The Shadow of Envy for the Self-Preservation Four

I am slowly working my way through Bea and Uranio’s youtube videos, and I’ve got a spreadsheet to help me keep track. This week, I listened to their interview with Self-Preservation Type 4 Ian Morgan Cron, and I was reminded that I have an entire shadow that I’ve barely glanced at spiritually: envy, which is strange, because that’s our passion. Passion is just another word for the Christian term “sin”, or as 4th century Evagrius would call it- the pattern that blocks us from connecting with the divine. Given how central it is to personality, one would think I’d have faced it much sooner.

The main benefit to learning the Enneagram so far for me has been holding the bottom up in my life. Self-Pres Fours are known as risk takers because they’re trying to amplify the feeling of aliveness so they can feel their feelings more acutely. However, when riskiness doesn’t pay off, or I should say, quite often, when the self-fulfilling prophecy of our belief in our deficiencies manifests as not getting what we want (which at least for SP4’s, unconsciously, is frustration) and therefore sometimes failure, we can suffer the consequences of our risk-taking. This was actually how I discovered I was a SP4- by reading Helen Palmer’s description of the SP4 and how they seek out the feeling of hanging off the side of a metaphorical cliff by their fingernails. I’ve quit a stable government job AFTER getting permanent status, and I know another SP Four who quit teaching at a university AFTER he got tenure.

Every other Type in the Enneagram has their shadow beneath them, in the dark, murky depths of human nature that society wants to keep hidden, but Fours love the dark depths, and revel in it, while their shadow is “making it” in the world. So now that I’ve dealt with the bottom (or at least I’m approaching a break-even mark), I might be ready to face the shadow of my envy, who knows. Envy is going to be overwhelming because I don’t exactly know that I have the resources to deal with it. When I indulge it, I never seem to reach a destination or resolution with it, and I fear that the answer is to let it go.

As a 4w5, I detest the idea of letting go because it feels (4) inauthentic, (5) irrational and unjust; there is no actual redemption taking place. It feels like we’re just covering something up or letting someone off the hook, which doesn’t really work for us. Moreover, it feels like a cheap shortcut that just strenghens our psychological projection onto an imagined savior figure- it was me being left empty-handed, not Him dying that made things better. I was never someone who believed that cheap aphorism that forgiveness sets you free, but as a religious kid who clung to suffering to enforce my identity, I nursed the authoritativeness of that line in my life. I grew up believing very strongly that I had to forgive an adult who made my life difficult, and the exegency was like a heavy piano tied to my ankle. Finally in my mid-thirties, I gave up on the idea of forgiveness because it just seemed to serve the other person, not me. In other words, it seemed like a social construct that served the people in power who weren’t doing the work. I was partially encouraged along this path reading a liberation theologian in Bible school who wrote from a Latin American perspective, saying, “We don’t actually have to forgive our oppressors.” Seeing that sentence in a book was a big weight off my shoulders in my twenties.

So I was intrigued by this interview with Trent Thornley, a Self-Preservation Six whose doubt would be somewhat of an equivalent to my anger at the injustice of forgiveness, perhaps. He talked about his journey with doubt from a Buddhist perspective and it was interesting that they come to the same conclusion as they do in the Enneagram, that doubt is basically like a mental addiction that you need to catch yourself in, and when you see yourself in the pattern, you can take a breath. I guess that’s the only thing I can believe intellectually- at the point where I find myself hating, the only thing I believe in is in noticing the body. But for some people, the work seems to stop there for some people, where you notice the pattern, then say, “Oh isn’t that just like my type! How silly of me.” Then they let go of the thread and forget about it, which sometimes it’s appropriate to do, I understand that. What I haven’t been able to do yet is hold onto the thread and follow it into the unsconscious in a way that resolves anything, but I know I’ve been able to see myself in more of a gestalt of the moment.

One of the key insights I found was that doubting never comes to the end of doubting, and that’s something that a Six – for me as a Six – was hard to see, because doubting feels like something that’s going to resolve in security. If I question it, if I’m skeptical, if I find the truth of it, it’s going to resolve in some foundational secure place. But actually catching the mind as a doubting mind was a very helpful insight. …. And it’s so pernicious and insiduous because it’s so … compelling. … Doubting can always doubt whatever comes up, so even the phrase “Doubting will never come to the end of doubting” can be doubted, but at some point, you just have to see that the whole pattern is something that can be seen, noted, and perhaps put down. ….

So I’m going to experiment with Thornley’s words when I catch myself in envy- to notice the pattern, and remember times when people who have more than me do make an effort to connect with me. I don’t know where it will lead, but I know that both noticing the breath, and making lists of gratitude is a big, important part of my practice. So we’ll start there, but I also know it’s really important for me to not let things off the hook.