much that I would create a problem where there was really not much of one.

But I also have seen 9s and 7s I know very well ignore and/or reframe problems to the point of letting them fester and create royal messes in their lives while they continue trying to deny them. Sometimes problems are problems whether you perceive them or not.

 

[21%]

Yes, I believe that basic needs/fears need to be addressed in a healthy manner, or they will take over your life and lead you to self-destruction.

 

[Ene]

I believe in confronting my fears head on. The only way to overcome fears is to confront them and not back down. My motto...seriously....is Fear Not. I absolutely refuse to live my life in fear.

 

[Chad of the OttomanEmpire]

Yes, I think that's the entire point of the enneagram.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Do you think its safe to say, that no matter what enneagram you are, when you act on your core fears, it often times will only confirm them?

In a nutshell, its only a problem if you perceive it as such?

I do think that it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, but I think core fears are so invisible to us that saying “when you act on them” can be somewhat misleading. The more we act on them, the more we won’t be able to identify it as acting on them- it’ll merely seem like responding to the reality going on around us. It’s probably (imo) better to say “if the unhealthy characteristics of our enneagram type are manifesting, there’s a good chance our perception of reality is more skewed by our core fears than we realize.” Or something.

I’ve put a great deal of thought specifically about this and being e5, since learning about my enneagram type. It’s no coincidence that e5s tend to be Ti doms- if it were more arbitrary and etype were entirely the product of upbringing, then it would be easier for me to accept that these fears don’t hold some grain of truth. It makes more sense to me to see it as a little bit of truth that gets blown out of proportion. I think we start to focus too much on a strength that comes easy to us to compensate for it- instead of focusing on working on accepting/coping with the deficit that caused it in the first place?





tl;dr version: my guess is that the core fear is based on a very real condition, but it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy when we ignore it (instead of consciously addressing it) and use inherent strengths to compensate for it unawares. Because then the weak point gets even weaker, and weaker, etc.

 

[Qlip]

Eh, I think the biggest problem with fear is bias confirmation. You will always watch for your fear to manifest in any small way and when it does, it just reinforces your bias. If you avoid a fear, you never give it a chance to be proven wrong.