I’ve always thought I’d successfully managed to avoid Sixes in my life, but lo and behold, I’d let more of them into my circle than I thought. As a Four, I find it insulting to be interrogated by a skeptical Six so our interactions tend to be short. Being tested for sincerity feels like we’re being asked to show our passport at a checkpoint on the ocean floor: we live in these depths, goddamit, and we’re drunk on their illusions- we need help getting to the surface! Fours suffer because we’re too “authentic”; we over-identify with it to the point that we lose out on opportunities for happiness and success because we mistake a lot of the dark depths of the human experience for authenticity, so for a Six to question our motives feels like a metalic taste in the mouth- just off. Especially as a non-social, I don’t feel beholden to prove myself when they start asking me testing questions, and usually I disengage and metaphorically crab-walk away.
Yes, it’s an hour and a half long, but for Enneagram enthusiasts and lovers of people, it’s well worth the time. True to their form, these Sixes showed up prepared to talk about their type, and you really get a lot of meat and potatos out of this panel. It also happens to be the funniest panel out of the nine. It was filmed in 2019, so I would love to see Beatrice invite these four panelists back for a post-Covid reunion to see how they navigated the war between right and left information sources. How spirituo-politically relevant would that be? (A word that needs to be in circulation!)
Lately, it’s been hard to find love for the Six archetype. Unhealthy Six energy seems to be gleefully upending everything I cherish around me; the Six sneer of cynicism and skepticism is taking aim at everything that gives me stability. My 7w6 aunt values her alt-right news websites more than the knowledge I accumulated over the 20 years it took to finish my political science degree. A couple Christmases ago, my 5w6 (or 6w5) dad sneered at me with a look of pure derision* that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I talked about Covid, after which I vowed I would never see him again. Even the lamp posts where I live downtown are plastered with conspiracy theorists projecting their terrors onto our infrastructure. I just want to scream at these people to get some therapy: “Your sci-fi fears are not a valid reason to ruin my neighborhood or the democracy that I cherish. Stop projecting your fears onto the screen of civic life. Yes, there is corruption and it’s bad and it needs to be weeded out, but you become irrelevant and unhelpful when you masturbate to your nightmares rather than feeling your feet on the ground.” This public stage conspiracy theorists have built in our cultural consciousness recently is mostly for unhealthy type Six performative panic.
As the Enneagram wisdom goes, as soon as you fall out of balance in one intelligence centre, you are already starting to lose contact with reality. You need all three brains working in concert – the head, the heart, and the gut intelligence (which we often just call the body). When all three brains are firing their cylinders at the same rate, you can be useful to society, connect in relationships, discern between vying motives, and solve problems in a way that serves the greater good. As a wise Six will tell us, the rationality of the head does not solve problems in isolation. All types are wont to isolating one of the three brains from the other two, which is like twisting the tube that provides the air intake, giving you a twisted, distorted read on reality.
Understanding the projection of the Six took a series of aha moments this year. I had Sixes make me angry and then, sensing they were making me mad, they reassured me that they weren’t mad at me. It took me a few of these interactions to understand what was going on. As Sandra Maitri explains,
The passion of fear is inextricably tied to the Six’s defence mechanism of projection…. “a mental process whereby a personally unacceptable impulse or idea is attributed to the external world. As a result of this defensive process, one’s own mental experience, one’s own interests and desires are perceived as if they belong to others, or one’s own mental experience may be mistaken for consensual reality.” Because of this defence, it is ofen difficult for a Six to discern what is objectively going on in someone else, and what of his own unconscious is being experienced as belonging to another.
Understanding projection helped me finally wade into Jordan Peterson material too. We all project, but Peterson has turned his egoic landscape inside out and called the resulting extrusion a philosophy. Maitri aptly describes the process of the Six imagination trying to turn the internal offensive material into an outer terrifying reality:
Most often, aggressive and hostile feelings and impulses are projected by Sixes, and in turn fuel their fear of a malevolent world. Criticism, judgement, and rejection are some of the less overtly aggressive but nonetheless undercutting projections favored by Sixes. The unconscious “reasoning” of the soul for projecting aggression is that it was experienced early on as threatening, and so having it inside oneself means having something dangerous inside. So the Six’s way of getting rid of this internal threat is to disavow it through projection.
Yes, gender equality is so much better than it used to be, thank god (err, I mean the women who fought for equality), but by saying patriarchy doesn’t, or no longer exists, Peterson is disavowing the unfairness of patriarchy and his unconscious participation in it, and foisting it onto an outside “oppressor” (the group who’s making him feel wrong or bad for being part of the system) through projection. I’m [sort of] game to listen to his complaints, to humour my white mid-30’s to mid-40’s guy friends who are fascinated by him, but I wonder if he’ll ever join the dots that publically humiliating and excoriating the group carrying his shadow for him isn’t actually helping him find peace.
As Maitri says, Sixes need to look like a victim for strategic reasons. Socially, being an underdog is safer than having power, so they will go to great lengths to make others look taller so they are less of a target, even if they have to exaggerate their victimhood or create it out of whole cloth.
…Experiencing himself as aggressive would challenge a Six’s core identity as a frightened weakling; and even though that sense of self is painful, it is nonetheless familiar, and thus ironically safe, territory.
(Conversely, Sixes can accord so much unexamined virtue to the underdog that they end up lauding the very people who are oppressing them, as we’re seeing in the United States right now as Americans prepare to hand over power to Trump and his billionaire friends again.)
Being part of the patriarchy is a tough position to be in, and no man who’s educated about it really wants to be part of it, and I understand why Peterson would feel uncomfortable having to hear about it over and over again in his classes- as one person, how to you change that? What can you do? Unfortunately, he’s using his platform to gaslight women instead of being an ally.
Last month, I went out for coffee with a man who has been an important Enneagram coach to me, and he talked about his work as a white ally to people of colour, and his stories made clear to me that allyship is more than just liberal projection- the projection from the opposite side that Peterson despises, (and which I have to be careful of as a Four). Allyship is a sacred place in the middle that you get to through presence to both the reactions we’re having internally, and the reactions people are having in their environment. It involves self-awareness as a first step, then courage as a second, not the other way around.
The painful irony for Peterson is that he is a Jungian, and honest Jungian analysis is built on a foundation of years of self-analysis. Thanks to the Buddhists, we know that the first rule of the work is to start with a curiosity about our own unconscious reactions first.
In that vein, my conversation with my Enneagram coach inspired me to get back into journaling, and that’s the project I take into 2025- diarizing daily to get out of my heart into my head, but more importantly- and most sacredly to my Four journey- my body.
2024 has been a year-long awakening to the sixness surrounding me in my life. In solidarity with them and our shared struggle around making decisions, I present a story told by a brilliant Type 6 comedian I recently discovered, who found mental clarity while getting into his body and discovered an interesting lesson, the meaning of which I’m still mulling over: