The Characteristic Neurotic Need: Complicity

Complicity characterizes the relationships of this subtype, whether affective or social. It is an unconscious, automatic ego strategy: an implicit pact of loyalty and mutual protection that seeks control and dominance in intimate or group relationships. It is a covert alliance or silent connivance in the face of questionable, harmful, or dishonest behaviors or attitudes, as well as protective strategies toward defenseless individuals.

Understood this way, such complicity can involve abuses of power, manipulations, or any other form of injustice, even when they do not constitute crimes. These implicit alliances are present both in Eights who fight for social justice and in mafia-type Eights—where, when they feel betrayed, it results in extreme revenge: the death of the supposed traitor.

This complicity may manifest as supporting, justifying, or looking the other way in situations harmful to others, or in pacts based on the belief that justice can be carried out by one’s own hand. Ultimately, the neurotic dynamic lies not so much in the concrete act—sometimes even well-intentioned—but in the connivance itself, in the lack of ethics or integrity to set limits on those who use complicity to impose themselves or dominate.

This complicity, understood in this way, is a reflection of the complicity they were forced into during childhood—whether with their mother, to defend her from their father or from a hostile world, or with their whole family for reasons that often revolved around protection from violence, poverty, or abandonment. Very often, we find in the biographies of these individuals stories of social hardship due to poverty, low social status, or difficult and dangerous environments (dictatorships, wars, crime). Thus, the Social Eight had to feel, even as a child, that they had to defend the humble, the excluded, and the socially repressed. To these kinds of people they feel loyal, willing to pay any price to restore their right and their worth to belong in the world. Their social ambition has this goal: to reclaim the place unjustly lost.

“I grew up in a neighborhood where if you weren’t an accomplice, you were a victim. I learned early on to keep my mouth shut and make myself strong with the strong, even when I knew something was wrong. Over the years, that anger turned into political understanding. Sometimes I still overflow and act harshly. I tend to see it as loyalty to the unprotected—and also as an attempt not to become the kind of person I despise.” — Henrique

The social instinct, infused with lust, expresses itself here as an intense, fervent, almost obsessive loyalty—one that is offered, but above all demanded. It is not a simple sympathy or altruistic desire to improve the world: it is a visceral commitment, an alliance lived as sacred. The Social Eight does not connect superficially; their bonds are of fire and blood, and any betrayal of these bonds is experienced as an irreparable offense. Their passion leads them to experience relationships through an implicit code of honor, where belonging is a tacit and absolute contract.

The complicity to which this character once felt bound is now proposed to those they love—whether family members or members of their group. Those within their circle are not allowed to break the pact, not free to detach themselves, for that would mean betrayal. And breaking complicity is always a harsh act. A person of this character cannot allow themselves to feel pain; if the alliance is betrayed, there is no other solution but to turn it

into an act of revenge. And the greatest revenge is to erase the person from their heart, from their life together. They may isolate themselves and shut down completely toward the other, nurturing distrust toward everyone. They may decree the other’s social death—ostracizing them from the community, and so on.

Behind the harshness of this reaction lies a deep primitive wound: betrayal is not processed rationally but strikes directly at the most archaic registers of the instinct. It is an activation that occurs beneath thought—an automatic response that severs bonds, blocks tenderness, and replaces it with a shell of pride. Pain is not admitted; it is transfigured into coldness or anger. Sensitivity remains buried beneath the mask of hardness.

Their survival became tied to a pact of loyalty that turned into the ideal of having safe, non-harmful people around them—without realizing that they interpret any movement of distance or disagreement as betrayal. The circle of loyal friends is the realization of their ideal of family: a group where they do not feel crushed. For the Social Eight, belonging is not a spontaneous fact but a construction of power. Their group is not only a refuge but also a bastion—a place to exert influence, mark territory, and feel protected under their own rules. Trust is built through tests, through actions, through constant presence. There is no room for ambivalence: you are either in or out. Gray is a color they find suspicious.

Their concept of friendship is affected by their inability to be truly empathetic—that is, to recognize the pain and needs of others. Because they are insensitive to their own most intimate parts, they are so with others as well. Fear and wounds cannot be the driving forces of people—those are feelings for the weak. The solution lies in excessive action, whatever the cost. People with this character had to numb themselves very early in life in order to carry on—for both their own sake and for their families’.

That emotional numbness is projected onto their way of connecting: they cannot stand fragility, they answer tearing complaints, and they do not know how to accompany others with tenderness. They prefer forming disciplined, orderly groups that move to common rhythms instead of dependency. Complicity is measured in acts of presence, in direct interventions, in standing side by side rather than comforting words.

“That is a theme full of polarities, pains, and loves. I clearly understand the origin of that trait’s construction in my childhood. As a girl, I experienced abrupt family collapse followed by a severe psychological crisis in my mother after losing all security—losing our home, our beds, everything. On the other hand, I think the trauma, the wound around complicity, is related to childhood friends who were false and left my heart very sensitive to suffering from disloyalty, insincerity, and the absence of true, clean friendship. My heart freezes forever and loses trust in the face of betrayal in friendship. I think that is my most

fragile childhood pain—one that leads me toward movements of isolation and distrust.” — Evânia

When one of those close people commits a “betrayal,” no matter how small, or makes an “ethical” mistake, even if not serious, the Social Eight feels it all as something deeply aggravated, triggering an alert in their core. Part of the heart is seized by a powerful but hidden childhood pain. These people are capable of facing major events—they have strength and great capacity to confront the harm inflicted on others, even on people they don’t know. However, they appear almost disabled when it comes to facing small, everyday betrayals or breaches of trust that sometimes occur in relationships. They feel those ordinary events as if they were stabs that wound the soul of a defenseless infant. In those moments, trust dies, forming in the face and chest a stone of ice, transparent to all who look. In those moments, it seems that trust will never return.

“When I was very young, I told my best friend that her father had beaten me so badly he sent me to the hospital. I had never told anyone. A few days later, in the middle of a conversation with others, he brought it up laughing, as just another anecdote. At that moment, I felt naked, exposed, humiliated. I said nothing. I waited for him outside and broke his nose with a punch.” — Anonymous

This pattern reveals an inverted threshold of sensitivity: intense for what is near but almost hypersensitive to disloyalty. Their emotional system is prepared to withstand external adversity but is extremely fragile toward any emotional movement from a loved one. Betrayal acts as the trigger of accumulated resentment, the echo of a wound that never healed. The reaction is not limited to emotional withdrawal—it can include active contempt, exclusion, and total rejection.

If people acknowledge their mistake with sincerity, then the Eight can forget and move on; but when that does not happen, the same childhood pain arises—a fatal pain, now tainted also by disgust and repulsion. Then, something deep inside remains distrustful forever toward those who have “failed” them. In any case, the restoration of the bond is only possible under certain conditions: explicit recognition of the mistake, symbolic submission to the moral authority of the Eight, and visible reparation of the harm. When these conditions are not met, the other becomes “dead” to the Social Eight. They may be physically present, but they have been erased from the emotional sphere, exiled from the Eight’s inner world.

“If someone hurts me, it’s not enough to get angry or never see them again—they have to die.” — Anonymous

Thus, a relational universe governed by absolutism takes shape: maximum loyalty or maximum punishment, all or nothing, unconditional bond or emotional exile. Lust, which in other forms may express itself through conquest or erotic excess, here takes the form of symbolic possession of the bond. To love is to possess the other within a rigid alliance, and to betray is to deserve expulsion without appeal.

The complexity of this relational pattern makes the Social Eight a character of extremes, where passion overflows both in the construction and the destruction of relationships.

This kind of passionate bond partly explains the fascination the Social Eight arouses in their surroundings: it is easy to admire their dedication, presence, and radical commitment. But it is also easy to fear the harshness of their judgments, the speed with which one can go from being protected to being cast out of their circle. Relationships with a Social Eight are experiences of intensity—of lustful intensity: as fertile and vibrant as they are fierce and destructive when the invisible codes of loyalty are broken.