Heart Separation

For the average person, the heart space is a place where your intentions align with your actions. The behaviors which are inspired by the heart space convey authenticity, identity, and active ownership of one’s soul. Heart energy interweaves the consciousness of your sense of self and the consciousness of how you’re coming off. Heart energy syncs these forms of consciousness so that there is no dissonance between them.

Core 8’s are unconsciously blocking their heart. It is the trade of their hexad mechanism. To offer the strategy of forcing existence, they sacrifice the tenderest layer of their existence. The heart space.

Body Expansion

Imagine your task is to cut down your opponent without them getting away. What would you do. If you’re an 8, you gauge the room. You gauge yourself. You gauge your opponent. You sense the opportunity to cut them down to the ground. You take actions to be in the position that promises the next devastating win. Without any hesitation, without any remorse, your weapon of choice is already straight through the other side of your opponent. You merge with your momentum and just as quickly as the last motion, you are already aware of your next killing point. In a rigid motion once again, your weapon rips its way to the next location and you keep your mind as focused as possible on the goal ahead. Nothing can possibly get in your way.

This cycle never ends. You are a warrior. This is how you were born, and this is how you will die. You understand this and you have no issues with it. You identify with this, and so your heart space is replaced with anti-tenderness. As an assertive type, you are already unemotional. You already ignore that. What you want is to target your next location and arrive there as fast as possible. In the body center this looks like asserting boundaries with an intense need for exact placement. “YOU move right now, right here. No questions.” This also applies to self. 8 is not going to bend its plan just to accommodate inner weakness no matter where it is coming from.

Assertive Scramble

The scramble of 8’s hexad involves the body and head space. This means that decisions for 8 are informed from activity in both their body and head centers. However, since 8 is not a head type, it is not using the head space to an optimized capacity. This shows up in the way that when they are pressed to prove what they are arguing they will sometimes overly default to “It just is true. Why would you need so much proof to understand that!” This doesn’t mean their head center is always less than visible, it just means the head center is subjugated as support for their body center and is only optionally a leg that they can stand on.

Of all the assertive types in the enneagram, 8 as a body type is unique in that it is an actual assassin of the heart realm. 3 and 7 are ignoring components of the heart center by default of being assertive types. But 8 has something else in mind than enabling a constipated heart center. 8 has an affinity for obliterating the mother of your own heart and fathering a strict harshness. 8 actively enforces an absence of vulnerability.

The heart center will never be a subjugation for 8. However, with growth, an 8 can access their heart center and factor in its contents to make their plans less destructive on their reputations. 8s are still humans. They know that they look shitty in the eyes of other people after they’ve just heartlessly reacted with violence towards someone who they think has slighted them. But there is numbness here as a result of their heartless strategy. It’s a lot like seeing red and not having enough access to empathy to think the room is anything but a battlefield. Our sense of humanity is not gone. It is just compromised. We can either be warriors who protect the village folk, or we can be savages who have lost their way back.

Rejection Offering

As a rejection type, you are also inflexible. You have one goal and one way of delivering it. Since this is the body space, it must also be lead in reality by YOU. To be led by someone else feels like a violation to your free will. Other people don’t know what is required to keep the momentum up which 8 lives on. When there is no action momentum, 8 thinks something is wrong. So, they must always offer a way forward. Next time you are around a core 8, try noticing what I am about to say. Make someone in charge of them. Observe how they feel about it. How do they cope with it? Perhaps they will try to make the situation into some sort of really powerful forward moving arrangement. “I know you’re going to make me grow A LOT. Thank you for being so incredible.” They may say things like this to keep the other person in the mindset of strictly forward moving momentum. But if the person in charge of them has already proven that they suck ass, they will let them know or someone know. This is unacceptable for 8. We are neurotic about maintaining positive body space acceleration.

Against other rejection types in the enneagram, 8 is the most complete in its process of cutting the object (the world) off. 8 can treat themselves as if they are not worth as much as the theory of a whole person, and neither is anyone else. All that exists is radicals, a bare element in an indesputable phenomenon, and are always in service to the boundaries enforced by reality. 8 thinks we are all JUST the force of gravity in the human form.

Reactive Head Subjugation

Object Relations happen before any of the other Triads. So, Reactivity comes after a rejection for 8's. Rejections occur less frequently than attachments do because the rejection cycle is longer than an attachment cycle. Attachment cycles occur more on a second by second basis - what is said in one sentence is attached to in the next. With Rejection, each rejection is like a promise which is expected to last a very long time. There is more activity around each Rejection, but only then. Therefore, 8 can appear less reactive than 6's until 8's are activated by a rejection. There is also more repetitive re-stating with rejection, so 8 reacts the strongest when terms and conditions are broken. The more shaky terms and conditions seem, the more reactive 8 will get to reinforce them. But when terms and conditions are solid, 8 is more chill than anyone else in the room.

As a reactive type, you don’t have enough units of anything to be in opposition to an 8. Although calm on the surface, we are 7000 feet tall in our twitch speed. We are 1000 years old and ripping our way out of the womb as we speak. Energy is either stagnant or at its kinetic potential and this applies to the entire room the 8 is commanding sometimes with presence alone. We are the most time rippling reactive type because of the width and length of the wavelengths of our influence in the physical world. 8 and 6 are often confused with one another due to the loud and war-like nature of 6 in its active/counterphobic state. If 8 is like the wide orbit of Saturn, reaching a deep hum that rumbles in all fields of existence, 6 is like the short orbit of the moon cycling the earth. The reflection of the sun on the moon is like the superego quality of 6, a constant reminder that you are the next building block of life to come out of the existence of the greatest source of stability your planet will stand on in its own lifetime. The phases of the moon being the reactive attachment style of 6, that is why 6 never misses a beat of its journey to the ultimate but never truly existing loyalty. You can probably see how this breaks from the actual patterns of 8. With 8, there is no loyalty, but there is a harsh rejection of emotional nurturance which presents as an adherence to the harshest and driest realities of our existence. This adherence is an not attachment but a rejection of a function. 8 is the product of existing rejected.

Rejection is a fundamental process that will never end until the 8 itself is put to an end.

8 Fix

When it comes to having an 8 fix rather than an 8 core, you will see quite a different pattern. 8 as a fix is acting more as a guest in their psychology. However, even as a guest, it can be quite a terrorizer to those around the 8 fixer. The 8 fixer may feel more of a sense that people who make them use their 8 fix are crossing their boundaries. It is as if they have awareness that the 8 fix makes them look bad, as is not the case for 8 core. Even as a fix and LAST, 8 is always loud. There is something all-consuming about the nature of 8. Like cancer or a virus, 8 is going to take up so much space it chokes and kills you.

8w9

A dragon flys at 700 miles per hour through the atmosphere and leaves the energy of your body bracing the ground as you aren't sure if you've lost your balance. You're not certain if you're seeing something or if it's really real. The air hurts and you can't explain it any other way; there is something in the air and it's bigger than a shark. How could this be possible? Even sharks are easy to see from a distance but this is much closer yet you are not the only person confused. By the blinking motion of your eyes, the room imbalances and all the newly free energy is gripped with impressive strength by the 8w9. Like the roar of a T-Rex, you suddenly realize you're in Jurassic park and that you took 4x the normal dose of MDMA. This is NOT what you expected, but it's everything you'd never wish on your worst enemy. Did I mention you're in bed with your core 8 husband?

8w7

A piercing loud laugh amplifies across the room. In the shallowest seat anyone can find sits a 5 ft tall Chihuahua staring at you with two nefariously black eyes. You notice an alarm in your brain as they bark into the air, emitting a signal that wafts a warpath of cumulonimbus clouds to nearby locations. You don't know if you took several doses of Mary Lydia's mushrooms before leaving your house or if you're just about to die of an 8w7.