E6 Conservation (Self-Preservation) – Warmth

The E6 conservation is the opposite of the E6 social. This one is warm and ambiguous, insipid, sappy. It does not come to him to say that this or that is white or black. It takes a lot of courage to say something is black or white. For him it is better to say: "oh, there are several types of shades of gray in between. And I don't really know what kind of gray we're talking about, because life is very complex." And so he can go on endlessly, always beating around the bush.

We have a person here who needs a lot of protection. He is afraid of not being protected, a fear that manifests as insecurity. And his characteristic passion is the need to have something similar to friendship: a little warmth. What characterizes the E6 conservation among the three types of the six, is precisely this search for heat. They are teddy bears. They want to feel the embrace of a family, to be in a warm place, in a familiar environment where there are no enemies.

In social contact there is a kind of alliance formation of "I am not going to hurt you and you are not going to hurt me", "I am your friend, be my friend". Freud said that such alliances were the essence of friendship, but of course they are only the essence of a neurotic friendship: coming together in the presence of a common enemy, huddled together in the face of danger. The "I support you and you support me" phenomenon is humanly general, but the conservation six does this constantly, in its yearning for a small, warm world.

The transformation in the conservation E6 by Betina Waissman

My first contact with the enneagram occurred in Rio de Janeiro in 1985. At that time he participated in a growth group with Guillermo Borja, Memo, who every year came from Mexico to Rio de Janeiro. It was he who took me to meet Claudio Naranjo, his teacher, with whom I took the Protoanalysis course. That meeting marked a before and after in my life.

In that first course I did not identify with the dynamics of Fear, but with that of Gluttony, which resonated more with me because of what I was living then. I was 28 years old, I did group theater as a first professional and vital activity, I was very involved with my process of therapy and Reichian body training and with the expressive body work of the Rio Abierto system. I also studied and worked with the Tarot and was interested in astrology and kabbalah. My theater group specialized in street theater and, although we also did theater, the main focus was language research and our social engagement.

I graduated in Sociology, since the social had always mattered a lot to me, but I had found in the theater my path of expression and social work more rewarding. I lived alone in a small studio in a bohemian neighborhood and away from my family. I earned money to support

myself, even though I had the help of my parents when I needed it. I was single after ending my first major love affair, which had lasted six years living in separate houses.

From the age of 20 to 28 I broke with the patterns and expectations of my family. I felt idealistic, I felt like I was liberating myself and discovering life, I liked to travel alone, dress unconventionally, I was a vegetarian and I took care of myself with alternative medicine. It was an expansive stage of my life, which resonated quite a bit with characteristics of enneatype seven.

For all this I placed myself in the trait of gluttony and during a good season working from that perspective was very enriching. I learned to enjoy a more open lifestyle and approached something I was looking for: to be freer. I understood the value of looking at oneself from other points of view, and also the importance of deepening without clinging, allowing the central to finally appear. Over time, I realized that it wasn't gluttony that kept me from growing, that wasn't my main defense and mechanism. I had a hard time seeing fear as the central neurotic issue.

Fear and search for warmth

Living in fear came naturally to me: I didn't see it as an impediment or as something problematic. Since I was a child I felt shy, insecure, but I was not aware of fear as a problem and normalized it. Although my shyness and insecurity threw me back a little, I always had a friend who was braver and more outgoing than me, and that complicity propelled me forward. Maybe that's why I didn't register that fear could prevent me from living what I wanted to live. My mother, her family and friends were from Argentina, and there we spent our holidays annually. I studied in an American school where children from many countries attended. I learned languages, traveled and met people from other places. All this gave me a certain ease of social relationship, although in a group I was always withdrawn and quiet. I used to access social through someone close to me that I felt safe with, like my close friends or cousins.

This way of relating, so common in the sixth conservation, I recognize since I was a child: I have always had some close bond, of intimacy and trust, with which I felt safe, and from there I could relate more broadly with the group. The search for warmth as a strategy continues to act even today, when I arrive alone in a new group: I tend to stay a little on the periphery and naturally locate someone to approach. I do not usually stay long in environments or situations where I cannot generate some sense of complicity and support, some homely, warm protection. When I do, I relax, the internal tension loosens and I can get to enjoy the group.

In childhood I was seen as a good girl, kind, loving, calm, obedient. I never gave war. "Sweet," that's what my father called me. I think he had a contented, docile and adaptable appearance. My mother says that since she was a baby she didn't give her any work: she slept well, she ate without problems, she smiled. It was so easy and so good... I do not remember myself especially cheerful but soft and collaborative, with good disposition and good humor, typical characteristics of the six conservation.

My parents were young — my mother had me with my years — and they had a very active social life, so they entrusted me to caregivers throughout my childhood. I remember loving my first nanny very much. She told me stories about monsters and fantastic beings that fascinated me but also impressed me. I dreamed of these creatures, and I used to have nightmares and delusions when I got a fever.

The next caregiver marked me deeply. It happened between the ages of three and six. I was a very cruel German woman who beat me a lot, threatened me and tortured me physically and with the word. He was always behind me, watching me coldly and extremely harshly, telling me that he was doing everything for my good, as he was educating me. I was totally terrified, and I, the eldest of two sisters — the third was born in this period and the fourth had not yet been born — lived in an environment of fear, alertness and silence. My parents couldn't know anything because, otherwise, she would get even with me. Nor did I want them to know what was going on, as they might be frightened, suffer or become disillusioned, and I preferred not to bring them trouble. I came to think that the caregiver could hit my mother, like she hit me.

I was a child who never talked about the negative, didn't tell what hurt me, didn't complain and didn't ask for what I needed. I did or responded to what they asked of me, what I owed, or what was expected of me. Looking at my photos from that time I find my look sad, different from the one I had before I was three years old. At that stage I went on to have a continuous allergy in my legs that lasted until I was 20 years old.

Little by little, I stopped identifying what was happening to me and I didn't know what to say when they asked me about me. It was not that I knew and hid or concealed, but that I diluted the conflictive, suppressed it internally, leaving me blank, disconnected. It conveyed naivety and a semblance that everything was fine, and I believed it myself. All the painful and hard of my childhood was hidden, minimized, I did not share it with anyone, I did not consider the possibility of naming it until later I went to therapy. From the perspective of the enneagram, I understood that this was how my conservation character six crystallized.

I endured the caregiver's mistreatment without saying anything until the eve of a trip by my parents, after which the three sisters would be left alone with her for a month. Although I had already seen myself in that circumstance, I was now six years old, I felt stronger or more desperate and I had a burst of tears, prey to dread, and I revealed the abuse to my parents. I did not tell the details of the barbarities to which the caregiver subjected me, but they were very frightened, canceled the trip and threw her out. Some time later, she came to visit us and wanted to greet me, asked me for a kiss and I gave it to her, shyly and fearfully. The same thing happened a couple of times in the park I was going to play. I don't remember feeling anger, just fear.

I also don't remember expressing anger in childhood, and the only fights I keep in my memory were quite innocent, a little later, with my cousin from Argentina. Also, I felt very bad

when I had bad thoughts towards people or when monsters appeared in my mind and in my nightmares: I took the blame and the fear of punishment.

I became very skittish. Any noise, a change of light, a shadow could trigger my fear. He lived as if reality was always populated with invisible and threatening beings. These beings and God watched over me, and even scrutinized what I thought and felt; they would always be attentive to punish me, because it would be educational, for my sake.

I grew up being a good student, a good daughter, a good friend, and at school I managed to make friends also with the loudest and most rebellious. Maybe because I was collaborative and loyal and because I liked the artistic and teamwork. I was never a leader but I helped in the groups and they counted on me, I offered support.

In the transition from puberty to adolescence I began to perceive my anguish. And to discover that I had a hard time with the relationship with the boys. They scared me, I felt clumsy, shy, I blushed, I didn't know how to chat or be entertained, and then I preferred not to go out with them. I took refuge in my group of friends and as they began to date boys, I realized my shyness and fear of intimacy. I remember wanting to be more open and outspoken than I was, but when they got closer, I would withdraw.

Ambiguity, contradictions and guilt

The adults around me said of me that I conveyed balance, serenity, peace, tranquility. This bothered me, because inside I felt the opposite: I looked tight, tense, repressed, a little tormented, distressed. What they told me was so different from what I felt or lived! I lived with different realities and these only unified in my silence and endurance. All this helped to confirm a characteristic of the six conservation: the feeling that head and heart were separated, and that the unknown and threatening instinct is associated with monsters, with evil.

I started to get fat and that made me suffer more. I was very scared of anger, aggression, provocation, confrontation, as is typical in this subtype. I would withdraw, withdraw, shrink, but I also didn't want to be seen as a coward. She showed me as peaceful and conciliatory.

I had fantasies of having a monster that could break in and that one day I would be discovered, that the ugly and bad would appear inside me and then disappoint, disappoint people. To be seen so different from what I felt internally made me feel false, a liar, and guilty. It was like a ghost that could appear at any moment and reveal the evil that I had inside.

This was one of the topics that led me to initially place myself in enneatype seven when I did the Enneagram I course (as it was then called) with Claudius. When I heard the word fraud in relation to E7, I associated it with this familiar feeling of feeling inside something different from what they saw from the outside: I was afraid of being a fraud. I never thought I was prepared or capable, but I seemed to generate that expectation in others.

I felt a lot of ambiguity: a part of me sought to go forward, I was attracted to expression, freedom, courage. Another part was pure insecurity, impotence: not knowing how to position myself, what to say or do in the face of problematic or conflictive situations or people. I had a hard time accepting my duality, my contradictions, as if this in itself was something bad and lying, fraudulent.

Doubt being such an important issue in enneatype six, I did not recognize it as such but my experience was the contradiction. Integrity, being true and consistent, was fundamental to me, as was the fear of hurting loved ones, of disappointing them, of not living up to it. From the mind I have always been clear that contradictions are inherent in life and in our humanity. Intellectually, it is very easy for me to relativize, to justify, to include different aspects of the other and of reality. But, emotionally, I have had a hard time getting out of the dichotomy of Good and Evil.

Guilt was another of the clues that led me to place myself in the E6: it was shot very easily, with the consequent discomfort and fear of punishment. As a child, at school, when they threatened the whole group because they wanted to discover the person responsible for something that should not be done, I, who never got into trouble, began to burn inside as if I were guilty and they were going to discover me. As a young man, the same thing happened to me when I went through some police checkpoint, which at that time were very common in my city. I knew I had nothing to hide, that my papers and my life were in order, but I lived it as if I were guilty of something.

From disconnection to greater freedom

Theatre, expression, movement and bodywork were my salvation. I started dancing since I was a child and at school I participated in everything-theatrical and artistic that was organized, but it did not occur to me to star. I enjoyed the expressive and playful, and when at the age of 18 I became fully involved in this world, I began to transform.

That same year the sister who followed me died of leukemia. It was a turnaround in my life. Contact with death propelled me into life. I committed to everything I was doing and began to have a searching awareness, and to see life as a path of growth. I think my reaction to my sister's death was my first big victory over fear. I remember the strength, the certainty and the courage I felt one day in the cemetery visiting his grave, crying and telling him that I was committed to my life, to giving meaning to life, to not letting it pass blank, not to settle in. It was when I took the theater as a profession and path of life. The theater made me feel alive.

A few months later I entered the University of Theater, participated in other free courses and made my first great trip abroad alone. This trip to the United States was an adventure for me. Staying at friends' houses I managed to feel protected enough to move alone and look for what interested me. I felt brave and adventurous, I had my first meditation experience: an intensive Transcendental Meditation, something totally new for me. I visited drama schools, saw shows,

walked the streets alone, had my first sexual relationship and even an experience of altered consciousness. In short, I felt courage and the effervescence of freedom.

On the way back from this trip I joined the theater group that would be the center of my life for the next 20 years and I looked for a less analytical and intellectual therapy: I did three years of bioenergetics and later I continued with Reichian therapy.

Both the artistic expression and the clinical framing have been the most healing and transformative for me. In both contexts I went beyond the taboo of taking out what happened inside, which implied connecting with my emotional world, so blocked by unconscious fear.

I didn't know that the blockage I perceived in the relationship with my emotions and inner life, typical of E6 conservation, was a consequence of fear. Fear of feeling, fear of pain, fear of intensity. I had a fantasy that I could not stand the intensity and that it would disintegrate me. And, on the other hand, I longed to go beyond the barrier that prevented me from feeling.

What I perceived most was my disconnection: I didn't know what was happening to me, I didn't identify what I felt or if I felt something, I was blank, paralyzed, a little dead. This mechanism of character six conservation of disconnecting from reality that frightens or uncomfortable, occurs especially in conflictive or painful situations. I didn't know what affected me until some time later. When I finally woke up, I felt worse about myself because only then did I realize things, their effect on me and what I could have done and didn't do.

Something like this happened in relation to my sister's illness, which lasted two years until her death. I sensed that something important was happening. I was almost 1 6 years old and I realized it was serious. But since it wasn't talked about at home, I didn't name it either, nor did I ask. My parents wanted her to continue with a normal life, and they chose to hide the situation by saying that she had a strong anemia, thinking that this would avoid suffering. I lived as if nothing serious was happening even though I was very attentive to my sister. I felt distress, I felt a little frozen, and I started to get fat. When she went into a coma and finally everything was revealed, my heart opened. The emotion gushed out, I felt alive and present and without fear of pain. A pain that opened me to feel like never before the love for my sister, for my family and for life. At that moment I understood the internal tension I had experienced beneath my disconnection during the previous two years. Understanding this, as well as experiencing the consequences of everything that happened then, uncovered in me the possibility of deeper changes.

Body, expression and transformation

A fundamental change was to begin to perceive and say what is happening to me without much time passing. When I'm in fear, I have a hard time even realizing what I see, feel, and think. In fear everything fades, as if I were in a cloud that confuses me, blocks me and there I stay. If I let myself be taken by this feeling, the fear grows and each time I block and shrink more, and the distance between my head and heart increases.

In my process I learned that, if I can sustain fear and go through it with awareness, I begin to see, to realize what is happening to me, beyond fear. The most transformative thing happens when I manage to say what I feel/think/see. I have learned a lot about this subject in my marriage, since in previous couples I almost did not say what I felt, especially what I did not like. I kept it, adapted, molded and told myself that time would solve it. He justified everything because if he named the conflictive he could make things worse, lose the other, be rejected. I was so afraid to manifest myself that I thought it was better not to say anything: it will happen, it will change.

Seeing fear as a central element in my neurotic dynamic, and not as something natural, has been decisive and very healing. Before it was so close to me that I could not focus on it and, therefore, I could not delimit it either. As I also tend to be confident and optimistic about others, I did not identify with the descriptions of paranoia and distrust associated with this character. Now, whenever I can name the fear, it becomes more concrete and localized, and then it decreases.

What has helped me most in my transformation has been to pay attention to the body: to identify the physical sensations of fear — how I feel when I'm afraid — and to allow myself, especially when it comes to that diffuse, ambiguous, disguised fear that misleads and decenters me. This fear does not seem fear, and it fills my mind with reasons that devalue, entangle, confuse and paralyze me more and more.

One of the especially healing experiences I had happened during a job in the context of the SAT Program. I was able to indulge in feeling fear all over my body, without containing or controlling it, without judging and without fantasizing or bringing it to mind. For the first time I let my body tremble freely and consciously: tremble with fear.

I had experienced tremor and vibration in bioenergetics and Reichian therapy exercises, but this was completely new. Surrendering to fear was an intense bodily experience that brought me enormous liberation and consequently, a great sense of vitality. Before, my unconscious strategy was containment, and from there I cooled, disconnected, dried and blocked. Then he judged me and blamed me for it.

Now, when I feel the fear in my body without avoiding it, I can make decisions. If I allow myself to tremble, even subtly, and I manage to endure it, breathe and be there, a change occurs. I go on to feel my body, to be in the body, and that in itself already reassures me, I feel more real. The focus changes: it is no longer just panic tremor, it is also vibration and connects me with the flow of energy in my body. I feel alive and I can move forward, albeit with fear, I am here and I do what I can.

Anger, aggressiveness, innocence and punishment

Getting in touch with anger, living it, expressing it and sustaining it has been the most healing. When I started my process in body therapy I could not connect with anger. I knew it was important, I understood it, but I couldn't live it. He did the classic exercises of rage: hitting the cushions, using the racket to hit, pushing, screaming, all the things that had to be done, but he didn't feel it. Guilt and fear were so unconscious and internalized that I could only cool down and disconnect. Distrust and discredit in relation to oneself and one's own experience, seems to me a very active defense in trait six conservation, which can lead us to desist or not to give value to important issues.

Seeking contact with rage—at first mechanically—helped me to get closer and demystify the taboo towards this emotion, and gradually, the inner permission to live it was opened.

As I began to experience anger, I saw more clearly how the fear of punishment was constant and internal: life could punish me. I lived the fantasy that if someone got angry or fought with me, they would never love me again. Therefore, I feared that if I got angry, I wouldn't love the other one anymore either. I couldn't put love and anger together. For me, the great learning of anger has been in the couple, in love and in trust. The effort has been to go through the fear that it would end or that love would be withdrawn. Now when there is trust I can get angry, diverge or have a different opinion and the world does not end. But if there is no trust, I can still tend to shut up, to retreat.

With aggressiveness, the taboo was also immense. I felt unable to defend myself, without resources, and therefore afraid of the world and life. I knew my endurance strength but not the strength to face. It wasn't just the idea that the world is dangerous but that I wouldn't know or couldn't defend myself. Claudio asked me about the tendency of the E6 conservation to do like some small dogs, which are thrown on the ground on their backs offering the chest, belly and soft parts to the aggressor. I think many times I have done this: to be fragile, weak, open and submissive to defend myself from aggression.

There is also an unconscious use of naivety as a defense in the form of "I didn't realize it" or "I didn't know," a childish attitude. A position of innocent weakness. I think this also has to do with guilt and fear of punishment. It is a mechanism that blinds me and that really prevents me from realizing it in the present, therefore I cannot take responsibility and defend myself in the moment. Today, when I look like this, I stop and wonder what is happening to me, that I am afraid. When I perceive it, something changes, I can take responsibility, and even if it hurts, I reconnect with strength and confidence.

In the process I understood that behind so much fear of the harm they could do to me is the fear of doing harm. When I began to feel the rage, the fear of exploding, of losing control and doing a lot of damage appeared: the monster.

Safety and security

I have heard many six conservations name the pursuit and importance of external security. I think that this matter becomes compulsive because we do not believe that this security can be achieved: a flat can be burned, money can be stolen, fate is not safe, nothing is certain, nobody knows the future... Even so, there is a constant attempt to make sure, to foresee just in case; so many times investing energy in creating a security in which we do not finish trusting. This tendency often appears in the material, even in the most everyday and banal. More than once I have contained the temptation to buy two of something I need or like in case it runs out, wears or breaks. In my bags and suitcases I always carry everything in case I may need it, I do not like to ask or depend on the other. There is a satisfaction in being able to attend to one's own need and also that of others without having to ask. Although there is consciously a rejection of dependence, protection is sought in the links. Friends have been my main support since childhood, and I have always lived them as my family, as the most valuable thing I have.

A crazy idea that fuels neurotic behavior is, "If I have friends, people who love me, and who I love, I'm protected." If something happens to me, someone will give me a hand, I will have somewhere to grab me. On the other hand, there is a lack of trust in love. I didn't think they could really love me, much less that they could protect me. The little girl in me didn't understand why my parents, who loved me so much, hadn't defended me from the caregiver's mistreatment. My fantasy was that friends would forget about me, that they wouldn't see me. Therefore, it was important to have many friends and take care of the bonds. Most of the time I was the one who offered the hand, the one who protected. As if this were to guarantee future compensation, in case of need. A kind of life insurance, which as with all insurance, I preferred not to have to use it, but it relaxed me to know that I had it.

I have observed the difficulty of cutting relationships even when they have left wounds. There is a tendency to maintain a kind relationship with everyone, as if this could ward off danger or a next attack. Nowadays I can cut a relationship with someone who has hurt me, and this makes me feel stronger.

Confidence

Another big change is to perceive certainty and trust internally and not just to deposit it outside. When I manage to recognize my intuition, realize what is real to me without the external confusing me, I feel connected and safe. When I can hear an inner voice that I experience as true, even if it is not perfect, and life confirms it to me, I feel stronger and more consistent. This voice corresponds to sensations in my body: I locate it between the solar plexus and the lower belly, in a central place within me.

It's not about the voices in my mind, which are many and can confuse me. When I am insecure and from the outside I am questioned, my mind becomes entangled and I lose my

center. I begin to doubt even more, to think that maybe there is something that I am not seeing, that I have to consider it and that the other may be right. That brings back to me the feeling of fraud, of helplessness, of not knowing, of not being worthy or of being inconsistent.

If I stay connected to my body, giving credit to my perception, I feel more whole and can defend my point of view. This experience is something else: it connects me with trust. It's an experience and not an idea. The work with Authentic Movement, practicing and imparting it, has been key in this conquest.

Writing about myself, showing myself and allowing this text to be published, is an achievement in the face of another fantasy: that exposing myself is dangerous and that it is better not to appear. Exposing yourself means being too much in focus and that is very dangerous, an idea confirmed by my childhood experience of severe punishment. This is another crazy idea: if I show up, they're going to cut off my head. It is not a conscious thought, it is something that when it happens, it is so fast and automatic that it invades me completely: it burns me, I blush, I want to run away and get out of focus; it's too much of a threat. I remember hearing from my paternal grandmother, whom I loved very much and who was a model for me, a Jewish saying that said: better not to stand out too much, neither up nor down. Otherwise envy or contempt is aroused, and the consequence would be persecution.

There is a kind of taboo to highlight, to become very visible that seems common to the six conservations. As well as the childish image of a severe, controlling and punishing God, like that of the Old Testament, with whom we must be constantly negotiating, praying for forgiveness.

The playful, expressive and creative path, both artistically and therapeutically and especially the theater, allowed me to expose myself with meaning and pleasure, with less guilt and more freedom.

Getting to know the work of Claudio Naranjo, who integrates the wisdom of compassion — so central to Buddhism — with his own Jewish cultural heritage, was deeply healing for me. I didn't conceptually understand the meaning of compassion: for me it was a very new vision, but in its presence I felt it like a balm running through me internally. Like a nectar that healed inside my body, my cells, my heart and my mind. And it remains that way.

My husband's love is for me another miracle of healing. At the age of 42 I moved to Spain to get married. With my previous partners I had not lived together and we kept houses and economies separate. I didn't give myself up completely, I feared intimacy even though I wanted it. I didn't trust that they could really love me and therefore I didn't compromise. He protected me in my independence while longing in fantasy for a wonderful love. Until the relationship with my husband, Juan Carlos, with whom I am much happier than I could have imagined.

Today I feel more resourced, more autonomous and more able to defend myself, although from time to time fantasies and fears return, especially in relation to the future. It helps me to remind myself that this is all part of the neurotic dynamic. I also keep blushing, but less, and I don't care so much anymore...