Fiveness: From Inside Out
Ava Ingram
I am tired of reading about fiveness as written by others. It is not that there is anything overtly incorrect about what is written, but it appears to be written with as much detachment as is ascribed to us Fives, and believe it or not blood does run in the veins of some of us at least.
When I read (EM February, Handwriting and Type Five) “I would like to give type Five a body…” – “…it would be immediately clear, were it a psychic play between full and empty, it would be empty that prevails…” – “…isolation defines the Five character” and so on, I felt overwhelmingly that I would like to describe what it feels like to be a living Five, I would like to give a subjective description of my own experience. I would like to confirm what you all know so well, that we are all unique, and the descriptions on paper are disembodied as we Fives are described as being anyway in a sense.
Why am I irritated, what is it that the descriptions are sort of missing? I don’t think they adequately explain to Non-Fives what is behind the preoccupation with intrusion, what is behind the fear of demands being made that we may not be able for.
This is what it is like for me. It is like having been born into the world as a tortoise, but a tortoise without a shell. What does the shell do for the tortoise?
It encases him, protects him, stops things that may fall on him, prevents brambles scratching him as he negotiates his way through the undergrowth.
Without this shell, essential for the well being of the tortoise, he is undefended.
Things fall on him and it is, “oh so painful,” he gets constantly scratched, he feels the cold more, he feels the heat more. If he is to survive at all, he has to find a hiding place, where the lack of shell will not leave him so vulnerable.
This is me. I feel to some extent, completely undefended in this world. My defense (shell) is missing. I have no idea how to deal with a full fronted attack, so I have to try and prevent being in the firing line in case one occurs.
We are by far the MOST SENSITIVE of the types, not the least sensitive as some seem to misinterpret.
It is because everyone else seems to know how to cope with the scary world and we don’t that we need our isolation, to observe and work it out, and see if we dare enter the fray.
The truth is we feel SO deeply that there can be constant pain there, as the Fours can have their constant melancholy.
You all know the truth about opposites, as in everything overdone can become its opposite. Therefore the most deeply feeling, because this becomes unbearable, can become the most seemingly unfeeling, compartmentalizing to cope.
However my experience is that feelings, very painful feelings are ever present, for me anyway. Sometimes we are very good at hiding them though.
Personally I do not want to bother other people with my depth of feeling or problems, why would they want to know? Just my very close friends hear.
However I am digressing, from the lack of protective shell, the extraordinary sensitivity, the terrible fear that accompanies the lack of shell.
Yes FEAR , the problem in our different way, that is as bad for Fives as for Sixes, the Head space problem.
I have only recently, in middle age, realized the extent of my fear, - been prepared to admit at all to myself how afraid I am. I have been afraid almost my whole life (from the age of 3 to be precise) – afraid afraid afraid. I now realize that my body, the one we are supposed to be almost unaware of, is constantly in a state of fear/tension, on red alert if you like, wondering where the next blow might fall from, because I have a sense from my experiences that I will surely not see it coming – and it is people I am afraid of, particularly the people I love because they are the ones with the power to hurt me the most. What a truly terrible admission!
No wonder many Fives do not let others in because of this terrible vulnerability. For some it seems the only possible way to cope with no shell is to isolate, but when you do as I have done, marry and have children, you are forever vulnerable.
Enough for the moment – I would love to share other snippets of my view from the inside out but first the image of the poor undefended tortoise, had to be off loaded.
More Snippets of Fiveness: From Inside Out
by Ava Ingram
Continuing with the theme of the sensitivity and vulnerability of us Fives, brings me to another rather dreadful aspect of fiveness, shared by many fives, perhaps not by all—and that is extreme fastidiousness.
We can also be very meticulous, finicky if you like – no wonder that sometimes people can confuse oneness and fiveness. Being fastidious and finicky can look like perfectionism, but unfortunately it is often more about being than doing, more an attitude to physicality, and life, while not doing. Would that I were a doer like Ones! OK when we do get around to doing, we can be meticulous too, another confusion , but I do envy the doing energy of Ones who may be out there getting on with things, while the likes of me might be fussing fastidiously in the background.
To get back to my own fastidiousness –
I remember being like this right from early childhood. The first thing I remember thinking was ‘not very nice’, was old age. My grandparents would only have been 60ish, but I noticed the wrinkles, the sagging, the thin hair, the not so good teeth (people in our culture then did not have money to spend on such things) and found it really unattractive, distasteful in fact. I remember thinking that only children were really nice to look at, as the ‘decay’, as I saw it had not yet started. I never wanted to be any older than seven, myself. Innocent perhaps, but it was a definite discomfort with the physical manifestation of us humans. I enjoyed mental contact, communication when I could get it, interesting things, but I thought people were physically messy. I am not proud to admit that old age still upsets me and I find the dribbling and drooling, loss of strength and control, truly tragic and dreadful at the same time. I have a ‘dread’ of the thought of being old myself, and have definitely decided that I will not take the ‘tablets’ or whatever may eventually be prescribed, but who knows if I will act this way if I ever get to old age. I have checked with many other Fives and they all seem to have a similar dread, but then perhaps everyone does.
Fortunately for me as a teenager, I got over much of my problem with the messiness of the human body, when I found out about the gorgeousness of the human male (more on that another time).
Working with the old would be a nightmare for me though, and I so admire those who do this work. Having said all this in no way lessens my compassion. And perhaps in reaction to my feelings, of which I am not at all proud, I go out of my way to be as kind, patient and caring as possible with the elderly, while still feeling the way I do.
Another aspect of fastidiousness I remember from school days is my reaction to children sharing apples; actually, two or more would take a bite out of the same piece of fruit, and I would feel quite disgusted, and could not understand how they could do it. If someone asked to share my apple, I would let them, and then either give them the whole thing or surreptitiously throw it away. I absolutely could not touch it again.
I cannot to this day bear to be around anyone chewing gum, it absolutely disgusts me, and is completely forbidden in my house. Even to see someone on television chewing makes me flick quickly to something else.
Weight is another thing, though perhaps this is more of an NF (Myers Briggs) thing than fiveness. I an INFJ, hate to see spare unnecessary flesh growing round my middle and exercise hard to stay thin. I have a male five friend, an INTJ and he is the same, hates the excess of any ‘paunch’.
I therefore would find it hard to have a close friend who was grossly overweight, as I would feel uncomfortable looking at him or her – horrible I know, but I am trying to be honest and admit what goes on inside this particular Five, in the hope it helps understanding. It is not only from the aesthetic point of view that I would be affected by a person being very overweight, but the sense also that there is undoubtedly so much behind the grossness that is perhaps being ignored. So if I were with someone very heavy, and the weight was not a topic of conversation I would feel completely inauthentic and that would be another discomfort; it would be as if no matter what we might talk about, I would be much more conscious of what we were not talking about, and therefore there would be no real communication, and that is a huge issue for me – communication - to be talked about at another time.
That is not to say my friends are all skinny like me, but they are all pleasant looking.
Just one more example of Five fussiness and this is from a Five female I know. Every time she made love to her husband, she had then to get him out of bed so that she could change the sheets! The marriage did not last.
I already used the word ‘excess’, and that is a big one for us along with ‘overwhelm’ – the word that no proper description of Fives could be without. The world can be so overwhelming and that is probably why we can dislike excess.
Dislike of excess is part of fastidiousness and that is why I add it on this topic. It so fits our stinginess, our feeling that it is fine to have enough, and too much is unpleasant.
I once had a great discussion about this aspect with another Five Enneagram enthusiast, and we decided that we disliked excess because it is in bad taste. Then we looked at why bad taste bothered us, and we decided it was because it is vulgar and we did not like vulgarity, but at the same time other people were welcome to do as they pleased, we could choose our own way. So far so good, we still felt like fairly evolved Fives, until we explored further and realized that to us the bad taste and vulgarity of excess, were in our view STUPID. Well we had a great laugh at our own frailty - evolved ? We felt we were two loving people who did not judge others, and that was true to an extent, but one of the core Five issues is to do with stupidity, an issue of course because we so fear it in ourselves.
We thought that because through the Enneagram we understood ourselves, we did not ‘suffer’ from intellectual superiority, and we had really caught ourselves out. It was funny (to us) but I will admit humbling. However I know that will not change for me—I somehow cannot help it—this dislike of excess.
We fives are not all the same though about our personal space, where we live. Some are hoarders, who keep things in case they might need them, some are not so sensitive to their physical environment, but my dislike of excess comes out as liking my space tidy and minimalist. I hate to have things around I do not need now, and have no sense that I just might need them in the future. I hate clutter, cannot operate in clutter, cannot think (unbearable!) if my space is very untidy, and there is ‘stuff’ around so am forever throwing things out. Left to myself, I would have hardly anything in my attic. I get uncanny pleasure from a good clear out, though there is rarely much to clear—wonder why! I had better clear off now, too many words, excess, rambling, not meticulous, don’t want to upset myself…
__________ Enneagram Monthly, Issue 125, May 2006
When I read (EM February, Handwriting and Type Five) “I would like to give type Five a body…” – “…it would be immediately clear, were it a psychic play between full and empty, it would be empty that prevails…” – “…isolation defines the Five character” and so on, I felt overwhelmingly that I would like to describe what it feels like to be a living Five, I would like to give a subjective description of my own experience. I would like to confirm what you all know so well, that we are all unique, and the descriptions on paper are disembodied as we Fives are described as being anyway in a sense.
Why am I irritated, what is it that the descriptions are sort of missing? I don’t think they adequately explain to Non-Fives what is behind the preoccupation with intrusion, what is behind the fear of demands being made that we may not be able for.
This is what it is like for me. It is like having been born into the world as a tortoise, but a tortoise without a shell. What does the shell do for the tortoise?
It encases him, protects him, stops things that may fall on him, prevents brambles scratching him as he negotiates his way through the undergrowth.
Without this shell, essential for the well being of the tortoise, he is undefended.
Things fall on him and it is, “oh so painful,” he gets constantly scratched, he feels the cold more, he feels the heat more. If he is to survive at all, he has to find a hiding place, where the lack of shell will not leave him so vulnerable.
This is me. I feel to some extent, completely undefended in this world. My defense (shell) is missing. I have no idea how to deal with a full fronted attack, so I have to try and prevent being in the firing line in case one occurs.
We are by far the MOST SENSITIVE of the types, not the least sensitive as some seem to misinterpret.
It is because everyone else seems to know how to cope with the scary world and we don’t that we need our isolation, to observe and work it out, and see if we dare enter the fray.
The truth is we feel SO deeply that there can be constant pain there, as the Fours can have their constant melancholy.
You all know the truth about opposites, as in everything overdone can become its opposite. Therefore the most deeply feeling, because this becomes unbearable, can become the most seemingly unfeeling, compartmentalizing to cope.
However my experience is that feelings, very painful feelings are ever present, for me anyway. Sometimes we are very good at hiding them though.
Personally I do not want to bother other people with my depth of feeling or problems, why would they want to know? Just my very close friends hear.
However I am digressing, from the lack of protective shell, the extraordinary sensitivity, the terrible fear that accompanies the lack of shell.
Yes FEAR , the problem in our different way, that is as bad for Fives as for Sixes, the Head space problem.
I have only recently, in middle age, realized the extent of my fear, - been prepared to admit at all to myself how afraid I am. I have been afraid almost my whole life (from the age of 3 to be precise) – afraid afraid afraid. I now realize that my body, the one we are supposed to be almost unaware of, is constantly in a state of fear/tension, on red alert if you like, wondering where the next blow might fall from, because I have a sense from my experiences that I will surely not see it coming – and it is people I am afraid of, particularly the people I love because they are the ones with the power to hurt me the most. What a truly terrible admission!
No wonder many Fives do not let others in because of this terrible vulnerability. For some it seems the only possible way to cope with no shell is to isolate, but when you do as I have done, marry and have children, you are forever vulnerable.
Enough for the moment – I would love to share other snippets of my view from the inside out but first the image of the poor undefended tortoise, had to be off loaded.
More Snippets of Fiveness: From Inside Out
by Ava Ingram
Continuing with the theme of the sensitivity and vulnerability of us Fives, brings me to another rather dreadful aspect of fiveness, shared by many fives, perhaps not by all—and that is extreme fastidiousness.
We can also be very meticulous, finicky if you like – no wonder that sometimes people can confuse oneness and fiveness. Being fastidious and finicky can look like perfectionism, but unfortunately it is often more about being than doing, more an attitude to physicality, and life, while not doing. Would that I were a doer like Ones! OK when we do get around to doing, we can be meticulous too, another confusion , but I do envy the doing energy of Ones who may be out there getting on with things, while the likes of me might be fussing fastidiously in the background.
To get back to my own fastidiousness –
I remember being like this right from early childhood. The first thing I remember thinking was ‘not very nice’, was old age. My grandparents would only have been 60ish, but I noticed the wrinkles, the sagging, the thin hair, the not so good teeth (people in our culture then did not have money to spend on such things) and found it really unattractive, distasteful in fact. I remember thinking that only children were really nice to look at, as the ‘decay’, as I saw it had not yet started. I never wanted to be any older than seven, myself. Innocent perhaps, but it was a definite discomfort with the physical manifestation of us humans. I enjoyed mental contact, communication when I could get it, interesting things, but I thought people were physically messy. I am not proud to admit that old age still upsets me and I find the dribbling and drooling, loss of strength and control, truly tragic and dreadful at the same time. I have a ‘dread’ of the thought of being old myself, and have definitely decided that I will not take the ‘tablets’ or whatever may eventually be prescribed, but who knows if I will act this way if I ever get to old age. I have checked with many other Fives and they all seem to have a similar dread, but then perhaps everyone does.
Fortunately for me as a teenager, I got over much of my problem with the messiness of the human body, when I found out about the gorgeousness of the human male (more on that another time).
Working with the old would be a nightmare for me though, and I so admire those who do this work. Having said all this in no way lessens my compassion. And perhaps in reaction to my feelings, of which I am not at all proud, I go out of my way to be as kind, patient and caring as possible with the elderly, while still feeling the way I do.
Another aspect of fastidiousness I remember from school days is my reaction to children sharing apples; actually, two or more would take a bite out of the same piece of fruit, and I would feel quite disgusted, and could not understand how they could do it. If someone asked to share my apple, I would let them, and then either give them the whole thing or surreptitiously throw it away. I absolutely could not touch it again.
I cannot to this day bear to be around anyone chewing gum, it absolutely disgusts me, and is completely forbidden in my house. Even to see someone on television chewing makes me flick quickly to something else.
Weight is another thing, though perhaps this is more of an NF (Myers Briggs) thing than fiveness. I an INFJ, hate to see spare unnecessary flesh growing round my middle and exercise hard to stay thin. I have a male five friend, an INTJ and he is the same, hates the excess of any ‘paunch’.
I therefore would find it hard to have a close friend who was grossly overweight, as I would feel uncomfortable looking at him or her – horrible I know, but I am trying to be honest and admit what goes on inside this particular Five, in the hope it helps understanding. It is not only from the aesthetic point of view that I would be affected by a person being very overweight, but the sense also that there is undoubtedly so much behind the grossness that is perhaps being ignored. So if I were with someone very heavy, and the weight was not a topic of conversation I would feel completely inauthentic and that would be another discomfort; it would be as if no matter what we might talk about, I would be much more conscious of what we were not talking about, and therefore there would be no real communication, and that is a huge issue for me – communication - to be talked about at another time.
That is not to say my friends are all skinny like me, but they are all pleasant looking.
Just one more example of Five fussiness and this is from a Five female I know. Every time she made love to her husband, she had then to get him out of bed so that she could change the sheets! The marriage did not last.
I already used the word ‘excess’, and that is a big one for us along with ‘overwhelm’ – the word that no proper description of Fives could be without. The world can be so overwhelming and that is probably why we can dislike excess.
Dislike of excess is part of fastidiousness and that is why I add it on this topic. It so fits our stinginess, our feeling that it is fine to have enough, and too much is unpleasant.
I once had a great discussion about this aspect with another Five Enneagram enthusiast, and we decided that we disliked excess because it is in bad taste. Then we looked at why bad taste bothered us, and we decided it was because it is vulgar and we did not like vulgarity, but at the same time other people were welcome to do as they pleased, we could choose our own way. So far so good, we still felt like fairly evolved Fives, until we explored further and realized that to us the bad taste and vulgarity of excess, were in our view STUPID. Well we had a great laugh at our own frailty - evolved ? We felt we were two loving people who did not judge others, and that was true to an extent, but one of the core Five issues is to do with stupidity, an issue of course because we so fear it in ourselves.
We thought that because through the Enneagram we understood ourselves, we did not ‘suffer’ from intellectual superiority, and we had really caught ourselves out. It was funny (to us) but I will admit humbling. However I know that will not change for me—I somehow cannot help it—this dislike of excess.
We fives are not all the same though about our personal space, where we live. Some are hoarders, who keep things in case they might need them, some are not so sensitive to their physical environment, but my dislike of excess comes out as liking my space tidy and minimalist. I hate to have things around I do not need now, and have no sense that I just might need them in the future. I hate clutter, cannot operate in clutter, cannot think (unbearable!) if my space is very untidy, and there is ‘stuff’ around so am forever throwing things out. Left to myself, I would have hardly anything in my attic. I get uncanny pleasure from a good clear out, though there is rarely much to clear—wonder why! I had better clear off now, too many words, excess, rambling, not meticulous, don’t want to upset myself…
__________ Enneagram Monthly, Issue 125, May 2006
