GavinElster
Member
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2017
- Messages
- 234
- MBTI Type
- ENTP
- Enneagram
- 3
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
agentwashington said:but type 6 is about seeking support and reassurance, and I also have this impulse towards independence and towards defying authority
On balance, I'd say there's phobic and counterphobic varieties of type 6, and the latter won't tend to be support/reassurance oriented. In fact, when it comes down to it, I think 6s actually have more of a complex about authority than 7s, and thus can be especially negative about perceived authority abuses.
Being denied pleasure is pain, so it's also about not seeking something that one can't get.
Yeah, I mean, this is a good point, and I have thought of these issues for myself,too.
The bottom line is I think there are sixish and sevenish themes both; I don't think everyone should be assigned a wing, but I think people like you probably need a wing to really capture what's going on. You can see how the more you start limiting pleasures to that which doesn't lead to disappointment, you're starting to value emotional security, which has some 6-ish tones. But you're right that the theme of gluttony does involve a kind of picking-at things, not diving wholly in, out of not wanting to face disappointment. At the extreme all this leads to type 5, which it's safe to say has crushed much of desire by rejecting the external world, which is why there's a clutching at oneself+painful awareness of insufficiency within oneself.
Ultimately, these don't strike me as (my definition of) purer 6-ish concerns, because I tend to believe at some core level, while 6s do seek security, the focus seems to be less on security and the pleasure-pain continuum and more on what it takes to be assured of security...or even just the level of security one can reasonably expect. Even the counterphobics are seeking assurance, because by denying the danger, they're trying to assure themselves they won't be overwhelmed by any situation.
I still think at some core level, what distinguishes the options for you (6w7/7w6) would be whether your focus is on assurance/certainty of what one can/cannot attain or on ways to avoid feeling limited. I think a 7-ish tactic would look more like trying to rationalize why one hasn't got the short end of the stick+really did get what one wanted/escaped being trapped/limited.
A general example: I think a lot of very 6-ish people have a complex about religion and losing their faith, because they feel it set up a false hope/false assurance for them, and this is especially jarring for them. This is about feeling cheated by a fallible authority -- it's more about the assurance/security one can have in mind that one isn't going to be disappointed than it is about finding ways to avoid pain by, say, rationalization. An example of how a 7 with 6-ish overtones might proceed similarly is by finding out more about a company's hiring practices to avoid feeling bad about being rejected (e.g. "now I know this, I realize they're stupid/not worth my time anyway!"). (Some attribute narcissim to 7s, but I'd say it's not always gloating levels, just an aversion to hearing what's negative/almost never viewing it as acceptable to just "have" to)
The key difference here is the 6-ish issue above intimately involves feeling like they used to have a belief system, a way of feeling certain, and it was just swept away. There's a greater entitlement to feeling good/not feeling bad in 7s' take on not setting up false hopes, and a greater emphasis on what it takes to believe something in 6s.
You can usually intuitively tell just by seeing if the person has more of a complex about being cheated or more of a complex about facing unnecessary pain. Obviously they're both true, but usually the vibe of the 6-ish reaction is pretty recognizable once you get used to it. There's a saying that most of the things we dread are worst because we don't know what's coming, and the actual thing is not as bad as the anticipation. I think this is related to 6 being a fear type, because the only thing you can do, once you have accepted the world is a fearful and/or uncertain place, is to seek assurance as to its nature.