Childhood

To describe the childhood of those who identify with the Social 5, I offer my autobiography (Sergio Veleda), as a representative of this character. It highlights elements common to the biographies of this subtype, and this experience will allow us not only to understand but also to empathize with the lives of children who will embody this character.

It is common from the beginning to have an intrusive and controlling mother, who sometimes appears authoritarian, as in the following pages. At other times, her control is exerted from the position of someone who feels superior or has unquestionable motives and guidelines for the good "education of the child." Often, she is an emotionally unstable woman. This intense emotionality and invasiveness cause the child to retreat into their inner armor, in a constant state of alarm and persecution.

In most cases, there are emotionally absent parents, perhaps overly involved in social life. The child lives with an unreachable father, sometimes seeing him as an important gentleman with whom they wish to identify but find hard to surpass. This importance is not necessarily associated with a great "hero." Sometimes, this socially relevant father is also a dark, morally unacceptable person, which leads the child to desire a place of "purity and moral elevation."

In any case, status is important for the family of a Social 5, and the child is seen in the "contradiction" between withdrawing to defend themselves from invasion and exposing themselves socially to satisfy the family mandate. The future Social 5 child receives projections of greatness that clash with their need for isolation.

The way out they find is to occupy a place in the world where they can idealize the recognition of their intellect and knowledge, aspiring to teach the world something extraordinary without getting involved in relationships.

Autobiography: Sergio Veleda, A Social 5

I was the first child in a family with five siblings, a Sexual E4 mother, and a Social E8 father. During my early childhood, I grew up being admired, praised, and loved, but I always received a lot of family interference and pressure. In adolescence, I began to be severely demanded. Everyone expected me to be a good example of behavior and conduct for my siblings. I was supposed to always be a good boy, socially acceptable, and, above all, intelligent. For my father, a political activist and free thinker, intelligence was a supreme value.

My family environment was always filled with strong anxiety. On one hand, there was my mother's compulsive, intrusive, authoritarian, and demanding behavior. She was a martyr who struggled to take care of her children, doing so with complaints and inculcations. I was unexpectedly punished for trivial things, leaving me confused about the reasons behind the punishments. The future socially active child received projections of greatness that clashed with their need for isolation.

The way I found out was to occupy a place in the world where I could idealize the recognition of my intellect and knowledge, aspiring to teach the world something extraordinary without getting involved in relationships.

My Mother’s Bipolarity and My Father’s Idealism

My mother always exhibited signs of bipolarity, with an evident borderline personality disorder. From my father, I received idealistic demands; he expected intelligence and intellectual capacity from me. In this way, he said, I could become socially important in the small town where we lived and perhaps become a leader, like him, in the future.

I remember when I was very young, seeing the large billboards that dotted the streets, sitting in the barbershop with my father and other men, reading and commenting on the news in the press. I felt important to them. My image was that of a child with intelligence beyond my age and a precocious curiosity about letters and information. I liked to know things.

Later, I understood that this assessment from my father and the men in the barbershop shaped my vanity and my need to be important for what I think and know. This vain desire to be is both a defense against being in the world and a resource to compensate for the fear of not knowing. Knowledge became more important than having money, clothes, objects, or social status; these things became secondary.

The Oppressive Influence of My Mother

My mother, hysterical and agitated, constantly invaded my space, controlling me through countless attacks, disrespect, and a series of commands, one after another. I felt suffocated by that river of despair that poured over me. I was heavily intoxicated by her psychic load, by all those shouts and abrupt gestures of my childhood and adolescence. I felt like the fruit of a tormented womb. I think that even in the womb, I developed an intense fear of being violated and destroyed. I became shy and evasive, reacting to a very primitive fear born in that cold and hostile womb where I was conceived.

In the homes where I lived with my original family, I never had my own room. My problems with lack of privacy worsened and marked my character. My mother and four siblings’ invasion intensified my need for seclusion.

A Strategy for Survival

Since early on, I clung to objects and thoughts. I developed a fertile imagination (where I withdrew) to conserve, maintain, and control my little universe. It was a small world that I needed to protect, because through it I could disconnect from everything around me. It was a strategy of escape and survival in the face of the violence and invasion I suffered.

In the second house we lived in, I began sleeping in a room with the other two children of the family. We were three brothers and two sisters. In the boys' room, the door was always supposed to be open. No one knocked or asked for permission to enter, not even my mother. I felt not only invaded but deeply offended and exposed. I had no right to privacy in that environment of physical and moral violence.

The Duality of My Father

My father was affectionate but sanguine, vehement, and extravagant. He was the leader of the railroad workers in the region where we lived. He fought for social causes and helped

the poor, even taking what we had at home to give to the needy on the street. He was a conflicted, fearless, and confident politician. Along with his friends, he was persecuted during the dictatorship. He had a spontaneous and natural view of justice. He drank and gambled in underground houses, putting our money at risk. I remember one morning, waking up to my mother crying while my younger siblings slept. My mother, the victim and dramatic one, broke into tears because my father hadn’t returned home and had spent the money. That night, he took my hand, and we both went out into the empty darkness in search of my father, that Dionysian man I loved and feared.

Unlike the fear my mother caused me with her direct and blatant violence, with my father, I felt the burden of implicit and indirect violence, always present in his intense temperament. He never hit me, but his eyes were as strong as lightning; they controlled me. They were large and always seemed bloodshot. Afraid of his authority, I feared his eyes, two burning spears that pierced mine. For a long time, I couldn’t look people directly in the eyes. My father emasculated my vision with the strength of his magnetism, making me shy and introspective.

Unlike my mother, my father had a noble soul. He was a great idealist, with a humanitarian heart. He was a mahatma, a "great soul" in Sanskrit. The one who punished me greatly was my mother, who oppressed me. Sometimes, she gave me aggressive sermons, but many other times, she would lose control and begin to hit me. I remember very painful moments when I would go into the shower and beat myself hard while the water ran over my skin. I had marks all over my body and felt so much shame. These two very strong people, my father and my mother, had authoritarian and patriarchal profiles, and I felt completely crushed. When I was ten years old, I decided to retire; I started walking in silence, without making any noise, and found a refuge within myself.

Living Without Privacy and Constant Invasion

The life inside the house, with my four siblings, without any personal space, and suffering from continuous maternal violence, was quite invasive. In my mother’s presence, I felt trapped and without space. It wasn’t just the lack of physical space; the psychological space was also invaded with disrespect. There was no freedom at all. When I stayed silent because I didn’t know what to say and she insisted on knowing something about me, she would accuse me, saying I was hiding something, "like liars do."

The claustrophobic oppression I felt with my mother would later lead me to develop a rebellion against her authority and all the other authorities I encountered in my life.

A Life of Criticism and Rebellion

I confronted authority head-on but always dismantled it with my judgments. The tendency was to place myself on the margins, especially in situations where others venerated something or someone.

I became highly critical, invalidating everything around me. As the years went by, I built a nihilistic view, not trusting people, denying the value of things, believing that nothing really mattered in this life. So, I began searching for something beyond the absurdity of all this. This led me to an interest in reading, which took me far, to another world. It was like exile, an escape from everything around me.

A Search for Meaning and an Escape

I recognize my story as that of a Social 5, but I never fully valued my "totems." I always sought what was above them, beyond them, thus creating a continuous dynamic of "totemization and distotemization." I always sought what would be beyond what I myself idealized. I understand that this was a way I found to deconstruct the idealized world of my father and the rigid world of my mother. To survive in this context, my escape in childhood and adolescence was to value only the world beyond this world. It could even exist in this world, but it needed to be invisible to the eyes. I was always interested in what is not seen, what is not evident. I became that myself: someone hidden, with the desire to be indecipherable.

As I grew older and later as an adult, the rebellion against authority, limitations, and orders became more and more evident. As a child, I withdrew with shyness and fear, but since adolescence, I developed the determined detachment that nothing in life was worth it, especially people. Soon, I began to detach from my family. As teenagers do, when I lay down to sleep, I would imagine the day of death for each of my relatives. By doing this, I thought I could free myself from all of them, not fear loss, nor regret being so far from all of them.

My Cold and Rational Nature

I became very cold and rational, believing that nothing interested me anymore, that nothing mattered to me. I felt an intense cold within me whenever the idea of abandoning everything, especially people, would invade me. The only thing that interested me and gave me pleasure was reading and studying to understand the meaning of life beyond suffering and restrictions.

In that southern Brazilian city of my childhood and adolescence, I was the only one who spent afternoons in the public library, always empty and abandoned. I took refuge there to read and then took some books home. It was shocking for me to read Homer as a child, who revealed to me that my life was like Ulysses' journey. I too was looking for a destiny far from where I lived, an exile. I longed for a journey to God, to Truth, to Beauty. I didn’t feel like I belonged to my family or my town, where I was seen as a stranger.

With the Passage of Time

Over the years, I began to understand that the determination not to be like others and not to be part of them were paradoxical but effective ways of inserting myself into society. It was the way I found to belong and participate in the world without being discovered and invaded. I never liked belonging to groups, doctrines, or parties... Although I participated in several, I was never really there. I was always leaving. Socially, I began to stand out precisely because I was not accessible and because I was closer to the margin than to the center of the world that surrounded me.

Material Issues

For me, material issues were irrelevant, because power is given to you by your level of knowledge and the autonomy that derives from it. In my youth, I practiced "cultural delinquency"; occasionally, I would steal books from bookstores. The justification was to read them and then pass them on to friends who couldn’t afford to buy them.

Reading for Isolation

Reading a lot, hours and hours, was part of my isolation strategy. Today I understand that it was my mother’s hysterical invasion that created in me the defense of isolation in even more sinister places. I needed to isolate myself to avoid the anxious tension from my mother. Locking myself away was the only way to find a place where I could be at peace, away from a chaotic and anxious world. When I was a child, I would climb a tall tree and stay there for hours. My mother wouldn’t take long to call me, so I was always alert and anxious. I knew that, as soon as I came down from the tree, she would attack me verbally or physically. I would climb the stairs to have some moments of peace. When I returned home, my mother would accuse me of being lazy. I heard that so much that I began to believe it. And, as I grew older, the need for isolation became stronger and stronger.

Searching for Isolation

The search for places to isolate myself became more and more sophisticated. Near my house, there was a long and deep ravine where an abandoned train track passed. On the slopes of the ravine, there were crevices where a person could fit. I loved being there in silence, sometimes almost autistically, without moving. I felt an indescribable pleasure in staying quiet and isolated. Everything became peaceful inside me for a few moments of stillness.

The Quest for Silence

When I was young, I started to enjoy walking along the riverbanks, where I would retreat to read Balzac, Beethoven’s biography, which fascinated me... Then came the woods that surrounded the city, where I would spend entire afternoons. The strangest of my fixations on isolated places were the cemeteries. There I could withdraw to read and admire the silence; rarely would anyone disturb me while I was enjoying romantics like William Blake or Walt Whitman.

Intoxicated by Madness

We were five siblings intoxicated by our mother’s madness. The refuge of imagination and self-exile in thought were the means I had to escape and free myself from that insane domestic captivity. I distanced myself to not be a part of the place where I lived. I felt different from others and believed I lived for something greater. I thought I was in the service of knowledge and intensely sought knowledge that was increasingly rare. I longed to read and get to know authors I hadn’t read, especially those considered more dangerous or incomprehensible. I wanted to listen to a type of music or read books that didn’t belong to common sense. The impulse was not to be in that world, to have the autonomy to think for myself and not for what others had already thought.

Living on the Margins

When I left home in my early twenties, I began living in a marginal world in many aspects. I lived with artists, with whom I shared an appreciation for art, but also with homeless people, drug addicts, criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers, criminals, prostitutes, gays, and

transvestites. I was very shy, and it seemed paradoxical to be amidst violence and danger. Today I understand, as it is social, that I lived that period of my life connected with the energy of an E8. The underground world activated my imagination, and with them, I felt strong. It was a world of brave and daring people. Later, when I discovered the Enneagram, I realized that I had always lived very well with E8.

Poetry and Isolation

My connection to life was poetry. I wrote a lot and compulsively. The tension of my closed, internally chaotic world full of crazy ideas found in feverish writing is a way of liberation and pleasure. I experienced a kind of nervous frenzy, within a current of living and sensitive words.

Creativity on the Margins

That period when I lived on the margins was very creative; it was when I wrote the most poetry. It was a sort of prophetic ministry. I recited my texts publicly, but always returned immediately to my distant and isolated world, dedicated to a mystical life. I positioned myself as an urban prophet, and thus, I inserted myself socially into the world. Perhaps the fact that I was so shy surrounded me with a halo of mystery that, being inaccessible, would give me protection and security. I learned to be in the world without being of the world, as the Sufis say. I wanted to be hidden again. Being directly noticed was too much for them to see me, for me to be noticed, but only from afar, so as not to be intimidating. The indirect path was possible for me, and I inserted myself into the world without being in groups, without forming bonds, without following anyone, without depending on anyone, always solitary and autonomous.