Animus – More discovery

Again and again I have to return to the concept of animus within me because I strongly sense its ability to cling to me and erode my vision if I forget it exists. This topic is hard for me to discuss because so much of my innate sensibility says that women should not have any differences from men and that this is an archaic way of understanding the world. However, that in itself is a dishonest account of what I have experienced psychically.

Growing up, I was perpetually struggling with gender-related struggles in part because my mother was such a reactive character to the complex of women-values. She was a wild soul and I loved her very deeply for that. But she also confused me and led me to believe that there was nothing wrong with me

and therefore I must be lazy for being unable to take on my visions and make them reality.

Now that I read about other women’s accounts of the animus, I think this must be a critical part of my personality. So much of their fixations sound familiar to me, and so much of these women’s experiences reflect my own.

Right now, at this very second that I write this, I feel anxious to an immeasurable degree. There is a voice in my head that is petrified not by me financial status at this second, but at the future of my finances. I’m starving and yet food feels completely alien and wrong for me. My whole being is fixated in fear and internal pressure at an object in the psyche – an object of “success” and “right-mindedness” that has warped the inside of my soul in such a way that takes emotional and physical tolls on my body.

What is it about me and my consciousness that is so vulnerable to the aura of a dictator? The “petty dictator” dictates my life and my full conscious experience does crazy cartwheels every time it speaks.

This voice may be the voice of an animus talking here. Its abrupt ruthlessness exhausts me. It’s loud voice overpowers my ability to think. The physical and mental state of shame and worthlessness seep into me and unwittingly demand all my resources so that all that’s left is this horrifying vacuum of blackness. Life without animus is just as bad as life with animus.

Helpful Post on Anxiety

I didn’t write this, but I don’t want to lose it.

It’s important to acknowledge that each enneagram is afraid of something. Fear is not enneagram 6’s hallmark emotion. Also, you need to distinguish between healthy or unhealthy, counter-phobic or phobic, and the variants (SP, SX, SO), and even “tritype” (I’m 6-1-4 or “philosopher”). One 6 wing 5 can be starkly different from another based on these distinctions. For an example of the healthy vs. unhealthy distinction, it’s not always anxiety or avoidance of such as the ultimate driving force, it can be a balance on a spectrum between being vigilant as opposed to anxious, pro-active as opposed to reactive. There are several levels between healthy and unhealthy that can be observed.

To get into the neuroscience of it, plenty of people would like to believe that enneagram 6 is related to some psychological trauma deeply rooted in youth (fear of abandonment, etc), but quite frankly it’s a neurochemical thing. There’s an elevated level of Fight or Flight hormones keeping the person alert to things that normally they wouldn’t feel compelled to think about because their body isn’t efficiently breaking those down on a biochemical basis. Something that wouldn’t be as traumatic for someone with different genes, different environment, different neurochemistry, can hit an enneagram 6 more strongly simply because of a predisposition to be sensitive to stress in all its forms, not simply emotional /psychological but also biochemical /physiological /immunological /genetic. The way a person responds to stress or makes an effort to eliminate it can be quite telling of their enneagram, their MBTI, and their neurochemistry, even what genes they likely have that influence mood and emotional regulation.

Not all enneagram 6 are anxious or afraid. When integrating to 9, one will look uncharacteristically in the moment, chill, content, easy going, and more than happy to indulge in Se. When things go wrong there is a confidence that what can be done will be, and things will work out as they may- the sky isn’t falling.

As a 6w5 it’s important to realize a capacity to be more than you have been, more than you ever thought you could be. As good as 6w5 is at scanning ahead for danger or problems or contingencies, it can often be the unforeseen that will most challenge and change you (for the better) if you just let it and be open to accepting something unexpected. Staying “safe” actually wastes a lot of precious energy rather than conserving it. Imagining the worst just to feel a sense of preparedness to steel one’s self up “just in case” comes at both a cost and a benefit, but there’s a point where it’s distracting you from just living your life in a fluid, receptive motion. It’s possible to get to that point, age and maturity and experience- and learning how to compensate for these neurochemical predispositions can really influence and change how a 6w5 both thinks and behaves.

Embrace what you don’t know instead of trying to be so sure of everything. What you can be sure of, of course as a skeptic you will second and third guess it, but only do so if you are ready to explore what that means within the realm of things “unsafe” that could threaten to shake your foundation. It’s not just all in your head, it’s in your DNA, and your DNA is not as set in stone as you would like to believe. You can change your thoughts, you can shift your perception, you can change yourself, you can adjust your actions, you can positively influence all facets of your health. Being in the moment, being in the physical reality, will make this clear once you start paying attention to things you thought you fully understood thus never allowed yourself to truly know and accept as they actually are.

Don’t just consider Ni as some future oriented drive. Ni is also your perceptive way of seeing things beyond surface presentation, beyond limits of time, beyond assumptions of character or purpose, beyond initial meaning, beyond the vantage point you intially had. There is more meaning and value to be found if you aren’t hesitant to explore it while suspending your judgment functions. A good way to develop this is to spend some time with a person who is adept with extraverted iNtuition because they naturally pull these reflections that would be internal for you out to the surface where your perception can “breathe” which helps you develop your own extraverted perception (Se) to balance with your introverted perception (Ni). Your observations will be more keen. Your paranoia will lessen. Your sense of anxiety will be replaced with confidence and resourcefulness when it’s actually needed- not before the fact, but in the heat of the moment. You won’t need to preoccupy yourself with whether or not you are “ready for this” because you won’t need to spend all that time analyzing.

It’s not “all in your head”. It’s a full body shift. Any head type enneagram (5, 6, 7) has this challenge. A head type enneagram with a head type wing of course is going to have even more of a challenge and reward from learning how to shift out of being so stuck in their own mind where they are most comfortable. Comfort is good every so often, but if it’s consistent all it will do is hold you back from being -all- that you are. What’s the point in being curious if you can’t apply what you know out there? What’s the point of fear /anxiety if it isn’t channeled through courage to actually diminish that fear /anxiety?

The imagined life (Ni – Ti) is painful; it has no substance to connect you with other people nor with vital life experiences (Fe – Se).

Why attempt to achieve balance and harmony outside of yourself when you are not at peace within your own being yet you try to convince yourself that it’s forces outside of you that drive this discontentment?

A study about mindfulness and task persistance

Overall, the authors did find that mindfulness was correlated with persistence (even when they controlled for the number of anagrams solved). More specifically, the two facets of mindfulness labeled nonreactivity and nonjudging were significantly related to persistence. As the authors conclude,

“. . . these results suggest that mindful self-awareness, particularly nonjudging and nonreactivity, can have a salutary effect on persistence at a difficult task. Higher levels of self-consciousness should contribute to improved persistence on a difficult task due to awareness of a discrepancy between one’s goal state and current state that leads to efforts to reduce the discrepancy. However, the theory of metacognitive awareness (Teasdale, Segal, & Williams, 1995) suggests that

However, the theory of metacognitive awareness (Teasdale, Segal, & Williams, 1995) suggests that judgmental and reactive thoughts triggered by a difficult task lead to less persistence because they promote self-criticism, frustration, and impulsive decisions to stop, whereas mindfulness promotes acknowledging self-critical thoughts or frustration and allowing these experiences to dissipate.

It may also be that negative self talk, which is related to task performance and is generally more frequent during difficult tasks (c.f. Ferneyhough & Fradley, 2005), is affected by mindfulness such that subsequent emotions, such as embarrassment or frustration, that might reduce persistence are less likely to occur or are less intense for more mindful participants” (p. 381; emphasis added).

An Article That Roots Anxiety With Samsara

http://shambhalatimes.org/2009/04/03/basic-anxiety-is-happening-all-the-time-by-chogyam-trungpa/