Enneagram Two, or The Roots of Ambivalence

Some souvenirs from a short but intense excursion into the land of the Two – an exciting although absolutely exhausting journey!

Generally speaking, children evolve as Twos  if, in their strive for affection, they learn that the key to being loved is being helpful. This happens when their environment – parents and other caregivers – consistently sends the message : “you are loved when you are helpful, caring and self-sacrificing”, and “you are not loved when you request something, do not share or refuse to help”.

Receiving such a message (verbal or non-verbal), little Twos develop an immense helpfulness which goes along with the denial of their own needs. These needs themselves do not go away, though – realities are not changed by repressing them. But as the Twos fear that stating their needs / desires will deprive them of love (parental first, later on that of their partners), and on the other hand the needs in question still have to be satisfied, they learn to hide these needs behind the needs of other people, because the latter are perceived to be more powerful arguments than their own (thanks mum and dad!).

Example: a Two who wants to go to a party will argue by saying :  “They really want me to come, I cannot possibly refuse!”. If, on the contrary, she does not want to go, that would become : “Sorry I cannot come, my father wants me to help him with his computer”. Thus, her own desire is “clothed” in the needs/wishes of others. If parents and other significant adults encourage this strategy, the little Twos will learn for life that in order to do what they really want, they must find the reason and justification in others. In doing so, the Twos may completely discharge themselves of all responsibility over their own wishes – “they want me to” becomes a leitmotiv of their lives, so that whatever they are doing, they are doing it “because someone else wants them to”. If a Two is intellectual enough, “they” may be replaced by any kind of abstract imperative, such as the Christian ideal of selfless love; anything at all, in fact, provided it enables Twos to avoid stating their wishes clearly.

Many conflicts with an average or disintegrating Two arise because the partner fails to perceive the ambivalent nature of Two’s verbal communication. Typically, a Two will say, “I am not coming because you will certainly be tired after work”, while in reality he just has his own reasons for not coming (often he would project his own problem on his partner – this is a clue to the real reason, by the way). Unable to state these reasons clearly because of the fear to be perceived as selfish, and remembering that being selfish is punished by withdrawal of love, a Two will hand you over the responsibility for the decision not to come (“it’s not me! It’s you!”).

If you take his statement literally, and honestly say that actually you do not feel tired at all, the Two will be frustrated and may become aggressive, because his real need – that of staying home – is not being perceived, and he is faced with the necessity to find another “selfless” pretext to satisfy it. If, on the contrary, you decode correctly the real need that he is trying to hide, and abound in his sense, the Two feels reassured and may relax, as he follows the pattern that proved to be successful in the past. The worst thing you can do is to ask a Two what he really wants – because she feels that to be direct is to take the risk of being punished by the withdrawal of love. To avoid this, she will say “I do not know!” and wrap up the conversation, leaving the voiceless partner wondering what the heck is going on.

Of course this mechanism is unconscious, so it would be wrong and unfair to picture the Twos as cold and cruel manipulators seeking to appear selfless while they are in fact selfish. The trouble is, the Two perceive the very fact of having desires as “selfish”. Therefore they pursue a totally fantastic ideal whereby un-selfishness equals not having needs. Their ambivalent communication, their inability to come up with a direct statement of their wishes comes from a deep-seated insecurity, from a terrible fragility that begs compassion and understanding. No “shoulds” and “oughts” can heal this fragility – only love that chases away fear is able to pass across the special message to the Two: you are loved for who you really are, what you want is essential to your identity and will never be punished by withdrawal of love. 

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, 

your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Let me say it in calm, poised, less violent words. Two things stand out for me distinctly against the darkness of the Good Friday this year.

The Body of Christ : a living reality, a vital organic unity we all participate in. The balance, the homeostasis of this unity is maintained by all its members. So closely knit we are, so essential we all are to the life of the whole, so vital is the exchange of love between us, that when one of us goes, when one tiny member of this Body is taken out -- the whole Body is shattered, the whole Body is crippled and wounded, and Christ Himself is trembling in pain. 

Each and every individual death is a wound to the Body, and an offense to its members. When it befalls those we know and love, we take on the shock, absorb the wave, grieve, and bear the scar; we stand in the frontline, we are the adjacent cells suffering from a brutal removal of the flesh that, we feel, is our own flesh. And so we must, for we are in Christ -- we are allowed to bear a little. But it is no different when death takes people we do not know; their own adjacent cells then absorb the shock, so that the wave of pain doesn't reach us. The wound is nevertheless inflicted to you and me, members of Christ's Body. This happens everywhere, every moment - here and now; we are just spared the feeling of loss, for we cannot bear it all. 

All days are Good Friday. There is no such thing as death or grief that are none of my business. 

Another thought comes from Gethsemany and feet-washing. God's love has no other way to reach the world than through you and me. Through us and in us He loves, and His own very life we carry when we let it happen in our hearts and minds. No Kingdom is possible unless there are people who desire the Kingdom and let it be brought down here -- now and then, little by little, one piece after another, smuggling it in whenever possible. No matter how weak and inadequate, no matter how totally irrelevant we might feel  -- we must forget it all for a while, and let God give, care, help, serve through us;  and sometimes, us!  We have to, simply because there is nobody else to do the job: He has only our hearts and minds, our voices and our hands to make overflow the fountain of His life. 

God's love is running in Christ's blood, like grief is running in mine, and the transfusion is slowly taking place. To be fully human means holding in our hearts both the tragedy of life and the fountain of love; allowing both the sore grief for what is irreversibly lost, and an overflowing gratitude for what is so generously given. 

Unconditional Love

It's not even what exactly he says, it's the way he says it: the experience we are only blindly looking for is there, don't you sense?

And Rumi's line came in today too : "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".

Broken Patterns, Whole Hearts

Perhaps we deserve a cheerful bit too, after all this gloomy plodding by the damp and wintery valleys of death. Although it often feels “not very well”, as a routinely understating Englishman would say, we do acquire some experimental knowledge of our real self too.

First, the real self is extremely difficult to offend, and impossible to destroy. Actually, what feels anger, guilt, fear, what feels hurt, unworthy, rejected, abandoned, fragile is the inner infant, because it knows no modus operandi beyond satisfaction/frustration dilemma. But the soul is all-inclusive, capable of integrating all contradictions; this is its greatest strength.

I am not saying that the suffering caused by the false self is imaginary – bloody really painful it is, if you ask me. Nor am I saying that we “mustn’t” feel these things – this is meaningless, because we can’t help it anyway. People who try end up in asylums with some unclear diagnosis… What I mean is that to feel (=hurt, abandoned, rejected) and to be (= idem) are very different things.

Nobody can avoid feeling hurt: you can't choose not to feel pain when you receive a blow, you just do that’s all. But being hurt is more than that : it is acting out of this feeling; nursing and cultivating the wound; responding with a blow or tears, or both; responding in a destructive way, be it directed against others or against yourself. And this is a choice indeed that we do have, although we can not see it if we identify too closely with our feelings, and rely too much on the acquired automatisms.

This is why no loving heart can ever be broken, in fact. Your false self may convulse and crack; your soul will be only watching it go into pieces. The real self can stand any blow, and does not need nor want any defence. It is just standing there in the open, just “being there”, holding the inner infant in a compassionate embrace, and waiting for him to pass.

That You Know

Building around the simple English verb "fall"... Feel totally obsessed by the melody, was almost whistling it in the middle of the St George's Mass this morning :). 

The dynamics of Falling Upwards II : The Valley of Death, routinely

And all shall be well and 

All manner of thing shall be well 

By the purification of the motive 

In the ground of our beseeching.

  T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

The false self has no reality of its own, because it is not rooted in God, but in our fallen human condition. Yet it feels awfully, acutely, sorely real. In fact, for most of our lives we have no idea of any other self than these acquired defence mechanisms and survival strategies. They define and circumscribe our horizon, they literally form our universe; they do feel like being “me”. 

From early childhood on, we learn to walk within limits set by the false self, thinking that they are all that exists. We learn to settle on little shaky comfort that the choice of a successful strategy offers, and under pressure of fear and guilt accept to be less than ourselves – our real glorious selves designed and created by God in love. People around us also think that this is all that exists, so everybody is happy - as long as we accept their parasite patterns too. This is no more than a collective hallucination, but we have absolutely no way to know it unless a disaster, a crisis, a heavenly vision challenge us.

This is why the encounter with our real self, if it ever happens, feels first like loss and deprivation, like an impossible bid  – we are indeed being torn apart from the only guide we have ever known, the only “I” we have ever called “I”, and often alienated from "public opinion" too. Total fog all around, and only an obscure intuition, a feeling, a whisper of inner voice to orientate you... The paralytic summoned by Jesus to walk was probably feeling exactly this : a blind helplessness at being asked to do something for which he had no functional ability, something clearly impossible in his situation. No wonder it feels like an agony. St Paul often calls the false self “flesh”; and he repeats it again and again: if ever we are to live in God, “flesh must die”. 

So that's what we all do, here falling: "die to sin", as our so cheerful St Paul puts it, and there is no way it feels nice and agreeable. Dear self dies hard: it will hurt and bleed, will send upon you fogs and fears - especially fears related to the imaginary dangers, - and your inner infant will wail and cry and beg to be spared. Yet you know why you keep going through these painful metamorphoses, stumbling at every step: because authentic love is only possible between real selves, free from all compulsion; and love is in fact the only objective reality that is worthy of our heavenly souls.

Sister Wendy Beckett on Love

This subject has been exercising my mind greatly and I have been dipping into a little book I have called 'Sister Wendy Beckett's Meditations on Love'. If you don't know her, she is an 82 year old contemplative nun who lives in a hermitage in Norfolk and became a 'consecrated virgin' (brave soul) in, I think, her 60s. She has a 1st class honours degree from Oxford in English literature and allows herself two hours of work per day on contemplating the many meanings to be extracted from art works. Yesterday's meditation, on Gainsborough's 'Chasing the Butterfly' spoke powerfully to me. I'll try to find an illustration to post here before you read her thoughts.


'Parental love is potentially its purest form, and may be the most painful. Gainsborough, whose marriage was unhappy, adored his two daughters, whom he called Molly and the Captain. Their mother's flawed psyche was inherited by both girls and their father agonised over them all his life. Neither was to know happiness, and his many pictures of them show a sad foreknowledge of this. To leave those we love their independence, to accept that we cannot make their choices for them, that they cannot live by our own hard-earned experience: this is part of love. We have to allow those dear to us to chase the butterfly, however convinced we are that it is uncatchable. We can never give the butterfly of happiness to another: each must catch it alone. For some, it will be ever elusive, and love must work within that painful understanding.'