Type 8’s Journey – Childhood Rebellion to Unyielding Resilience
Forming and developing ego structure and personality is not a manufacturing process. There are stages of development, but there isn’t an assembly line where everything makes linear sense. Instead of testing your patience with attempting to share insights into this Enneagram Type 8 personality, I thought it might serve others for me to focus on a particular aspect of my personality that developed as a survival strategy but now lingers as a predisposition for continuing pain and suffering for myself and others.
One piece of early history might prove insightful. My birth was traumatic in that my mother almost died from aspirating on her vomit. When the medical staff realized she was blue and choking to death, the adrenalin in the room spiked, and I was whisked off to the nursery. It was hours before I was reconnected with my mother. This seems to have been incorporated into my psyche as – the world is a cold, hostile place. This led to a later conviction: The world is an anvil, and life is a hammer. I will survive.
Fast forward fifteen or sixteen years.
I was never interested in or good at sports, and I’ve never enjoyed exercise to the point where I engage in it with enthusiasm and delight. My body mostly felt clunky to me. I had parents who seemed uninterested in their children. They didn’t want to know about their internal worlds. We grew up in a military family with discipline and were expected to follow orders.
I was not fond of orders, not the intent, but the fact that I wasn’t considered. My feelings were inconsequential to the decisions being made. NEWSFLASH! – I developed a strong rebelliousness against authority.
As a child, I also got into a few fights, which I rarely won. I developed a rage and hatred around being picked on, whether physically or emotionally. So, by the time I was sixteen, I had a clear sense that “when I get out of this house,” nobody is going pick on me or hurt me – they will need to be prepared to die because I’m not going to fuck around with civilized rules of boxing or whatever,
If you want to pick a fight with me, I’m going to pick up the nearest object and club you with it – we’re not going outside to see if your physical prowess can lead to bruises, bleeding, and humiliation for me.
As an adult, I’ve never been in a fight because when I left the nest, I started cranking up a forcefield of energy that said – If you fuck with me, you’re going to die. Couple that with denial of fear, and I felt secure in most situations. Also, I’m 6’2” and have been 220 to 240 for most of my adult life.
Many people see me as big, but I don’t feel big; I feel normal. Depending on their sense of presence or intelligence, I can perceive five-foot women and string-bean guys as big.
As you can imagine, my survival strategy created many difficulties and challenges.
Here’s the point I want to make – that energy still haunts me to this day. Despite my personal work, people can still pick up on that residual stance – and I’ve been actively working with its dissolution for over thirty years.
Perhaps what people pick up on is not so much the potential for violence but my intensity in exploring myself and reality. I’m not so focused on danger and survival, but I am intense, and I have those eight challenges around—I know what’s true and have the stamina to go a great distance when others need to take a break.
I find the polarity and violence in the world painful and sad. It doesn’t break my heart as my heart has been wide open to its effects for years and years. I keep my heart open as I never want to return to where I came from.
It saddens me when people allow their projections and ideas to get in the way of inquiry. The world is a mess in many ways. Thoughts, prayers, and social memes are not as effective as – Can I talk to you for sec?