Let's Talk About Eights
Jim Jennings, Ph.D.
If you’re willing to listen, I’m willing to talk. I’m an Eight. Funny thing about being an Eight. If I meet a group of Enneagram aficionados and state my type when asked, I’m often met with a somewhat defensive, stand-offish reaction. “Uh-oh! I’d better be careful. You’re an Eight.” I guess they’ve heard that while the passion or vice of the Eight is lust, the problem of Eight’s (for others) is anger.
Ones struggle to be in control and strive mightily to do what’s “right” (as they understand what’s right). They deal with anger by never being angry. Ones get upset when other people, circumstances, whatever - forces them to lose it. Ones perceive the source of their anger coming from outside themselves. They find anger to be an alien, distressing emotion.
Nines of course, being the nice people that they are, find it much easier to remain unconscious of what they are actually feeling deep down or they act in a passive aggressive way. They never get angry until those occasions on which the anger seething just under the surface bursts forth like a volcano and spews hot lava on whatever or whomever surrounds them.
Not so for us Eights. Anger is very familiar. I have no problem in feeling my anger. I can feel it twenty times a day. My problem is containment, making sure that I don’t react to my anger by losing it and acting like an idiot. I rarely lose it anymore, but there were times in the past that I am not proud of.
So what’s it all about? Why do Eights experience such strong emotional reactions and what are they reacting to? I can’t answer for all Eights but I can try to answer for myself. When I was in graduate school for psychology I went for therapy. At that time the conventional wisdom held that one of the best ways to discover what therapy is all about is to first be in therapy yourself. I discovered I did have a real problem – my anger.
Chimpanzees and their cousins the bonobos are social animals and are our closest living animal relatives. These social primates employ strategies of dominance-submission or closeness-distance in relating to each other. Chimps primarily struggle for dominance while for bonobos prefer to “Make love, not war”. We humans employ both strategies.
Eights are highly sensitive to dominance-submission strategies. (Does that mean we Eights are really chimps at heart?) Underneath the anger is fear, fear of being dominated. We can’t stand either the thought or the reality of being under anyone’s thumb. Buried deep under the fear is pain from having been hurt, humiliated or betrayed when one was weak and vulnerable in a long forgotten past. The paradox is that Eights can’t stand bullies or others being bullied and yet it is the Eights who can be the biggest bullies. Immoral, unhealthy Eights are the most dangerous of people.
The Enneagram has made a big difference in my own life in that it has given me a much clearer awareness of my own dynamics and motivations. There are times when I find it very hard to watch the news on TV. I have a strong visceral reaction to what, in my perception, is an abuse of power. The greater the abuse, the stronger the anger and upset I experience. Some things I just cannot watch. Examples range from people in authority using their position to contemptuously push others around to get their way, to the more egregious evils of child abuse, rape and genocide.
There are a few people in the public arena that evoke very strong visceral reactions in me. Naturally I recognize them as Eights. The bad news is that when I examine myself, I find in me the very characteristics that I can’t stomach in them. But the bad news is also the good news. One of the goals of therapy is to make the unconscious, conscious. If I remain unaware of what’s so for me, it means that I have an even greater chance of acting on automatic. Awareness brings me greater freedom to choose both thoughts and behavior. And I need to get free if I’m going to coach you to greater freedom.
So what does this Eight do for a living? I’ve chosen to spend my life in a way that forces me to control my anger. I’ve spent it as a psychologist and family therapist listening to you. My job is to let you hear what you are really saying because I’ve noticed how much you miss when you’re talking about yourself and your problems. My job is to help you mine the treasure that lies within you so that you can tap into your own resources, get free of your distortions, misperceptions and the illusions that drain you of your strength and take charge of your own life. My job is to help you become more yourself and (let me use a buzz word here) to become more differentiated, so that you can have increasingly satisfactory and meaningful relationships with the people who matter to you.
Believe me, it’s a tough job, but I love it. I love watching you gain strength. I love using my knowledge and power to release the potential within. I experience pleasure in the flowering of your relationships. I love it when you get free.
The path to higher functioning for Eights is to move toward Two, to become ever more aware of the otherness of the other. (We Eights need to stop acting like chimps and act more like bonobos.) The more you come to my office or call me on the phone and trust me with your pain and confusion, the more my appreciation for what you have experienced grows. My increasing respect for you allows me to hear you, to see you, to experience you with ever increasing clarity. You are not me and I am not you.
But if a chimp like me is really going to be useful to you, I need to do more than just hang out with the bonobos at Two. It’s essential for me to join the circle of talking heads who dwell at Five. This is where it gets interesting. Eights naturally gravitate to Five. In Enneagramatic terms, it’s the direction of disintegration. A good example of this is the late John Gotti. The Mafia Don contained his anger by wrapping it in strategies crafted by his cronies at Five. Poor John Gotti. He outsmarted himself, went directly to jail, and died in prison.
Healthy Eights don’t go directly to Five. They need to go first to Two and then take the bonobos with them when they make friends with the Fives. Let me use an example to try to make this clear. An Eight has a beautiful knife. The knife is neither good nor bad. If the Eight acts on his anger, he many go directly to Five and scheme to use his knife to take a life. An Eight who is a surgeon goes to Two and then to Five. He uses his knife – scalpel – to save a life. Think Dr. DeBakey. How many lives were saved by his using his knowledge and skill when cutting into hearts?
So many times in coming to me, you’ve demonstrated that love is essential, but not enough. Often, my respect, my care my concern for you counts as nothing. You’re the expert at playing a losing game. It’s your game. You challenge me to the contest. This is a power struggle and you know how we chimps respond to that. I want to win and the only way that I can win is to beat you at your game. In order for me to win, I need to turn you into a winner. This takes a lot of smarts and that’s why I have to go to Five.
I’ve been playing the game with you for such a long time that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But I hate it when you beat me by managing to lose and mess up your life once again.
That’s when I have to remind myself that you are not me and I am not you. Isn’t that obvious? No, not really. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist whose prime was the third quarter of the twentieth century, was one of the founders of what is called the Family Systems Approach. One of the main postulates of his theory was what he called emotional fusion. Was he ever right! You have demonstrated it for me time after time.
So what is this thing called fusion? In a nutshell, it’s the misperception of the self as something other than the self. Don’t you remember all those times when you told me how your partner was making you angry, upsetting you, and making you jealous? You brought her to the office and right in front of me you said to her, “When you said that, you made me so upset.” So, it’s obvious to you that she’s responsible for your feelings. You’re only a victim. That’s an example of emotional fusion. Emotional fusion occurs when you don’t know the emotional boundary between you and the “other”, whoever or whatever that “other” is. You blame this “other” for what you’re feeling or you blame yourself for what the other is feeling.
On a number of occasions you even blamed me. I asked you how I had made you feel what you were feeling. Right-wrong, helpful-not helpful – I said what I said. It’s true that you had a response, an emotional-physiological reaction to whatever it was that you heard, or frequently misheard, me say. I pointed out to you that at that moment you’re problem was not in your emotional-physiological response but in your attribution of your response. Your feeling was real. Your thinking was nutty. You were confused as to the emotional boundary between us.
How different was that time when you said to me, “You know, Jim, when you said that I really felt – hurt, sad, angry happy, good – whatever”. You held me responsible for my behavior and took back responsibility or ownership for what’s inside you and is really yours. At that moment, you became more differentiated. (There’s that buzz word again.) You broke through your fusion with me and took back what was yours.
You’ve also taught me that emotional fusion is just one aspect of the fusion process that underlies a lot of human suffering and confusion. An example of fusion would be for me to blame those few people in the public arena whom I mentioned before for my automatic, visceral reaction. They are who they are and did what they did, but my perception is my perception. My emotional-visceral reaction is my own. My feelings are real. What I need to be aware of is the nutty thoughts that accompany those feelings and the idiotic behavior that can easily flow from those thoughts. I need to examine and challenge my thoughts so that I can act and not react. Behavior has consequences. To choose the behavior is to choose the consequences.
That’s why when you engage me to play this coaching or therapy game with you, you can rest assured that I will do my best to win. I will respect you and act in a caring and trustworthy way toward you and I will use all my smarts to make you a winner. So, even though I will feel upset if you beat me and choose to lose once again, I will not take it personally. To do so would be to fuse with you. I will do my very best, but it’s still your life and you are the one who is responsible for it.
In a previous paper I explored the overlap between Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s Levels of Health and Murray Bowen’s Scale of Differentiation. Healthy people have a personality. But in the average and unhealthy ranges we have another example of fusion. The people who hang out there don’t have a personality, rather they mistakenly believe that they are their personality or the personality just drives them. Don’t you remember when I challenged you to change your thoughts and behavior and you said, “That’s just the way I am”?
It’s particularly dangerous, both for themselves and for others, when Eights remain in the average or low average range. That’s because the vice or passion of the Eight is lust. What is lust? Since I’m not only an Eight but a sexual eight, I’ll do my best to answer. In common parlance the term refers to strong sexual desire, but in this context it is much more. Because they are so afraid of being dominated in any way by others, Eights are strongly tempted to dominate. If I have the power to tell you what to do, then you’ll have no power to tell me what to do.
This is serious business because Eights are tempted to treat others as objects, not subjects. The Eight can seek to gratify himself or herself by using you as a something rather than relating to you as a someone. You are simply a means to an end. To return to the example of the Mafia, the goal is money and power. Murder, extortion, intimidation are the means. To stand in the way of the will of the Don is to risk the kiss of death.
So let’s talk about sexual lust. The problem is not strong sexual desire. The problem is in treating others as playthings who can be used and then tossed aside like rag dolls. The solution for the Eight is in moving to the Two. In my own personal experience and in spending so much time with you and listening to you over the years I’ve become ever more aware that the fullness of sexuality is best experienced in a committed relationship. As for me, I’m very clear about what I want. I want much more than a sexual encounter. I want to cherish and be cherished. I want intimacy.
I remember the many times that you came to my office and shared with me your joy and excitement because you were pregnant. You shared your love in a physical way and this new life began in your body. The both of you were so excited waiting for her to be born and both of you found yourselves madly in love with her once she came forth. It was in your arms, in your eyes, in your heart and in your constant interacting with her that she gradually discovered who she was.
That’s the paradox. There is no such thing as a person outside of relationship and it is only in relationship that we become individual persons. If you took that beautiful baby of yours, put her in an isolate, fed her, kept her warm, removed waste products but never held her and talked to her, she’d just turn her head to the wall and die.
This is another place where it gets very interesting. You keep telling me how you so much want to be your own person and yet you also never stop telling me how your heart aches for intimacy. What’s the secret? How can you achieve both?
Emotional fusion is not intimacy because when you fuse with another you lose yourself. That loss is so painful that it always leads to distance. When you fuse, you emotionally cut off from the person you claim you love. Remember, in fusion you are either a victimizer or a victim. Either you are responsible for what your partner is experiencing and that makes you a victimizer or you are blaming your partner for your own inner experience and that makes you a victim.
Your partner is not your creation or your possession. Your partner is a person just like you and yet in many ways not like you at all. You told me that you just wanted to be happy. You told me how when the two of you met you were so much in love. Your heart ached for intimacy. Now, even your physical relationship had grown stale. The more you fuse with your partner, the greater the upset, the more certain the cut-off. Fusion always leads to emotional distance, never to intimacy. In listening to you for so many years I’ve become aware that fusion is endemic. I encounter it everywhere.
A committed relationship is a commitment to resolve differences. In order to resolve those differences both you and your partner need to be differentiated. Differentiation enables you to hear what your partner is saying and provides the framework for your partner to hear your thoughts and positions.
You and your partner are in a relationship between equals. Intimacy emerges from relationship. The more differentiated you are, the more you can own, take responsibility for, be accountable for your own feelings, thoughts, behaviors, whims, habits, personal style — whatever, and the more your partner can do the same, the more likely it is that you and your partner will achieve intimacy.
The wonderful news about intimacy is that the more you become one in your love, the more you discover yourself. It’s the exact opposite of fusion. The more you fuse, the more you lose yourself. In intimacy you are continually growing, discovering ever more about what makes you you.
Let me end by giving a message to my fellow chimps who may sneak a peek at this article. You’re constantly tempted to keep holding to the position that nobody’s going to tell you what to do because you “don’t need nothin' from nobody”. Left to your own illusions, you can deny your essential dependency and interdependency. That’s the absurdity of the average Eight's position. Take a tip from me. Challenge your nutty thinking and start hanging out with those bonobos over at Two. If you do, you’ll discover a whole new world filled with freedom and fun — no, much more than fun, joy.
__________ Enneagram Monthly Issue 152, October 2008
Jim Jennings lives and practices in Montpelier VT. He would appreciate your thoughts and reaction. He can be reached at jamesejennings@yahoo.com
Ones struggle to be in control and strive mightily to do what’s “right” (as they understand what’s right). They deal with anger by never being angry. Ones get upset when other people, circumstances, whatever - forces them to lose it. Ones perceive the source of their anger coming from outside themselves. They find anger to be an alien, distressing emotion.
Nines of course, being the nice people that they are, find it much easier to remain unconscious of what they are actually feeling deep down or they act in a passive aggressive way. They never get angry until those occasions on which the anger seething just under the surface bursts forth like a volcano and spews hot lava on whatever or whomever surrounds them.
Not so for us Eights. Anger is very familiar. I have no problem in feeling my anger. I can feel it twenty times a day. My problem is containment, making sure that I don’t react to my anger by losing it and acting like an idiot. I rarely lose it anymore, but there were times in the past that I am not proud of.
So what’s it all about? Why do Eights experience such strong emotional reactions and what are they reacting to? I can’t answer for all Eights but I can try to answer for myself. When I was in graduate school for psychology I went for therapy. At that time the conventional wisdom held that one of the best ways to discover what therapy is all about is to first be in therapy yourself. I discovered I did have a real problem – my anger.
Chimpanzees and their cousins the bonobos are social animals and are our closest living animal relatives. These social primates employ strategies of dominance-submission or closeness-distance in relating to each other. Chimps primarily struggle for dominance while for bonobos prefer to “Make love, not war”. We humans employ both strategies.
Eights are highly sensitive to dominance-submission strategies. (Does that mean we Eights are really chimps at heart?) Underneath the anger is fear, fear of being dominated. We can’t stand either the thought or the reality of being under anyone’s thumb. Buried deep under the fear is pain from having been hurt, humiliated or betrayed when one was weak and vulnerable in a long forgotten past. The paradox is that Eights can’t stand bullies or others being bullied and yet it is the Eights who can be the biggest bullies. Immoral, unhealthy Eights are the most dangerous of people.
The Enneagram has made a big difference in my own life in that it has given me a much clearer awareness of my own dynamics and motivations. There are times when I find it very hard to watch the news on TV. I have a strong visceral reaction to what, in my perception, is an abuse of power. The greater the abuse, the stronger the anger and upset I experience. Some things I just cannot watch. Examples range from people in authority using their position to contemptuously push others around to get their way, to the more egregious evils of child abuse, rape and genocide.
There are a few people in the public arena that evoke very strong visceral reactions in me. Naturally I recognize them as Eights. The bad news is that when I examine myself, I find in me the very characteristics that I can’t stomach in them. But the bad news is also the good news. One of the goals of therapy is to make the unconscious, conscious. If I remain unaware of what’s so for me, it means that I have an even greater chance of acting on automatic. Awareness brings me greater freedom to choose both thoughts and behavior. And I need to get free if I’m going to coach you to greater freedom.
So what does this Eight do for a living? I’ve chosen to spend my life in a way that forces me to control my anger. I’ve spent it as a psychologist and family therapist listening to you. My job is to let you hear what you are really saying because I’ve noticed how much you miss when you’re talking about yourself and your problems. My job is to help you mine the treasure that lies within you so that you can tap into your own resources, get free of your distortions, misperceptions and the illusions that drain you of your strength and take charge of your own life. My job is to help you become more yourself and (let me use a buzz word here) to become more differentiated, so that you can have increasingly satisfactory and meaningful relationships with the people who matter to you.
Believe me, it’s a tough job, but I love it. I love watching you gain strength. I love using my knowledge and power to release the potential within. I experience pleasure in the flowering of your relationships. I love it when you get free.
The path to higher functioning for Eights is to move toward Two, to become ever more aware of the otherness of the other. (We Eights need to stop acting like chimps and act more like bonobos.) The more you come to my office or call me on the phone and trust me with your pain and confusion, the more my appreciation for what you have experienced grows. My increasing respect for you allows me to hear you, to see you, to experience you with ever increasing clarity. You are not me and I am not you.
But if a chimp like me is really going to be useful to you, I need to do more than just hang out with the bonobos at Two. It’s essential for me to join the circle of talking heads who dwell at Five. This is where it gets interesting. Eights naturally gravitate to Five. In Enneagramatic terms, it’s the direction of disintegration. A good example of this is the late John Gotti. The Mafia Don contained his anger by wrapping it in strategies crafted by his cronies at Five. Poor John Gotti. He outsmarted himself, went directly to jail, and died in prison.
Healthy Eights don’t go directly to Five. They need to go first to Two and then take the bonobos with them when they make friends with the Fives. Let me use an example to try to make this clear. An Eight has a beautiful knife. The knife is neither good nor bad. If the Eight acts on his anger, he many go directly to Five and scheme to use his knife to take a life. An Eight who is a surgeon goes to Two and then to Five. He uses his knife – scalpel – to save a life. Think Dr. DeBakey. How many lives were saved by his using his knowledge and skill when cutting into hearts?
So many times in coming to me, you’ve demonstrated that love is essential, but not enough. Often, my respect, my care my concern for you counts as nothing. You’re the expert at playing a losing game. It’s your game. You challenge me to the contest. This is a power struggle and you know how we chimps respond to that. I want to win and the only way that I can win is to beat you at your game. In order for me to win, I need to turn you into a winner. This takes a lot of smarts and that’s why I have to go to Five.
I’ve been playing the game with you for such a long time that I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But I hate it when you beat me by managing to lose and mess up your life once again.
That’s when I have to remind myself that you are not me and I am not you. Isn’t that obvious? No, not really. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist whose prime was the third quarter of the twentieth century, was one of the founders of what is called the Family Systems Approach. One of the main postulates of his theory was what he called emotional fusion. Was he ever right! You have demonstrated it for me time after time.
So what is this thing called fusion? In a nutshell, it’s the misperception of the self as something other than the self. Don’t you remember all those times when you told me how your partner was making you angry, upsetting you, and making you jealous? You brought her to the office and right in front of me you said to her, “When you said that, you made me so upset.” So, it’s obvious to you that she’s responsible for your feelings. You’re only a victim. That’s an example of emotional fusion. Emotional fusion occurs when you don’t know the emotional boundary between you and the “other”, whoever or whatever that “other” is. You blame this “other” for what you’re feeling or you blame yourself for what the other is feeling.
On a number of occasions you even blamed me. I asked you how I had made you feel what you were feeling. Right-wrong, helpful-not helpful – I said what I said. It’s true that you had a response, an emotional-physiological reaction to whatever it was that you heard, or frequently misheard, me say. I pointed out to you that at that moment you’re problem was not in your emotional-physiological response but in your attribution of your response. Your feeling was real. Your thinking was nutty. You were confused as to the emotional boundary between us.
How different was that time when you said to me, “You know, Jim, when you said that I really felt – hurt, sad, angry happy, good – whatever”. You held me responsible for my behavior and took back responsibility or ownership for what’s inside you and is really yours. At that moment, you became more differentiated. (There’s that buzz word again.) You broke through your fusion with me and took back what was yours.
You’ve also taught me that emotional fusion is just one aspect of the fusion process that underlies a lot of human suffering and confusion. An example of fusion would be for me to blame those few people in the public arena whom I mentioned before for my automatic, visceral reaction. They are who they are and did what they did, but my perception is my perception. My emotional-visceral reaction is my own. My feelings are real. What I need to be aware of is the nutty thoughts that accompany those feelings and the idiotic behavior that can easily flow from those thoughts. I need to examine and challenge my thoughts so that I can act and not react. Behavior has consequences. To choose the behavior is to choose the consequences.
That’s why when you engage me to play this coaching or therapy game with you, you can rest assured that I will do my best to win. I will respect you and act in a caring and trustworthy way toward you and I will use all my smarts to make you a winner. So, even though I will feel upset if you beat me and choose to lose once again, I will not take it personally. To do so would be to fuse with you. I will do my very best, but it’s still your life and you are the one who is responsible for it.
In a previous paper I explored the overlap between Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s Levels of Health and Murray Bowen’s Scale of Differentiation. Healthy people have a personality. But in the average and unhealthy ranges we have another example of fusion. The people who hang out there don’t have a personality, rather they mistakenly believe that they are their personality or the personality just drives them. Don’t you remember when I challenged you to change your thoughts and behavior and you said, “That’s just the way I am”?
It’s particularly dangerous, both for themselves and for others, when Eights remain in the average or low average range. That’s because the vice or passion of the Eight is lust. What is lust? Since I’m not only an Eight but a sexual eight, I’ll do my best to answer. In common parlance the term refers to strong sexual desire, but in this context it is much more. Because they are so afraid of being dominated in any way by others, Eights are strongly tempted to dominate. If I have the power to tell you what to do, then you’ll have no power to tell me what to do.
This is serious business because Eights are tempted to treat others as objects, not subjects. The Eight can seek to gratify himself or herself by using you as a something rather than relating to you as a someone. You are simply a means to an end. To return to the example of the Mafia, the goal is money and power. Murder, extortion, intimidation are the means. To stand in the way of the will of the Don is to risk the kiss of death.
So let’s talk about sexual lust. The problem is not strong sexual desire. The problem is in treating others as playthings who can be used and then tossed aside like rag dolls. The solution for the Eight is in moving to the Two. In my own personal experience and in spending so much time with you and listening to you over the years I’ve become ever more aware that the fullness of sexuality is best experienced in a committed relationship. As for me, I’m very clear about what I want. I want much more than a sexual encounter. I want to cherish and be cherished. I want intimacy.
I remember the many times that you came to my office and shared with me your joy and excitement because you were pregnant. You shared your love in a physical way and this new life began in your body. The both of you were so excited waiting for her to be born and both of you found yourselves madly in love with her once she came forth. It was in your arms, in your eyes, in your heart and in your constant interacting with her that she gradually discovered who she was.
That’s the paradox. There is no such thing as a person outside of relationship and it is only in relationship that we become individual persons. If you took that beautiful baby of yours, put her in an isolate, fed her, kept her warm, removed waste products but never held her and talked to her, she’d just turn her head to the wall and die.
This is another place where it gets very interesting. You keep telling me how you so much want to be your own person and yet you also never stop telling me how your heart aches for intimacy. What’s the secret? How can you achieve both?
Emotional fusion is not intimacy because when you fuse with another you lose yourself. That loss is so painful that it always leads to distance. When you fuse, you emotionally cut off from the person you claim you love. Remember, in fusion you are either a victimizer or a victim. Either you are responsible for what your partner is experiencing and that makes you a victimizer or you are blaming your partner for your own inner experience and that makes you a victim.
Your partner is not your creation or your possession. Your partner is a person just like you and yet in many ways not like you at all. You told me that you just wanted to be happy. You told me how when the two of you met you were so much in love. Your heart ached for intimacy. Now, even your physical relationship had grown stale. The more you fuse with your partner, the greater the upset, the more certain the cut-off. Fusion always leads to emotional distance, never to intimacy. In listening to you for so many years I’ve become aware that fusion is endemic. I encounter it everywhere.
A committed relationship is a commitment to resolve differences. In order to resolve those differences both you and your partner need to be differentiated. Differentiation enables you to hear what your partner is saying and provides the framework for your partner to hear your thoughts and positions.
You and your partner are in a relationship between equals. Intimacy emerges from relationship. The more differentiated you are, the more you can own, take responsibility for, be accountable for your own feelings, thoughts, behaviors, whims, habits, personal style — whatever, and the more your partner can do the same, the more likely it is that you and your partner will achieve intimacy.
The wonderful news about intimacy is that the more you become one in your love, the more you discover yourself. It’s the exact opposite of fusion. The more you fuse, the more you lose yourself. In intimacy you are continually growing, discovering ever more about what makes you you.
Let me end by giving a message to my fellow chimps who may sneak a peek at this article. You’re constantly tempted to keep holding to the position that nobody’s going to tell you what to do because you “don’t need nothin' from nobody”. Left to your own illusions, you can deny your essential dependency and interdependency. That’s the absurdity of the average Eight's position. Take a tip from me. Challenge your nutty thinking and start hanging out with those bonobos over at Two. If you do, you’ll discover a whole new world filled with freedom and fun — no, much more than fun, joy.
__________ Enneagram Monthly Issue 152, October 2008
Jim Jennings lives and practices in Montpelier VT. He would appreciate your thoughts and reaction. He can be reached at jamesejennings@yahoo.com