E6 Sexual – Strength

And here is the so-called counterphobic character: sexual E6 goes against fear. So we could call this neurotic need force. On a descriptive level, we can say strong in the same way that a conservation six can be branded as a weak person. One is a rabbit and the other is a bulldog: a counterphobic is much like a barking dog. It doesn't always bite, it barks more than it bites, but it has a fierce appearance. The need is not only to feel strength, but also to be able to intimidate. The internal program says that the best defense is a good attack.

A very illustrative joke about it: a woman went to visit several psychiatrists because she heard wing noises in her bedroom that prevented her from sleeping. A novel psychiatrist gives him a gun telling him that he is going to end his phobia by shooting, "because you know you are stronger." The next thing was a big scandal: the man killed his guardian angel.

So these are the madmen who go against danger, who can kill anyone because anyone can become something dangerous.

The transformation in the sexual E6 by Grazia Cecchini

With contributions from Mireya Aregui and Barbara Grassi

The awareness of passion

The first step towards the transformation of the contraphobic six is not easy: recognizing oneself in the E6 means getting in touch with the passionate/emotional part that is fear. To recognize fear as the underlying motivation for behavior and cognitive structure, the counterphobic has to take a paradoxical step: feeling the emotion of fear.

On an emotional level, the contraphobic feels fear, but there is a redefinition of it in terms of obstacle, limit and shameful defect from which it must be freed. For this, he develops a series of behaviors whose objective is to convince himself and others that he is not a victim of fear. Being discovered as fearful means reviving the sense of unworthiness and insecurity that he tries to hide through his specific passion: strength.

It could be said, therefore, that the first step is to feel the insecurity and the feeling of indignity, blocking any attempt to attribute it to events or people guilty of being bad or unsympathetic.

Luckily, life offers us many opportunities for this: in my case, the first contact at the conscious level with fear and insecurity took place at the age of 17, when I was hit by a car:

"The impact was gentle and undamaged, but this was followed by two months of panic attacks. The fear came improvisedly, it was vast, and the basic consciousness: you can die. The emotion was fixed to the obsessive idea of death and prevented the further step: the awareness of the need for safety and security... But I realized the existence of fear."

For Barbara, the first significant contact came when she was sent to a school: "…in that place, alone and with the obligation to stay (because my mother wanted it to) and to control my twin brother, I felt an enormous terror that paralyzed my ability to express what I felt even with a normal cry, but at the same time it was this inability to cry that increased in me the awareness of strength and endurance" The paradoxical situation here is very clear.

For Mireya, the intense contact with fear occurred on the occasion of her mother's admission to a hospital: "They took her up, she was still anesthetized and she did not answer my call. A chill ran through my body; I thought my mother had died. There I was, petrified, and when the nurses saw me, they started asking who I was, who had let me in and they took me out of the room."

From the point of view of consciousness, the SAT process and the recognition of character six according to the enneagram are fundamental, because the awareness that fear is the fundamental neurotic need and forces its direct manifestation, helps the counterphobic to give an existential meaning to his way of being, overcoming the obstacle of fear as a symptomatic emotion that must be eliminated. The horizon of consciousness is broadened beyond the strictly psychological aspect. It is difficult for a classical psychotherapeutic path to focus on this significant point.

Once fear is recognized as passion, contact with true self-deception is eaten: strength.

In counterphobes, strength is often cultivated on a physical level (almost everyone has spent time in sports or physical experiences that served to feel strong muscularly). Another trait is that of strength as resistance to fatigue, repression, humiliation and pain itself. This aspect makes it resemble an E4 conservation. The difference is that sexual E6 cultivates strength as an illusion to sustain each other's attack and fear.

However, for a transformation to take place, it is necessary to reach deeper levels: to recognize force as a substitute identity that fills the deep feeling of not being worthy and that is put at the service of not feeling need of the other. "If I'm strong I won't fall into the relationship and they won't hurt me." "If I am strong, I can exist, whether you/the other is in relation to me (because I will know how to defend myself), or whether you/the other abandons me." The neurotic illusion of force is directly connected with the illusion of independence and incolumity, and also with the narcissistic trait of megalomania.

To penetrate deeply into the meaning of strength, it is important to understand what it means to be a sexual subtype; in the counterphobic it is not easy to perceive the energy he puts

into the relationship because he hides it from himself and others. In reality, their passionate search for strength is intimately linked to the love relationship (attack and escape from intimacy).

In the process of transformation, the experience of weakness and that of needing the love of the other are fundamental. Sometimes physical weakness is also important. For me, the experiences of fasting through the practice of yoga have been very important: "Fasting leads to an inner emotional contact to which you cannot react in an adrenalin way, we can only give ourselves. This helped me to feel a soft and slow way of being, without any relation to states of affective weakness or that could be related to external events."

It is difficult for a counterphobic to indulge in a crazy and passionate infatuation. But it's actually an experience he needs. Some counterphobic women say that it has been very helpful not to run away from a loving and difficult relationship. After having had a marriage relationship in which I felt protected and dominant at the same time, the change in my experience as a woman occurred due to an extremely conflictive and insecure relationship:

"As usual, I would have kept my distance by controlling my feelings. Thanks to the analytical work I was doing at the time, I didn't automatically get into the avoidance defense mechanism and stayed in relationship. This brought with it intense emotional states and a sense of madness. But when I came out of the tunnel I found myself stronger inwardly and with a new state of fullness, produced by the fact that I had lived intensely the emotions. It was an experience of integration, because this being did not allow me to split sex/love and thought/emotion. And above all, he disarmed my basic conviction: that he was the culprit and I was the victim."

The accusation. The rejection of self

It is not easy to recognize the accusation as a philosophy of life. Cognitive distortion is surely understandable on the rational plane, but it is the part that most resists change.

The sexual fear starts from a basic distrust in relation to the other, of which he thinks that he will surely hurt or deceive him; therefore, he must prepare, with his strength, not to succumb. But the profound conception that a six has of himself is that he has caused the anger of another (because he has been bad, or because he is not adequate, or he is not beautiful, or annoying), and this constantly leads him to reject himself.

Another fundamental (probably the easiest) step related to the destructuring of nuclear cognitive error is to recognize the defense mechanism of projection. The difficult thing is to recognize how the accusation of the other allows to preserve the good part of oneself. The counterphobic, accusing the other of being guilty, makes sure not to be singled out as evil and therefore guilty; if this is achieved, he will not be punished and, as a consequence, expelled.

Behind the fixation of the accusation there is a constant and strenuous search not to be punished, but the accusatory behavior allows to cover up the deep belief of being the real inmate, the real bad guy.

For the counterphobic, the monster is the punishment of God and the consequent expulsion from Paradise: this rejection by God has been the original indelible punishment and he has no other possibility than to project it out of himself, on another culprit.

The change is in abandoning the anxious and illusory quest to be good, accepting and acknowledging the aggressive part. The counterphobic is not aware of living with a gesture and an aggressive attitude towards the other.

"Today I can place the recognition of my counterphobic character in adolescence (12-13 years), when after strenuous attempts to "be good", constantly making vows and promises – which I never managed to respect – to the Virgin, on the occasion of the preparation of First Communion, I abandoned all kinds of control and had a behavior of uncontrolled aggressiveness. Today I think that the teachings on goodness and holiness have acted as a mirror of my feeling of exclusion, and I decided to move on to the opposite side: to side with the excluded."

For a sexual E6, the crazy deas, split from reality, must change their valence: "Even if I am bad, I do not lose love", "even if you are bad, you can love me", "even if you are bad, I need you". To reach this cognitive change, the contraphobic has to recognize the child's own part that needs affection and tenderness. He has to recognize that the elimination of the good mother (as Melanie Klein would say) does not solve the pain of renouncing love. And you must realize that you put all your energy into control so as not to feel cheated or manipulated, thus denying the need for tenderness.

The most substantial change is the integration of good and bad into oneself and the other. It is to abandon the illusion of finding in life another totally good (and, therefore, reliable and not dangerous) person.

To obtain this integration, a miraculous technique is the gestalt hot chair; I believe that there is no other therapeutic method that can be as successful as this one to reveal the cognitive deception of sexual E6. The hot chair reveals the defense mechanism of projection and cognitive generalizations, dismantling the logical accusation-danger-distrust scheme and disarming the counterphobic in the face of contact with reality.

Thinking and fixation

The quality of counterphobic thinking reflects ambivalence in the relational context. Like all E6s, the counterphobic has, on an affective level, the feeling of being trapped in a relationship or situation from which he cannot escape. The love relationship is the place that is most sought, but

it is this same place that can hurt you and where you can totally lose your freedom and, above all, your mental capacity.

The counterphobic's style of thinking is doubt. Taking a direction means acting, and acting means taking the risk of making an irreparable mistake. Every mistake is, for character six, a fatal and definitive mistake.

Deep down, the contraphobic has a strong sense of being precarious, either in the relationship or in life itself. He never has the security of belonging. He wants to belong and, at the same time, is afraid of losing his freedom and psychic independence (integrity). To resolve the anguish of non-belonging or belonging by staying on both sides, always doubts about the path he has to take. This is functional for him to maintain the desire to belong and, at the same time, to be free, without realizing either.

Consequently, he fails to feel loved and part of the other, and fails to feel completely free. The truth is that he is afraid of freedom. It is better to be heroes in a delimited enclosure.

To remain in doubt means to save the skin.

Change in the realm of thought is a very hard part of transformation. Not using hesitant thinking means exposing oneself completely; it is like throwing oneself into the void, because it necessarily involves an action. And if you are not sure that it is the right action (that is, not wrong) it is better not to move and use doubt.

The fixation of accusation and doubt keep the fear of acting standing because acting means heading towards the risk of irreparable error. Not acting reinforces the feeling of emptiness, the height of the passion of strength and fear.

To transform the doubtful style into a thought connected with emotion and action, it is necessary to experience that there is no single truth. For the counterphobic it is like moving from Newton's causal law to chaos theory. Nothing is measurable, nothing is predictable, the only truth is a fluctuating nothingness. For the counterphobic, this is the real madness, it is the loss of self, the dissolution, which he tries to avoid by maintaining the hesitant style of thinking and behavior.

"Retirement marks in me a new way to face my paranoid thoughts, full of doubts and judgments. The game was born, I put my contrasting and ambivalent thoughts to fight with swords and I laughed. I once surprised myself because I laughed alone on a bus and people looked at me like I was crazy, which made me laugh more. Every time I managed to play with myself, my thoughts dissolved, they lost their value and my obsessive struggle with my dreaded god was relieved," says Barbara.

Getting lost in madness, that is, in the void without space or time, is the cure. In this sense, I venture the hypothesis that zazen could be an important type of meditation practice in

this phase of transformation, because it creates an inner containment with respect to the fear of going crazy. At the same time, the sexual six has a need to experience crazy, extravagant, out of the ordinary things.

Virtue: courage

Courage is a word that a counterphobic does not feel deeply until he experiences that the only way to get rid of the anguish of life is action. It is not important to act justly, but to act. For the counterphobic, courage means deciding an action, making mistakes, not defending oneself from error, not accusing oneself or the other, accepting the consequences. It is important that someone accompanies you in making decisions so that you can verify that the error is not fatal, that it can be recomposed, that you can apologize. You can fall without dying and without hurting yourself (it was my most important discovery in martial arts practice). You have to experience that the distress goes away when you act and not when you have acted well.

Disarming is courage also in the face of the pain of the love relationship: disarming to open up to tenderness.

"With meditation I have been able to experience tenderness towards me, I have learned a new inner dialogue in which there is a place for everything. In a season of deep sadness I visualized myself as a mother comforting her sad, desperate child in her arms, and for the first time I felt loving to myself, a mother who transmitted courage," adds Barbara.

Almost all counterphobes have difficulty feeling supported and in tune with the mudra of courage that corresponds to virtue. The clenched fists on the chest would seem to reflect the rigidity of the one who is closed and the force he uses to defend himself. When I learned the mudra of my virtue in the SAT, I could not feel its help, it was more useful to leave my arms and my hands open as to discover my heart. Only with a lot of practice and deepening in my personal work did I contact the deep sense of courage: entering the unknown and spontaneous and crazy action. Thus, the mudra revealed to me its deep meaning, that is, the courage to abandon myself, to surrender either on the cognitive plane (accepting that I am not right), or on the emotional plane (surrendering to the unknown).

Spontaneity, rage and sexuality

Sexual E6 has the neurotic illusion of being spontaneous. Only the profound experience of spontaneity, as carried out in gestalt therapy or in the spontaneous movement of the SAT process, puts the contraphobic in a position to recognize its inhibition in the face of spontaneous action.

The contraphobic six manifests a marked control over the body with the aim of cultivating strength and not feeling the chaotic emotions linked to the liberation of anger or free sexuality.

It is important to emphasize that, while aggressiveness is the predominant gesture in the counterphobic, anger is not easily expressed in the context of intimate relationship — an area that would be useful for expressing feelings or rights; it is easier for the sexual six, surely, to express it in social relationships than in intimate ones. Expressing anger in the context of the romantic relationship means reliving the fear of receiving aggression, the fear of being punished and the fear of the old expulsion. But this means putting true heroism into practice.

Likewise, the free expression of eroticism and sexuality is inhibited because it would mean putting the area of pleasure into play.

The sexual six also experiences pleasure with ambivalence: while on the one hand he seeks it (sexual instinct), on the other he cannot demonstrate it because pleasure is closely related to surrender to the other. And for people with this character, the other is always a potential enemy.

In addition, releasing sensuality and eroticism would mean leaving room for tenderness, that is, showing the weak side. Being tender brings with it the fear that the other can take advantage of the weak side and also reveals the shame of feeling fear.

The counterphobic resolves this conflict by separating emotions: behavioral aggressiveness is disconnected from the deep experience of rage, and sex, completely separate from the feeling of love and intimacy.

Under this aspect, the transformation has shown significant progress in the practice of spontaneous movement. All sexual E6 people declare themselves dumbfounded by the potency of this instrument and all recognize that spontaneous movement should be practiced for a lifetime, not only to connect and integrate the split parts, but also to cultivate surrender and trust.

Trust and faith

Talking about trust to a contraphobic is like talking about cats to a mouse! Not only is the other, as a potential enemy, not trustworthy, but the counterphobic does not trust himself. The cognitive conviction that every mistake can be fatal entrenches the idea that every decision can be fatal and, therefore, no argument that the counterphobic has painstakingly constructed in his logic split from reality will be enough to reach confidence. The separation between good and evil, and the projection of evil outside, allow him to cultivate the illusion—on the edge of psychotic defense—of always presenting himself as good and just. But if the split is not totally psychotic, it keeps and hides inside a brutal monster.

The counterphobic constructs an intellectual explanation on the basis of which the monster has every reason to exist: it has been unjustly mistreated, it is unjustly misunderstood, it is unjustly abused, it has to protect itself from humanity, which is evil... On the basis of this

approach, it unleashes incessant battles that advocate against social injustice, for the equality of peoples, for the right of everyone to existence...

But if the monster has to deal with love, that's when he doesn't know why it exists: in the face of love, the monster is just a frightened child who has no confidence, who learned to give up, who feels like one of the demons expelled by God because they were not worthy, who thinks that he will never be able to fill the distance that separates him from beautiful and worthy beings.

Recomposing the dialogue with the inner child is the only way to transform the monster: from a bad boy (who wants to see mom and dad dead) to a frightened child.

Sexual E6 often perceives beauty as a characteristic not only aesthetic, but as representative of a category of people from which it is irretrievably excluded. The ugly and the bad are equivalent. Although he dedicates his life to demonstrating that aesthetic beauty is not important — cultivating it is an index of stupidity — in the hiding places of his psyche it is an unattainable quality. The only thing he can do is conquer the beautiful object by cultivating (sometimes in secret) poetic or visual art, or by trying to conquer the other/beautiful, thus projecting onto the other all the qualities of perfection and dignity. Once conquered, he can tell himself that if the other/beautiful one is accompanied by him, this means that he is not so ugly.

The reconquest of the artistic is one of the essential stages of transformation. Overcome the shame of being an art creator. Returning to writing poetry, prose, drawing or composing music means showing and exposing oneself, recognizing one's right to be a vehicle of creativity.

The reconquest of the seductive and erotic capacity is a stage of the fundamental transformation: to be seductive and sensual means to approach the other and be in contact with the desire, instead of opposing it (going from six to three). For this, gestalt therapy, together with spontaneous movement, are surely important instruments. A kind of discipline of physical contact is very effective. Practice touching the other. At the experiential level, it can be useful to practice some body techniques and all kinds of dance as a couple that involves physical contact and dancing together. Dance as a couple is based on the movement of the other, on feeling it and moving by giving oneself.

In addition to the therapeutic work focused on projection and whose objective is to dismantle generalizations, body work is much more effective because it is beyond the conceptualization of which the contraphobic has always been an expert, since he always has at hand one more argument to prove the opposite.

The knot of distrust at the relational level is very important in the transformation process not only to rebuild a basic trust that opens the way to sentimental experimentation (the social and concrete is quite affordable). If the theories of the link are taken as a point of reference, the counterphobic could fit into the insecure/avoidant style, like all E6, but the sexual subtype has a history of insecure/ambivalent bonding. This combination makes it difficult to rebuild a secure

link base. At the relational level, therapeutic work must involve the sexual six in the approach to the other through contact, clearly establishing the boundaries between contact and withdrawal, while leaving free access to withdrawal, that is, the possibility of differentiating/separating from the other without feeling guilty. The counterphobic must learn to leave, to separate, to build his process of differentiation, with the courage to lose the relationship. The next phase involves practicing the courage to enter into relationship. This clarity of boundaries is helpful in building a foundation of support for faith.

Faith is an experience that dispenses with mental construction and above all with intellectual understanding. For sexual E6, as for all mental characters, the concrete and the pragmatic are sure ideologies that allow control of the world. Faith in organismic self-regulation implies surrender and trust that the world has natural justice and beauty, and that it is part of this world. There is nothing else to do, you can leave yourself alone, lay down your arms and appreciate the tranquility (passage to point nine of the enneagram).

In reality, access to faith for the counterphobic goes through living the experience of being a creature of god, a son like the others, belonging to the supreme family of the whole. If he manages to perceive that his origin is not cursed and that his existence does not depend on who has given birth to him or who surrounds him in the here and now, he can then perceive himself as a spiritual being.

For me, the timeline technique as reformulated by the SAT process was a great help. If this technique is experienced in a painting that does not have a strictly psychological sense but rather existential and spiritual, it can lead the sexual six to an experience of belonging to the fundamental whole. For me the door of belonging that transcends the concrete interpersonal relationship was opened, and I was able to begin to feel worthy and beautiful, to open myself to the other without wondering if it is reliable, enjoying, instead, the opportunity of pleasure, love and also affection.

If a counterphobic manages to reconstruct this experience of himself, he can rely on a faith that goes beyond the visible, enjoy the unknown and recover his ability to build love.

The Three Loves

In the theory of Claudio Naranjo, E6 is a character predisposed to admiring love, that is, to the search for someone superior and reliable in whom to believe. After undergoing various tests, the other can be recognized as a carrier of qualities that the sexual six would like to have, or as a good authority (opposed to the bad authority he lived during his childhood) and with which he can resolve his conflict between surrender/trust.

Unlike the E6 conservation, which seeks protection in the other idealized, the sexual E6, in contact with the feeling of not being worthy, seeks in the other a recognition that will allow him to be and not be expelled.

In this sense, the sexual six is an idealist, a dreamer, a hero of great battles and great ideas.

This love leads him to develop empathy and to approach the other with compassion. But, since it lacks maternal love (caritas), the contraphobic can become very protective but not hot. To develop truly compassionate love, the counterphobic must go through understanding the evil other who has driven him out, and understanding his inner monster. If he manages to see the enemy as a suffering creature, he can recognize the inner child as a tender creature and, in addition to undertaking great battles for him, he will begin, perhaps, to embrace him. Children are happy if someone defends them from abuse, but if no one hugs them they can die.

To develop this level of compassionate understanding, work on the inner family, as reworked in the SAT Program, is very valid. In this program, the work on the family has a personalized approach to the process and the phase of compassion and forgiveness is sustained by an authentic attitude, indispensable for the counterphobic.

The development of maternal love leads to giving permission to exist to the instinctive child and above all helps him to have confidence in his instinct. Their instincts are wisdom, beauty, kindness. Erotic love is surely the least developed in E6 — even sexual E6, even seems otherwise. We could say with Freud that the sexuality of the contraphobic is more phallic than genital. There is a huge taboo of erotic pleasure. For counterphobes, it is easier to have impulsive sexual activity than to indulge in the sweet pleasures of preliminaries. It is as if erection is more important than orgasm with ejaculation (and in metaphorical terms this experience is also valid for women). The counterphobic is sexually pushed to demonstrate his power and dominance over the other (also for women), rather than motivated to enjoy the other.

The transformation is in getting lost in pleasure, in giving oneself to the orgasmic and ecstatic pleasure of union with the other: recovering erotic love as a passionate and tender experience of union with the whole, with the supreme.