Enneagram 5
by Sofie, nota5, just a 5 fix
Type 5 is another mystified mistype one will encounter in disproportionally large numbers in online communities, but very rarely in real life. Not because 5s live on the internet, but because few actually understand what 5 is, yet identify with being withdrawn, brain-smart, socially inept and ingenious. Only the withdrawn part is a structural fact about ennea 5, so let’s get into the components that identify 5 rather than traits you may or not may relate to. Sorry, Redditors.
Head Center
5s are head types overidentified with their center - they do too much thinking to navigate the head triad’s fear.
6, in contrast, is disconnected from and ungrounded in the head center, whereas 7 is underdoing the thinking part, spurting thoughts into actions instead (assertive scramble).
5s don’t do well with action anything. They are fundamentally cut off from the gut center as withdrawn types - scrambling thoughts with emotions. What that means is that they seek emotional resonance from their thoughts, only when the heart center feels pulled into a discovery they will rest and declare a thought into a truth.
5s, as all competency types, have the heart enslaved to their core center. The heart is whipped to make value judgements that confirm the first center’s sensation - the consequence is a heart that doesn’t move freely, it is a tool for the core center’s endeavours. Competency types (1/3/5) have a tendency to overlook the heart’s impact and how they puppeteer it around - they see themselves as more emotionally neutral than they are.
The Withdrawn Scramble of Head & Heart and a necessary excursion into Object Relations
The three scrambles (heart + head center for withdrawns, heart + gut for superego types and head + gut for assertive types) arise from which - or both - Object Relation(s) the type regards as problematic and incapable of fulfilling their needs.
There are two object relations (OR): The guidance function and the nurturing function. Superego types (1/2/6) have a problem with receiving guidance and are all structurally separated from the head center, in which guidance is found, which makes them feel-doers. Assertive types have (3/7/8) a problem with receiving nurturing and are therefore structurally separate from the heart center, which makes them think-doers. Withdrawn types have a problem with both OR, so they have no non-problematic function left to get their needs met in reality - they have to go inwards to have their expectations met, which makes them feel-thinkers.
How the scrambles deal with their unfulfilled needs is through their object relational stance:
Attachment types (3/6/9) adapt their strategies to replace the lack of grounding in their lost center, which is also their core center, outside of themselves. 3s adapt their hearts and values to find nurturing, 6s adapt their beliefs to find grounding in guidance through an external force. 9s are withdrawn, so they go inwards to mull over their lack of nurturing and guidance in the world, perpetually misunderstood and unseen. But the obligation to fix their needs is always being put upon themselves for attachment types.
Frustration types (1/4/7) self-parent that need - 1s self-parent their lack of guidance and head center and become their ultimate godly structure; 4s self-parent their lack of guidance & nurturing and withdraw to find it internally (never in the outside); 7s self-parent the lack of heart center and overnurture themselves.
Rejection types (2/5/8) reject that they have needs stemming from their problematic OR in the first place, and overdo the non-problematic function instead. 2s reject a need for guidance and head center, and overdo nurturing. 8s reject a need for nurturing and heart center and overdo guidance. 5s, having no unproblematic OR, reject having a need for nurturing and guidance in the outside. They rely only upon themselves, locked in their head center.
The ‘double trouble’ with both OR is what makes 4/5/9 withdrawn. The consequence is a lack of gut center access, a separated body. No gut, no self-actualisation. No life juice. Reality blows. Expectation vs. Reality is an unsolvable rupture for all withdrawn types. Everything was better imagined. Often, actualisation isn't even important. The planning stage is where withdrawns feel fire and warmth, guidance and nurturing. Perpetual internal refinement (4), problem-solving (5), dreaming (9). Once a problem, a need has been tackled internally, why actualise it? There's no juice in it. The juice was solving it internally.
Back to the 5.
To summarise what you just read and what may have been too dense for your Chestnut-soaked brain, here are the structural elements in brief words again:
5s are head types that overdo thinking by pushing deeper into themselves until an emotional value judgement through the heart center has been made. They overdo thinking because thinking is rarely actualised due to the separation of the gut.
5s are withdrawn heart-head scramblers or ‘feeling heads,’ having a double problem with nurturing and guidance, needing to go inwards to find satisfaction.
Their object relational compensation strategy is rejection of having those needs in the first place. ‘I don’t need guidance from the world, I don’t need nurturing from the world.’
5s are competency types, and as such they have enslaved their secondary heart center to obey the head’s commands.
Almost everything about the enneagram can be unearthed from looking at these structural elements and their intersections:
The core center and secondary ‘scrambled center’ which dictates the Harmonics (competency enslaves the heart to solve problems, positive enslaves gut to find a silver lining, reactive enslaves the head to find truth)
The Object Relational Strategy to cope with unfulfilled nurturing/guidance (adapting, self-parenting or rejecting the deprivation)
See how clean the Enneagram is? So satisfying. You don’t need traits. This is a 5 trait, if you will, to strip down the excess to focus on the bones, the skeleton.
The skeleton of 5 is a head type that seeks competency, and therefore scrambles in the heart (the primary or triangle types are somewhat of an exception, but not really - read the article on our precious scrambled eggs to understand their two modes and how their separated center is also their subjugated one). However, the consequence as per law of three is that for a type using head + heart, the missing center piece is the gut, hence the type is withdrawn. The origin of being withdrawn is a double issue with both object relations.
How neat.
Now we can briefly talk about virtue, vice and lines of connection.
Virtue: Non-Attachment
I have clarified enough that 5s aren’t attached by the definition of OR, so don’t be confused by the wording here. The virtue is a quality we can strive for through inner work, by identifying our patterns and integration of the invisible force - the gut center for type 5.
Non-attachment as the spectral opposite of 5’s vice or passion - avarice - is a letting go of the self-withholding. It is a state of allowance for the 5’s rejection offerings to emerge from their withdrawn scramble, when 5 stops clutching their pearls to compensate for their deprivation of needs from reality. All 5s have are their minds, and to integrate their separated bodies, to truly participate in life, they have to actualise without fear of their autonomy being compromised. They have to unattach from their self-belief that only their feeling heads can uncover truth, they need to loosen the grip of their scramble.
Vice: Avarice
The vice or passion of 5 is avarice - not a material greed, but a withholding of self. Stingy or plainly unable to share themselves outside of their interest. The core root of avarice is a feeling of being incapable, which sounds opposite to competency - but this is exactly why they’re doing all in their power to be competent, to mask a profound existential dread of being unfit to withstand the world. All they have to cope with it are their minds, so 5s will offer to themselves the competency of their insight. They are able to focus deeply on a subject that fascinates them because they’re neglecting (=rejecting) all that is outside of this, especially their own gut force and power. They’re very curious, independent thinkers, and they do not need their theories to be proven or be embraced with consensus. Competency and rejection in the head space makes for an unattached mind that enjoys testing, playing around and experimenting with wisdom commonly established (especially with w6).
The tragedy of avarice is that only through their scramble they find power. This is how they miss the invisible force. True power is three-dimensionality, is facing reality.
Lines of (Dis-)Integration: 7 & 8
When our core center strategies don’t pay off to meet our archaic instintual needs, we disintegrate into our lines of connection. For 5s, the lines are 7 and 8.
If you look at 5’s position on the Enneagram, they are deep down in the pit, underneath the ‘worldly’ surface line of 6—3. Their lines are going upwards to type 7 and 8, both assertive types who are heart suppressed think-doers. If 5 gets challenged, they may disperse into the frantic, fractal and irregular thinking of 7 and the power-seeking phallic gut force of 8. I am of the belief that we don’t just ‘freely borrow’ from lines to diversify our core strategies, but that when disintegration happens, we are torn between the tension of these two forces, our type tortured on the rack. There is no control over how we access these lines, and the disintegration happens in both directions simultaneously. There is no grace in lines, no measure. For 5, what happens in disintegration is the suppression of heart, substituted with gut. But without heart, 5 cannot discern what’s valuable or potent, they become a full machine.
Articles on lines follow later, check for updates or join the Discord brewery.
The structural components described for simpletons, again:
Rejection/Power Type OR - making an offering that’s thought-based, allowing themselves to exist only through their area of expertise, rejecting their gut power and most worldly indulgences, easy to cut off distractions in the form of thoughts, life requirements or personal connections - seeking power through intense mental focus and mastery, if they know all that is to know they will have power to exist and beat life, wanting to possess your mental space by forcing their intellectual findings on you (their way of connecting is through updating/reprogramming your mind)
Competency Harmonic - subjugated heart center, results oriented, underidentified with the heart yet using it to validate their core head, finding a perspective that will solve the problem (read about triads from core 5w6 Mads here)
Withdrawn - forgotten/neglected gut center, unfit to exist in reality, locked into their center and unable to engage outside of it, turning away from the world to meet their needs internally as the world can’t meet them, physical reality feels less real than their internal world
5w4
- Curiosity combined with a desire for a unique, personal vision
- Mentally creative loner type, more inaccessible than 5w6
- Double withdrawn core, no surface touch
- More negative and intuitive than 5w6, less cerebral
- Potentially interested in more macabre or dark themes than 5w6
- Profoundly dysfunctional in reality
5w6
- Mentally strategic, methodical, discerning experts
- Double head core with attachment wing, checking in with what’s been established in their field of expertise
- More quirky, nerdy and high-strung than 5w4
- More challenging than 5w4, need to prove or explain themselves
- Not afraid of dense, dry, scientific information seeking
- Specified robots
On Type 5 (by Silicon Lifeform, 5w4)
5s don't have enough life force to live - they are energetically impoverished.
The price of just living, maintaining their bodies and interacting with others and so on is just too much. They are frail and escape the fact that they are in 'matter poverty' with VR. They escape it all into thinking, that's how they *can* exist.
There is not a 'goal' for what they are doing with the thinking - rather it’s the plane of reality were they are able to exist. They have this feeling of lacking inner instinctual resources, and so are stingy with their limited energy - easily overwhelmed. Can't easily access their gut center to be embodied - and so try to withdraw and observe life, replacing living or real interaction with learning and knowledge. They can’t exist too much and are cut off from accessing their emotions. Everything wants to much from them. Fragile means easily threatened, I think reality in general is threatening to 5s.
5 is overidentified with thinking, meaning they are locked into it - always needing to simulate more thoughts - out of touch with silent mind. Riso mapped them as the ‚active' force in the law of three of the thinking center. Meaning they are 'overdoing' thinking; the most mentally intense type. This distortion means they think rather than do; life as an observer, self imposed virtual reality frameworks over existing.
They are doing their gut and feeling center 'inappropriately' through their mental center. The resources to engage in real gut center stuff just don't seem to be there, they must see themselves as energetically depleted. Neurotic boundaries and every request is an automatic 'no' because everything is costing them 'lifeforce' money, and they are impoverished. They strip down their lives to a minimum in terms of physical existence, it is seen as a secondary life to their mental one (undervalued).
All that energy is re-routed to overclock their brains. If you imagine their head centers as their dominant instinct, and the gut center as their blindspot - imagine they are doing their gut center inappropriately through their mental center, like a social dom might do sx inappropriately though social.
Fives are the overexpressers of the head triad. The most mentally intense, neglecting everything else. While the five has feeling infecting the underside of their thinking, they are totally *unaware* of this (this is related to their line to 8; who also is blind to their heart - fives can be unaware of how they can come off as a bit bullyish/aggressive sometimes). So they are only aware of the center directly in their sight (the sevens thinking center is annoyingly visable just behind their gut center - frustrating that it can't just be head 'nothing can ever be just right'). Fives do not need to have this movement mixed in, they are totally out of touch with their gut center - and so will be playing the long game with concepts, completely thinking through all the ramifications
The kind of fragility I am thinking of for example with 5s can come out sometimes as this intellectual arrogance, or putting down others for example in an academic field who question their theory etc. They can be unaware of how much emotion is fueling the cerebral debates they are engaging in (which they think are totally stoic/objective in). 5s are so identified with being their ideas, that a threat to their concepts can be a threat them/their ego - and can mean they will not take that criticism objectively - instead immediately start building a counter weapon (without fully evaluating the merit of the critic). At this point the 5 has lost insight or perspective of the thinking center and are warping things to protect their fragile ego. This is one reason 5s get so complex and ivory tower - there is less people to threaten your ideas/you then. But also, they can then sort of hide behind convoluted language and claim that the perceived attacker 'just doesn’t get it' as a defense. An aggressive elitism, intellectually controlling and an emotional immaturity or lack of self awareness of their own scrambled heart center- underside of their thinking being 'infected' with feeling their ideas being so tied up with their heart center sense of value inappropriately.
Just speculating with theory, but 9, 4 and 5 all share the withdrawn structure. What that means is that their thinking and feeling centers have become mixed together in an 'inappropriate' way, and their gut center is 'missing' or "offline.’
The gut center is ‚forgotten about' or paid little attention with 4 and 5 since they are not gut types and so not identified with this 'missing' center. But with 9 since they are a gut type, they are identified with this missing center, and so the relationship is different.
The reason why these types could be hypersensitive to the overwhelming environment is because the gut center represents in some way existing in the material plane or being embodied. Interacting with existence in this reality, moving in the world, actualizing. Generating energy; the physical body as an engine or somatic machine which uses force to enact its individual agenda. If the ego is ignoring this aspect of self, that would necessitate that when waves of physical reality do come crashing it must in some way reject or turn away from these (withdraw).
Reality, physical environment, situations that require forceful agenda, boundaries etc are 'overwhelming' precisely because they don't fit into the ego structure of these types. If accepted and integrated, then what it means to be a 4, 5 or 9 would be threatened.
