We like to think we’re complex, but personality gurus pegged me

By David McElroy · August 5, 2019

Am I really this predictable? Or are they reading my mind?

A couple of months ago, a friend told me about a daily “EnneaThought for the Day” which I could sign up to receive from the Enneagram Institute. You know how much I’ve come to appreciate the insights of the Enneagram personality typing system over the past four or five years, so it was a no-brainer for me to sign up to get the free thought of the day about the Type 1.

But I didn’t expect it to feel as though somebody had been reading my thoughts. These people had me pegged. I appreciate it — and the recognition makes me laugh — but it also makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Am I really this easy to predict?

“A major feature of your personality is the tendency to see disorder all around you and feel personally obliged to do something about it. Watch for this in yourself today.”

I inhaled sharply when I read that one. I laughed at myself nervously. How could they possibly know this? How did they know that I feel as though the world is falling apart and that it will collapse if I don’t fix everything?

Surely that was just a fluke.

But it keeps happening. Not every day, of course, but at least once a week, one of the thoughts pierces me and reminds me that something in me is organized in a more predictable way than I like to admit.

“Remember that your Basic Fear is of being bad, corrupt, unredeemable, and condemnable. Can you feel into the existence of your Basic Fear in yourself today?”

Those are feelings that I try to hide. How could they know I feel that way? How could they know that I often feel as though I’m irredeemably bad or broken? I’m terrified for anybody to know this, so how could they see it?

“Ones have a self-defeating, negative tendency toward obsessions and compulsions. Do you see evidence of this in yourself today?”

I don’t want to admit this.

“Try this Affirmation today: ‘I now affirm that the best I can do is good enough.’”

How could someone possibly know that I need to hear this? I’m often convinced that my best will never be good enough to earn the love I need — and this leaves me depressed.

“When do you think you will give up getting angry about the indifference of others to your efforts? How about today?”

I wanted to cry out about that one. I become bitterly angry — but I try to hide it — when people are indifferent about the things I see as important, even holy. There are certain things which I offer to the world as my best gifts — and it feels like offering pearls to swine. How can I possibly stop being angry about that?

“Back to basics today: remember that healthy Ones are conscientious, self-disciplined, and highly principled. Cultivate these qualities in yourself today.”

And then another.

“Remember that your Basic Desire is to be aligned with the ‘Good,’ to be virtuous, and to have integrity. Can you become aware of how your Basic Desire is the root of many of your most compelling motivations and unconscious actions?”

Both of those hit way too close to home. Yes, these are the things I am at my core. They’re the things which I assumed everybody was or at least wanted to be. It destroyed my innocence years ago to discover that so few people care about being good — that so few care about doing the right thing just for the sake of being righteous.

“Remember that your Direction of Stress is to Four, which is a metaphor for feeling alienated, misunderstood, and self-pitying. Do you sense these qualities in yourself today—and know what triggered them?”

For years, I mistyped myself as a Type 4 and now I know why. Under stress, a Type 1 starts acting more like a Type 4, sometimes for good and other times for bad. “Alienated, misunderstood and self-pitying”? I never saw self-pity in myself but I strongly saw the other two. I still do. I suspect I always will, unless I find a place to belong — and someone to belong with.

“Your Achilles’ heel is your self-righteous anger. Try to step back and see that your anger alienates people so that they cannot hear many of the good things you have to say.”

I hid my anger for many years, even from myself. Expressing anger wasn’t allowed when I was a child, but I constantly feel anger today about the world not being what it should be — about people not being what they ought to be. I didn’t realize this until I read those words, but people are probably turned off by my strong sense of right and wrong — of how things ought to be and how they must be. I guess not everybody feels that way.

“For the One, the Missing Piece will be found at the highest Levels of type Four.”

This one made my head feel as though it was going to explode, at least for a moment. What they’re saying here is why I have trouble giving up my identification with the Type 4. The best parts of myself identify strongly with the healthiest parts of the Type 4. And now this tells me why I can’t let go of the need to create. I thought that giving up the identification with Type 4 would allow me to abandon my desire — compulsion, really — to create.

But I was wrong.

Part of me wants to never see another one of these thoughts again. Some of the insights are so painfully true that they hurt. Just a bit. But another part of me knows I need this — because I need somebody to call me on my own tendencies. (And, yes, this is why I desperately want to be loved and understood by someone who gets me deeply, so she can call me on things I need to hear.)

It’s far too easy to identify with my narratives and live in those thoughts, but these insights pierce my balloons and deflate my ego when it’s identifying too strongly with the wrong parts of me.

I want to be loved and understood, but I never thought that there could be so much understanding from someone who’s never met me and who’s not even writing for me.

At times, I fear that I can never good good enough, be worthy enough, or really be loved. But these insights show me that my inner patterns do fit among humans — at least somewhat, at least some of the time.

For better or worse, being called on my secret tendencies make me feel understood. And accepting those things — even the ugly parts — makes me a better man.

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It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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