E3 Social – Prestige

For the distinctive passion of E3 social, Ichazo proposed the term prestige: we can say that the three social is someone who has the passion to shine — not only through work, but also in the way they present themselves to others. It is as if he had an intrapsychic propaganda department. By bringing the desire for prestige, understood as a passion for social recognition, to a need for applause from everyone and not just from a few, it consumes excessive energy that naturally interferes with spontaneous action.

None of the E3 subtypes are described in the DSM-IV, which surely reflects the fact that the corresponding traits, oriented towards good performance, practicality, and success, are idealized by modern culture, in which it can be say that the social three, in particular, has become the modal personality of the secular and technocratic world.

Social E3 is the most chameleonic of the subtypes of the three. He is also the most vain of the vain. Regarding the other E3, he is a strong and reactive character, lover of power, even if he manages it not directly, but through the people he supports.

The transformation in the social E3 by García Vallés

If, as Claudio says, the journey that is transforming us is not so much up but forward and down, the process in the social three goes through going beyond the external form, beyond the valuation of the other, to be able to look at what we have not shown, what we have denied and valued negatively of us, and that which we have identified as alien to our ideal self.

The process of transformation usually begins with the feeling of dissatisfaction of what has been obtained and that keeps us lost, with a great internal disconnection and with a crisis of objectives in life.

Through personal work, we enter the search and recovery of the rejected. We learn that what we have discovered is ours and for us, rather than to achieve a new triumph to show the world. We have to walk on uncertainty, which implies losing ourselves, getting lost to assume change, inhabiting a disorder – the result of a dose of madness – in order to recognize the most authentic of us.

It also involves manifesting what we are not and do not know, thus opening an increasingly wider and freer interior space. Finally, that rediscovered and valued as ours also begins to lose weight, which implies a softer and less demanding treatment for us, thus being able to connect with trust and awareness towards the new, letting us be, letting us perceive what is coming, what God brings us.

We will describe how the beginnings of the trip have been, and then point out what is left behind and what appears as new, and get to imagine what we would be in fullness. Finally, we will add some advice to colleagues and friends that will help us understand how we are.

Our personality before the trip

The original scene, at least the one in which one remembers how the trait was fixed, that moment in which the anguish of the abandoned child finds a way out, in the social enneatype three is marked by the experience of the gaze: a look that returns us to a lost paradise, to a well-being, but that, from that moment on, it falsifies us forever. I had to find something to show, something that would give me a place, something that would satisfy my parents, so that I would receive a kind of support in the form of a look, not because of who I was, but because of what I showed.

Some testimonies express it very clearly:

"Look how smart my girl is, but she already reads and she's only three years old!‘ they told me. And I, clutching Mom's skirt, without an arm to take me, turned into her cloth of tears, and I said, "Come on, Mom, don't cry.‘"

"‘But you can't imagine how well my little girl folds her clothes,‘ my mother told me."

"When I was five or six years old they asked me: "And you, my girl, what are you going to be when you grow up?‘ We lived in a humble house, and I went around in my little red dress on the Ferris wheel in the park, and everything turned and turned in a litany around the iron. And I came to answer: "I'm going to have money to fix this house and make it beautiful, and have a refrigerator! When I grow up I'm going to be successful!‘ And there, when I felt that it would be so, I stayed calm".

"I was taught as a child as I was a trophy: "But how beautiful my child is, he is blond, handsome as a little angel‘"

Before starting the conscious process of transformation, the three social ones have our eyes set on obtaining social success; this is our engine, the search for a prestigious social position in the environment where we move, where we can shine and be admired and where we almost always get it. We easily create a network of people whose basic function is to be admired by friends, teachers, bosses, students, patients...

We want to be the center of attention and the gaze of those we admire, and we deploy all our capacities of seduction to achieve it, which vary depending on the different assessments that biographically have been reinforced. For some it is about showing intelligence, culture, class; we show how much we know and what university careers we have. Others show the material symbols of social status: having a nice house, a car that snatches the look, clothes, watches, etc. Others, the body and the face, being cute, knowing how to dance...

With all this deployment we get a look of recognition, but not to us, but to that figure that we have sustained for so many years with effort and with great feeling of emptiness. We know how to sell and attract attention with a clear adaptation to the environment in which we are. But inside we do not find ourselves: in the midst of so many roles that we represent, we do not know what we feel or who we are.

"I was not authentic: what I thought were my feelings, my emotions, were not real, and I wanted to be authentic but I could not. I wanted to tell the truth and I didn't know what my truth was. This is very exasperating, asking myself what I feel, and not knowing, or what I think, what I want, and seeing that I don't know either. This, in contrast to a personality in which I appear very structured, apparently very clear, in which I do know what I want, I do it and I impose it. For many years I have believed that I always knew what I wanted: this was my delusion."

The adaptation to each medium cartons us, cools us and freezes us. However, we believe we are always fine. Simply, we function in the world and we function well, effectively, impatiently, responsibly, competitively, without knowing what is happening inside.

To fill the void we reinforce our blindness in doing: we always try to be busy, refusing to stop so as not to become aware of how lost we are. We can become machines of work and production, with a demanding and sometimes authoritarian mood, but dressed in sympathy and good humor, where the other is not a person but an instrument of our goal. As Montaigne points out, we don't usually do anything for someone, whom we only do something to while we're doing something else.

When we gain admiration at work, we expand:

"As more people approve of me and applaud me, the more I expand, the more I dominate and the more I control. Here our madness is manifested: we seek to feel supported by people through admiration and applause. Admiration is the base that sustains us and distances us from the experience of that little boy or girl who feels sad, alone, and abandoned. The feared scene is to be worthless, to have no money, to be poor or not to be successful in our profession. That scene puts us in contact with abandonment and pain."

"Therefore, we can sink before the possibility of feeling questioned. The reaction is to freeze and wait. What hurts is not shown: it is charged coldly with distance and disinterest, through a sibylline revenge, without any awareness of pain."

Process awareness: what emerges as new

Where are you going to get lost? We are lost without acknowledging what we really feel. We cling to superficiality, to what is seen and valued socially, looking at the other, their approval and custom, constantly adapting to the circumstances of others. We perform and express only what we consider right and proper and we take it as certainty, thus fleeing from our wound.

In the process of falling what opens up is a feeling of great pain, a very great pain when seeing the lack of connection, occupied by the desire to please others. It is a feeling of emptiness unmasked by seeing only vanity. A nausea that springs from seeing how vain our actions are, how useless they are, how superficial we are. We look for impressive things or situations until we begin to realize that what is impressive is what is not, what calms us. Thus, the desires that previously filled the entire spectrum begin to break.

When we discover ourselves, we feel ashamed for being like this and fear that they will find out, of breaking our good image before those who matter to us. What a horror if they find out! "I'll never be able to get out of here."

In the process, the mechanism of modifying ourselves is immediately activated, of adapting now to the healthy, to the right, and suddenly they tell us: how changed you are! But of course, we are still trapped in the same circuit, trying to perfect it and put it at our service.

The healthy thing always happens to assume what I am, what is, what arises from my own; look at the fault and inhabit it instead of covering it up with doing or demonstrating.

In us, the healthy thing is to know our failure, our lie, to know what we show and are not, and to verify that we do not die for it, that we can sustain ourselves. It also involves looking at our ambition, doing only what we can really do. Contact with the body is our barometer: we must be attentive to discomfort and the ability to express it above the fear of rejection and inadequacy. Show the wrong, the unpleasant, confident in the spontaneous and without being taken by emotion to seek the profitability of the act. When we manage to appropriate this, laughter, calm, peace appear.

We heal ourselves by setting and accepting limits, saying "no" when it is what we feel and recognizing what expands us, such as staying with the everyday, enjoying what there is: a walk, a simple enjoyment, what develops us, which encourages us to put our cooperation and contagion capacity at stake.

Faced with the need for applause, the need for pause appears, which allows us to contact us. Although it does not disappear, the need for success loses weight, and a certain renunciation is born, a restraint that is no longer adequacy. How healthy it is to be able to say and recognize: this is for me and I keep it without external witnesses. The engine of success loses strength but it does not die out: we can recognize it more and more and we also punish ourselves less and less for being like this.

Transformation goes through self-denunciation, attentive not to be used, but shared as a painful and healing experience simultaneously to the extent that this experience connects me with the authenticity of me. Observing how I despise, how I flatter, how I draw attention, how I manipulate without directly asking for what I need, in short, how I cover my bad image, now allows me to denounce myself.

The experiences of authenticity reinforce us and move us away from a feeling of falsehood, of feeling unworthy, which is based on a "I have worth because I do", and in its place appears a "I have worth because I exist", which makes us feel worthy of us and connects us with tenderness and forgiveness, which help melt the iceberg that formed in the heart. For us, a good healing affirmation is: "I respect what I feel."

Loneliness after the fall appears not as the feared but as the necessary space to be present, to know each other: we no longer flee from the void, the void becomes the space to be present and look.

At this stage we recognize the importance of the intimate relationship, we learn to be someone who needs the other and is necessary for the other. We learn to share our time: now we can let go more and do less: "seeing that the other needs affection like me makes me softer, less demanding with the other and also with myself".

But, without a doubt, what emerges as new, what opens up to us in the process, is the encounter with life, with the great, with the spiritual, with God. As in any process of transformation, approaching our parents, looking at who they have been, what we have needed and what we take from them, what they have been able to give us and what they have not, makes them and makes us great, and this allows us to access experiences not previously imagined.

From there, I live spiritual openness as an experience that leads me to the human, to the real encounter with the other, recognizing that anyone in the world can teach me. The spiritual is revealed as the encounter with the inner space that takes us out of the certainties linked to control and takes us beyond pain and loss, to a space of encounter and recognition. Which allows us to leave behind the pride of living as unique, separated from the rest.

The spiritual is also revealed as a strength to go through suffering when the only thing that appears in our life is a hopeless one: "this is ego, this is ego, this is ego", until at a given moment calmness occurs. That alien that we carry inside comes out again and again, and the only possibility of reconciliation with him is to give him a place, since only from that place do we find calm when we recognize him and we know we are unable to annihilate him. Also, we feel less and less scared with that alien, like in the movie, we already know when he's going to come out, either in the second or the eighth passenger.

Being lost, doubting, ceases to be something to hide, but becomes a fundamental part of the process that allows us to find ourselves. It is no longer something to avoid, but it will be part of our journey. As in the Tarot card, the Hermit does not see beyond that place that illuminates its light.

What would it be like to reach the fullness of development?

What would it be like to totally repair that lack, that original wound of love, and overcome strategies like false modesty and rediscover spontaneous enthusiasm and enjoy laughing at things, and participate without fear of cutting myself off so as not to show who I am? I wanted to recall the command of Delphi:

“Look at yourselves, know yourselves, become attached to yourselves; you listen to each other, you answer each other; concentrate, resist; they betray you, they disperse you, they hide yourselves. Don't you see that this world keeps all its vision shrunk inward and its eyes open to contemplate itself? For you it is always about vanity, inside or outside, but it is less vanity the less widespread it is. Each creature is studied first of all and has, according to its needs, limits appropriate to its efforts and desires. There is none as empty and as needy as you, who encompass the universe; you are the one who scrutinizes without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction and, after all, the buffoon of the farce.”

Developing involves a level of acceptance, of non-judgment, of non-manipulation, of non-denial, without having lost the mood and enjoying a certain joy of living.

In fullness, we would find a very free being, we would be facing a person attentive to her and not to what they expect from her, who assumes her impulse of falsehood and who, with her ability to bring out the jester she carries inside, can go beyond her image and show her heart, his difficulty, his bad mood, his need, his pain.

To the extent that the narcissistic impulse decreases and loses weight, in the face of characteristic competitiveness there is a need for collaboration; self-esteem ceases to be supported by maternal praise and begins to recognize and open up to the present and to feel joy for being here, for living, doing the simple things in life more calmly.

A realized social ego three would be in contact with a love that would no longer be just an admiring love, permanent reference in its own search for admiration and recognition, but would surely reach a balance between the three loves.

We would be facing a person who would expand the instinctive and maternal love that binds him not to others, but to the other; a love that would allow him to give himself beyond seduction and that, overcoming his feeling of having been instrumentalized or not respected, would go from an experience of utilitarianism to an experience of real surrender in the encounter with the beloved, without trying to dominate him, looking straight at his shortcomings without looking for in the other the way to cover them, and that also allowed him to find his sensitivity and emotionality.

Being able to be with other human beings in a more equal way, listening, transmitting, creating beautiful things, would also be a consequence of development, so that the social three would go from looking to control to looking to discover, like a child who when looking discovers sounds, space, perfumes, who leaves behind the functional and who lives by himself, without obsessing over being useful.

How to help and understand

Helping an ego three, like any other, does not mean pointing the way but accompanying it, and in this it helps to feel if love is present: with the tranquility of your company, one can go to the bottom. Love is the panacea, the universal medicine. If there is love, there is no fear and you can work thoroughly, because it is the field where you can be without judgment, without going through the machine of annulling people.

Of course, the process is continuous and permanent. The ego always appears and, in this sense, unites us all. It is difficult to accompany without leaving the ego aside without getting stuck, but we can still accompany, with fear, with insecurity, with mistakes that can also help us, because the most important thing is to accompany from the true.

The social three needs to recognize its truth and for this it helps us the real contact, beyond the automatisms, where the important thing is not to achieve results but to learn to feel good being what you are and becoming aware of the orientation to the external world as a compulsion disguised as pleasure. It is necessary to become aware of the fragility but it is not necessary to identify with it so as not to put it in the circuit of use.

One can help understand the other through presence: being present with what is there, paying attention to what is happening, with no more clues to which we can cling, taking only ourselves, as in airplanes, when , before a depressurization, they tell you that you must first put on the mask, breathe, and only then help the other with their difficulty. In this sense, a classmate of trait had a revealing dream: "She woke up from her because someone took her by the arm saying: someone sent me to find you! And, looking at the face of that person, I discovered that she was myself".

Helping to be present with what is there, going through emptiness and loneliness, doing nothing, leads us directly to grow, to let go of ties and to experience who we are.

It also helps to become aware of the fear, the fear of being, of letting go, of being inadequate, selfish, approaching the spontaneous, the uncontrolled.

It helps us to accompany us to discover our real need beyond the ideal, and this happens by contacting the rejected emotions: anger, shame, envy, to reach the pain that sustains them and live it head-on in front of a person and validate themselves.

Finally, we can unmask the ego with a real contact with the other that helps us to experience silence and recognize what happens inside us without having to do anything. All this, not from an annihilating will, but from a more patient, more serene and more loving encounter with us.