Emotionality and Fantasy

The Self-Preservation 6 is the most emotional of the three subtypes. The deeply cerebral nature of E6 enneagram type causes all emotion to be dissected and interpreted. Each emotion must be understood in terms of cause-effect relationships and the potential present and future consequences. It’s like taking your fever every time, or like a meteorologist who is constantly monitoring the temperature, pressure, and humidity of the internal emotional environment (in addition to monitoring the external one, of course).

This monitoring is motivated by fear of an internal world that cannot be fully trusted, which seems dangerous to them: it can be cannibalized, overwhelmed by emotions.

Regarding the issue of pain and the fear of mental illness and suffering, in the SAT 1, I feared losing control if I did experience fear. Probably because I have always behaved like an adapted child and was not allowed to show sadness and fear deeply.

Positive emotions are filtered, measured, and distilled. Negative ones—fear, sadness, anguish, anxiety—are frequent, and they are analyzed in all their nuances. These emotions are directed toward something manageable, slowed down, diluted with others, or relieved by fantasy, idealization, and magical thoughts.

There are shared emotions and unexpressed ones. In my childhood, the family context "allowed" me to express joy and satisfaction, while inhibiting the expression of anger or frustration through crying. If I got angry, it was seen as my whim, or it caused hilarity because it seemed ridiculous; if I cried, I was "playing the victim." Therefore, I learned to inhibit some emotions that were disapproved of or mocked. I learned to be accommodating and refine my dialectical skills to defend my causes, to use rationalization in place of expressing anger.

My mother, a Sexual E4, considered crying a manifestation of weakness or victimhood, while my father, a Sexual E5, avoids emotional expressions. With them, I learned that sadness and crying were personal issues to be expressed privately, either in my mind or my

room. Of course, the latter didn’t exist either: there was no knocking on the door, and even locking it was considered an act of rebellion and was prohibited because it prevented my mother’s constant control. There was nothing left but to sob at night, the only time I didn’t feel controlled, disapproved of, and judged.

It is true that all this control of anger, frustration, and sadness brought crises with it. In moments of tension or school stress, I would "explode" with scenes of anger, especially toward my mother, with rage and crying. In any case, they were isolated and sporadic moments.

Anger is taboo; as soon as it arises, it diverts, it attenuates, as if its uncontrolled manifestation could lead to self-destruction. It is noticed and even manifests itself, but for a very short time. Its intensity is unsustainable, triggering unprecedented anxiety. A few minutes, if there is no other remedy, when it is a matter of life or death, but there is also no psychological structure that allows it to sustain longer. At most, you can take a passive-aggressive or controversial attitude, fantasizing future revenge without carrying it out. It is the emotion denied by the Self-Preservation 6.

I still have a hard time giving legitimacy to my anger. I don’t allow myself to express it often. And if I am angry, I deny it. It comes to me, I begin to feel it but I don’t express it. I rationalize and contain it until, at a certain moment, I explode in a fiery dialectical torrent.

It is as if there were no balanced modulations of the expression of anger. I have realized that this turns me into a pressure cooker, a dormant volcano that suddenly explodes, so I have learned to use my body instead of rationalization. From the outset, I express anger by slamming the door, or I unload by doing things with my hands in a second phase, instead of exploding. When, a few hours later, the internal accuser has calmed down in its search to attribute blame to someone or something, and the body has been able to release the tension, I can grant myself relief that has a more dialectical and constructive flavor than accusation and anger.

Self-Preservation 6 is overwhelmed by both the awakening of the primary wound and the idea that he has not done what he should, feeling that it is his fault if things have turned out this way.

I have a real taboo with anger. Faced with the injustices of which I feel a victim, it is hard for me to feel it. I always think that I deserve what happens to me. Somehow, I have to justify the person attacking me.

As soon as it arrives, I divert the anger toward myself. In Rio de Janeiro, I was the victim of some corrupt police officers who intimidated me, and to whom I had to give money to make

them leave. I didn’t feel anger toward them but toward myself for having fallen into the trap, for not having been able to foresee the damage. I wasn’t scared enough!

Furthermore, a kind of atavistic feeling of guilt subliminally justifies all the injustices committed against me. If the hotel gives me a room with a bad view, it's hard for me to go to reception and ask for another one because I think it’s somehow fair that way (maybe I arrived late that day and there weren’t others, or I have a discounted rate and so I don’t "deserve" a room with good views).

Control of Emotional Intensity

If it is not easy for you to express emotions such as anger, which could lead to a conflict with another, it is not easy to live openly with positive emotions that could shorten the emotional distance too much. The positive intensity must be controlled in the same way as the negative one. It is difficult for him to verbalize how much the other cares in an affective relationship: first, he rationally drives away the emotion, and then, if he feels it despite everything and is about to express it, he censors it. Phrases like "You are the love of my life" or "I would feel lost without you" have to be "ripped off" and, even if they are pronounced, they are almost always followed by distancing (a laugh, an ironic phrase...).

The expression of emotional intensity is also controlled in the face of loss. Giving in to pain openly, especially in the presence of others, is not acceptable because they fear judgment or mistrust that the other can effectively comfort or contain. The convictions that "I have to manage alone" and "better to be strong" predominate. These beliefs are rooted in a childhood experience in which parental figures send the message, either explicitly or implicitly, that we should not rely on the help of others and that being weak is a source of danger. Some life stories evoke great shame when the child, in expressing his emotions, is judged and feels deeply inadequate.

As a child, I had a great sense of rhythm, and I liked to play the drums. My father did not want to buy them for me (even in the "toy" version) because he thought that this type of music was typical of those who wasted their time and did not finish anything. One afternoon, I was in my room listening to rock at full volume; I was frantically banging my hands against the table. Without me noticing, my father entered the room from behind and smacked me all the harder unexpectedly: "Good!" he exclaimed contemptuously. "This is how you spend your days... How nice!" I still remember, after many years, the humiliation and shame I felt.

Control of emotional intensity leads him to end up excluding joy and enthusiasm, which are too "visible." Thus, it progressively assumes a sad, melancholic, and worried emotional

tone. The path that leads to overcoming character conditioning involves recovering the "permission to be happy" that puts this subtype in contact with their forgotten "natural child," who, before learning to be ashamed and control himself, manifested happiness and satisfaction.

When I had too much fun, eventually something precious would break, and the fun would turn into tragedy.

As a child, the prevailing moods alternated between the excitement of having fun or waiting for a game or a walk, and the moments of sadness that followed. That’s how I felt on Sundays, not to mention the end of summer vacation or Christmas.

My brother encouraged me to personify objects that had a life of their own and with which I spoke: balloons, the pillow, earplugs... The drama came when they were thrown into the trash, with catastrophic fantasies about their suffering in the landfill or lost in the cold street. It broke my heart, and sometimes I cried uncontrollably.

The Fantasy

Fantasy is indispensable to the Self-Preservation 6. All of the paranoid aspects feed on both big and small, daily, constant catastrophic fantasies. They act as a background noise, of which he is hardly aware, but which accompanies all his steps.

It’s like living perennially in parallel worlds. He anticipates the future with fantasies that are not only negative but also positive, imagining every possible development, from the triumphant to the disastrous. Regarding the past, he racks his brains not only remembering but also considering what could have happened. He imagines different scenarios, as if a time machine allowed him to go back to that day, to that moment in which he did not say or do what he had to, to see "what would have happened if..." he had taken another path.

And when things in life go wrong, he uses fantasy to imagine a different present: an alternate reality that comforts the pain he feels in the real world, clinging to symbols or coincidences.

He idealizes idyllic work or friendly situations that seem harmonious and authentic, only to later discover that this is not the case.

Since in my world there was no love, I didn't control anything, and I didn't have a group of faithful friends, I imagined another world in which I had love, friends, and where I was able to gain control; an unreal, imaginary world, but one in which I submerged daily to escape

from a reality so greedy for certainties and affective stimuli that I could have fallen into despair if I had not had that space of control and fantasy.

The Self-Preservation 6 reviews everything with its possible endings, whether positive or paranoid. In situations of uncertainty that bring on a crisis, like when waiting for the results of an exam or analysis, in your mind, a movie unfolds that plays out in full detail. Your brain constantly anticipates events.

What will be the next crisis, the next disease? He clings to all possible fears. Sometimes he uses fantasy like it’s candy, to alleviate fear: he revisits some negative event and imagines a different ending for it, which alleviates and calms him.

It is as if the imagination of the Self-Preservation 6 never takes off toward the development of creativity; instead, he uses it to control tomorrow or rewrite yesterday. He relives the past, putting fantasy at the service of an impossible search: not making mistakes, sniffing out every detail like a detective after a guilty party.

As for the future, the imagination is oriented to control eventual dangers and painful emotions, structuring itself as obsessive programming. But it also works to generate another image of himself, “heroic.”

I believe that I am intellectually wonderful, that I can go very far, I invent plans, and at that moment, I feel that I can carry them out; I see them completed.

The Self-Preservation 6 needs to be around people with greater decision-making capacity, whom he seduces with his expression and soft, sweet, and complacent behavior. Many times, he also feels anger toward those people on whom he depends. He is not allowed to express it directly, but in the end, it slips out when he least expects it, damaging the relationship. Then he feels guilty and tries to suppress his aggressiveness even more, which increases anxiety and a feeling of helplessness.

Fantasy is at the service of fear. It is not constructive imagination, at the service of action, but serves the purpose of defending against the eventual reaction of others, especially regarding what they are going to think. It is difficult for him to bear the idea of being considered a bad person. He wins the sympathy of the potential enemy with a docile and smiling attitude that disarms their aggressiveness.

Another function of fantasy is to alleviate anxiety through solutions that, by the mere fact of having been imagined, are as if they have come true. Imagination replaces action, in a kind of hallucinatory satisfaction of needs.