The Price We Pay for Collusion – Narcissistic Wounding
The normal course of life is like this: A wart grows on your nose and becomes so big that you finally can’t hide it from yourself or others. So you pretend to be someone else. And people, for one reason or another, quit mentioning the wart. Of course, you can’t mention their crossed-eyes, crooked teeth, ugly toes, and etc.
We do not see the world for what it is, nor do we really see each other.
The enneagram of personality types offers us a two-edged sword. One edge can help us cut through some of the veils that obscure reality. The other edge can cut us to the quick and unfortunately this is the edge we most often use.
The deepest wound in the soul is separation from True Nature. The deepest wound in our psychological self is the narcissistic wound, the wound of not being seen for who we really are. The narcissistic wound is a universal phenomenon – we have an ego, we have this wound.
It usually doesn’t take a great deal of self-exploration to discover the trail leading to this place of excruciating pain. Many people are already familiar with the experience of not feeling seen, or heard, or considered. Picking up this thread and following it to its point of origin, now there is something radical.
This is a place of deep raw suffering. A wound as old as us, but as painfully fresh and alive in its affect as it was for the child who was seen as a body, an intrusion, a burden, a blessing, or even as a set of hopes and dreams by parents or early care givers. The greatest need for the soul in this world is not love, but acceptance. Even the most well-intentioned parents want their children to become something other than what they are – you know – change into something great, i.e., smart, wonderful, the President, Bill Gates, or whatever. Unfortunately for the soul, what the parents are relating to is a set of images, hopes and beliefs – an ego structure (self-image) they are helping the child to create. It can’t be otherwise, as they know themselves this way.
I can remember the juice in discovering the enneagram. When we “get it”, when we finally see the fixations functioning, we can’t help but get “cranked-up” about it. Hell, I’m still cranked-up about it, though my orientation toward it and understanding of it has changed.
I remember being at Esalen attending one of Helen Palmer’s 5-day panel workshops. In the afternoon session the two’s had everyone in their laps and that evening the four’s had everyone as far back as their fannies could scoot. It was the five panel that raised the hair on the back of my neck.
My fixation (8) is connected to five, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time there. I thought I had some understanding of the five mind and the way their attention works, but about half way through the presentation, I realized these folks were from another planet! Their minds didn’t work like mine at all.
All the times I had told people, “I hear you”, “I understand where you’re coming from”, “I know what you mean”, and etc., suddenly seemed to be just so much vapor. I had been living my life under the assumption that all of us were basically using the same processing machine. Nobody had informed me that there was Windows, Mac OS, Android and six other operating systems out there.
Of course, when we get all fired-up like this, it’s, “Oh, you’re an eight”, “I’m in my seven wing right now”, and etc. A “two” once told me she drives in eight. Which I guess justified her actions of being an obnoxious, aggressive driver (I know, I was in the car with her when she stated this!).
This kind of talk is understandable and normal for a while, but I know people who have studied (I mean really studied) the enneagram for years and they still talk like this. It’s like some of my old doper friends from 35 years ago. They’re still holding the same stoned conversation as the day I walked out of the room.
Another fascinating thing is how many people wear their fixation like an award or accolade while others carry it around like a bad report card. Or, the people who wish they were some other fixation, like that would improve their experience of themselves. Or the mind set that operates like this: “I need to bash this person’s head in so, I’m going to eight. Now, I need to think about what I just did so, I’ll just zip over to five. And now I’m really depressed so, I must be in four”. I don’t think I am being too harsh or unreal here because I interact with “enneagram people” everyday that embody these behaviors.
Man
Likes to think
He has evolved
Above the animals
With an advanced intelligence
That can choose its destiny
But the ordinary man
Is no more evolved
Than a parrot
Parrots, too,
Only repeat their conditioning
Parrots, too,
Dress wildly to attract attention
And parrots are also known
To associate with pirates
Need I say more?
I don’t run into very many people that are ambivalent about the eight fixation. Many is the time a person has said to me, “Now that I’m not afraid of you…” or “I like eights …” For many years these types of comments cut me to the quick as I was working on the narcissistic wound and it was so manifested that if I touched a single chest hair, my whole body went into convulsions. Then, for a long time, it just made me very sad that the ground for contact was so limited and so removed from the real.
Recently, I was able to spend some time with a self-identified two that likes me as an eight – likes my energy, likes my forthrightness, likes my “style”. I like this person, too, but we spent a lot of time on that merry-go-round. I kept watching that need to be defined and to see the world through a particular lens and the compulsion driving it.
One day, for a moment, I awoke in the middle of my life to discover I was living in a land ruled by a chattering monkey and a dog chasing its tail. After many years, I was able to recall that thousands of these moments had occurred in the course of my life. A curiosity awakened in me that focused my attention into the freedom and lucidity of that recurring moment. At first, the craziness and insanity of the monkey and dog were highly entertaining, it being such absurd and outrageous activity. Until I realized that their behavior was driven by a state of constant torture. This broke my heart and then, I saw they were me.
It’s impossible to change the compulsion of the fixation from within the identity that is living that fixation. Understanding the enneagram won’t change it either. The only thing that works is us being changed and we can’t do this. We aren’t some thing that needs to be thrown into a personal growth cuisinart. This orientation is still non-acceptance – rejection.
My observation is that all of us eventually suffer a total heartbreak as we realize that most of our well-intentioned work on ourselves is a recreation of early environmental dynamics or some other reaction to parental demands. Of course, I haven’t observed everyone, but so far it has been one hundred percent. The situation is basically hopeless. The personality can’t take us where we really want to be. There is no true fulfillment or contentment realized as a result of its striving and endless activity.
Sooner or later, the chickens have to come home to roost. This is the moment where we allow ourselves to really become aware of the true “state-of-affairs” and the profound price we pay for it every day. To see the effects and feel the affect from the personality’s dominance in our life is a huge devastation to the heart. To experience the wounding from our not being seen is bad enough, but to see the suffering we have inflicted through our unconsciousness is a greater pain. And we do this to ourselves from a much more intimate and immediate place almost every second of our lives.
But, remember, this is a two-edged sword, this enneagram. It can help us to see part of the state-of-affairs. We don’t have to avoid the inevitable. We can actually embrace it. Eventually we must.
There used to be a great demand in me to hold others accountable for much of my sad state-of-affairs. The more I dug into my formative dynamics, the more pissed I was at mom and dad. For a long time I was of the mind that I had to “work” all of this stuff out with them. And, while it is true that some of those demons needed confronting, it is mostly the case that we just need to see the truth in ourselves. Sometimes we do have to directly confront others with some of this. We can’t free ourselves by working in the comfort of our cozy schizoid shells. Sometimes the demon we need to confront is really an agent of beauty or love, but the pain of the loss of the real is often a demon to us.
At some point, I decided to become an experiment in my own life – to take the lab rat out for a spin and see just what was really under the hood.
The best wine
needs the secret ingredient
Those demanding to know
the finished product
don’t add the mystery
Put yourself in a bottle
pull the cork in tightly
Let the dust gather
as the mystery
unlocks the treasure
When time is ripe
life will pull the cork
And you
can taste the wonder
and mystery of you
On & On
And that is where I try to focus my attention when I’m looking at you.
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