Emotionality & Fantasy

Emotional Style

The Eight commonly uses dissociation against emotion—a primitive defense that arises when a child faces more stimulation than they can regulate due to absent, neglectful, or abusive caregiving. Without co-regulation, the child builds a physical/psychic armor to protect vulnerability. Sensitivity is projected outward and turned into protective action for the oppressed or excluded.

Evania When I’m overactive—or resentful with someone—I disconnect completely from emotions. I don’t feel like myself when I’m disconnected: hard on the outside, very hurt inside. I’m moved by simple things—a tiny flower in the street, a beautiful day, a poetic sunset. My heart quickly tears up when I see an unprotected child on the street.

Emotions tied to vulnerability—guilt, need for care, and love—are denied. Anger expresses most easily, tinted with avenger fury against an unjust world. It becomes acting-out against perceived oppressors—while the most intimate anger (from personal wounding) stays out of awareness.

Most rejected emotions are sadness, fear, and shame:

1.Sadness may have been felt in childhood but quickly denied because it connects to inconsolable abandonment. Many Eights aren’t aware of the pain of maternal physical/emotional abandonment. Sadness risks depression—experienced as a loss of energy and self-esteem. It may surface in contact with others’ suffering (abuse, torture, crime), opening the heart and then transforming into anger and reparative action. 2.What moves me most is people’s solidarity, a friend’s loyalty, someone’s courage to act. I cry watching NGO boats going to sea to rescue refugees, risking prison for their humanity. 3.Fear may be contacted only as a brief bodily vibration that must be quickly numbed. Showing fear—especially publicly—would mean losing the power struggle and the image of hardness. As leaders and protectors, Social Eights hide fear and fragility. 4.Shame is deeply intolerable. If Social Fours live shame as a defining passion, Social Eights experience it as an inner monster—Achilles’ heel of a power-identified persona. Their existential need is to rescue themselves from social humiliation;

feeling shame would confirm worthlessness and give reason to those who mistreated and excluded them.

Another “forbidden” emotion is tenderness. For the Social subtype (the least hard of the three), tenderness would contact the wounded child and recognize empathy without excuses. They convert tenderness and empathy into solidarity and complicity: cancel the pain—both theirs and others’—especially for victims of authoritarian, tyrannical power.

Idealistic Fantasy

Their fantasy projects into ideals: dreaming of a better world; being the person who brings change and healing. Unlike a Social Seven, these aren’t airy projects—the Social Eight acts, gets hands dirty, and fights on the ground. They can develop artistic sensitivity, but committing to it is hard because the battle keeps calling. When they are open to creativity and mystery, a sensitive heart and imaginative mind can emerge.

In my life, social struggle was essential—changing the world from the most marginal, toughest groups. Seeing myself generating change, living in daily collective rebellion against injustice, made me feel alive. As the years passed and I looked at today’s world, a huge demotivation and disappointment came. Winning that battle meant standing at the top of power and, at the same time, avenging childhood wounds.

Socially, when facing complaint, lack of solidarity, or absence of collective struggle, they disqualify others with sarcasm or humiliation. Aggression becomes blunt. Claudio Naranjo, in The Ignored Root of the Evils of the Soul and the World, describes the Social Eight’s patriarchal paradox:

Acts with violence against violence, exhorts the weak to be strong while devaluing them in the attempt to help. Accustomed to alert and continuous struggle, shows a strong impulse to provoke, display irritation and disrespect, treating others as inferiors—thus contributing to inequalities they, as justice-seekers, fiercely fight.

A testimony from the book puts it plainly:

In my activism and assemblies I used very violent, aggressive tones, despising and humiliating those who disagreed. I realized this after many years of therapy. It was very hard; I had to stop going to assemblies— that behavior

gave me power. In truth, I was working for the patriarchy, with its same weapons.