Second, thanks for all the replies. Your descriptions were great to read.
These are really nice.
I'm glad you enjoyed it
I've been trying more recently to make sense of my own particular brand of insanity, and keep coming back to conflicts between identifying myself as more 4ish or more 5ish. My tritype even shows it because I'm a 4w5, then 5w4, then 1w9. I feel like this blurs the lines even further for me, but eventually settled on 4 as my main because of my persistence both with trying to identify myself and trying to express myself in a meaningful way in order to relate to connect with people on an emotional level. In my goals, finding truth between is is secondary to each of us being able to identify with our true selves and connecting with one another's genuine feelings.
To expand on one of the things I posted a bit inefficiently earlier, being at the edge of Thinking and Feeling, as I understand it--4's think their feelings and 5's feel their thoughts. Similarly, 7's do their thoughts, being on the edge of the thinking/instinctual triad. 2's do their feelings, being on the other edge at the feeling/instinctual triads. 1's feel their instincts, 8's think their instincts. The true Instinctive, Feeling, and Thinking types are 9, 3, 6. They do not cross their energies like that. There's a great picture in a book a friend of mine showed me to illustrate these blendings along the cusps that I should try to look up. I think this is it:
Understanding the Enneagram Also mentioned in this book is how the different types act when they are healthy and unhealthy. As types become more and more unhealthy, they move in the direction of disintegration and start looking more like another type.
When I'm unhealthy, I tend to be a lot more 2ish than 7ish (4's disintegrate to 2 and 5's disintegrate to 7). I always can tell when I'm backsliding on my life priorities because I notice that I begin to start worrying about everyone around me and their problems when I'm unstable. But unlike an actual 2, I'm not equipped to caretake. Especially in those periods of stress. I have had to try and fail many times giving what I don't have to give before I realized that helping people when one is at a deficit actually hurts them more than helps them. 5's tend to become really erratic with their ideas, just looking for the next enjoyable thing or the next, like an unhealthy 7. They tend to get really paranoid and close themselves off, withdrawing from all the painful things around them. A 4 withdrawing looks a lot more blaming while still reaching out to everyone around--demonstrative, blamey. A 5 withdrawal looks secluded, closed-off, almost undetectable if you don't know the person and check in with them to notice that they've completely collapsed in on themselves using some badly strung-together scrap of quasi-logic or another. I hate to use Big Bang Theory as an illustration, but I just recently started watching it with my roommate and it's the first thing that comes to mind. What Sheldon goes through in
this episodet is a comical, light-hearted example of what I've seen unhealthy 5's do, especially when they have loving and supportive families. It can get pretty dark if no one intervenes, because they aren't going to usually reach out for help from anyone after they've begun fixating on the futility of everything.
Starting adderall for my ADD has helped me to organize things enough to have a more 5ish and 1ish lean to my choices and actions. Last Fall and Winter, I spent the better part of the time putting off school, losing my job, watching Star Trek TNG reruns, and playing Candy Crush. I'd have occasional things I'd try to start to research and feel out but would lose track of (figuring out what the m/s^2 really refers to, and what an alternate dimension might look like, how to make laundry soap, farming crickets, fixing the problems in the current US and political spheres, the emergent properties of pi...etc). Rarely did I ever do more than make a rough outline of a hypothesis of things that could be connected. I spent most of my actual time helping people instead of researching my own ideas and theories. I helped my INXP friend get a resume together, found him a cat, got him a free bike, and did his dishes a few times. My INTJ friend, I spent a lot of time checking in on every few days to ask about his condition and see if I could come over to hang out with him. I'd nudge him a lot in a more positive direction.
After starting adderall this spring, I've become more able to really focus on doing the research that is necessary to fully realize my ideas and things I want to express. Starting Prozac for my depression and anxiety in the fall definitely made me more pleasure-focused. I think that contributed a lot to my 7ish unhealthy-5-tendencies. But at the forefront of things, the majority of my time wasn't spent in isolation, it was spent whining and helping other people in my life and avoiding going to class because "my friends needed me and I could do my stuff some other time." Last summer, before starting the meds, I'd pretty much crawled into a hole and was pretty close to committing suicide because I saw myself as a burden to everyone and everything around me, and saw no way to stop being that way. I'd gotten involved in too many unhealthy peoples' lives and was overextending myself so much that I couldn't fully recover from day to day. Meds and therapy have helped me a lot, but it's still a daily struggle to find balance.
Sorry if this is too much info! Definitely in 5-zone today!
