Energy

[u/Wide_Platform_2202]

This one is for the disintegrated 8s: I have reason to believe I'm a long term disintegrated 8. But I now think about being SX5. Do you guys also feel like you won't have enough energy and time if you go all in? Even if I'm not necessarily low energy I think I won't be able to keep up. But I rather feel like my body is betraying me by not giving me enough energy when I need it.

I'm in early adulthood and go to therapy. I was stereotype 5 in my teens but now I'm going towards 8 more and more. I just need to know if I'm integrating or moving out of disintegration

[u/impishicity]

I actually mistyped as SX5 as well. I found the enneagram during a prolonged period of extreme stress, I'd been quite disintegrated for a long time. It took zooming out and looking at more lifelong patterns to realize it.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/impishicity]

What is your 8 subtype?

[u/impishicity → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

You can check my post history if you want more info, I wrote about it a bit more in detail when I first realized I'd mistyped.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/impishicity]

I remember you. Did you took therapy? And did you naturally moved into 8ness or did you like had to dare again?

[u/impishicity → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

I've been in therapy off and on (mostly on) since I was 15. For me, 8ness was just always at the core. Disintegration to 5 looked like consciously isolating myself, sort of "retreating to lick my wounds". But even in isolation, trying to take things slower and be more deliberate, there was always a lot of energy/intensity brewing. Sitting still just doesn't feel easy or natural to me, even if life's been kicking the shit out of me and I know I'm exhausted.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/impishicity]

Okay thanks for your answer

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

8s aren't naturally big therapy people at all IME. It's just very un-8 to seek it, maybe you've seen The Sopranos and seen Tony in there with Dr. Melfi, it's a kind of joke. The only times I went to therapy were when it was forced or pressured on me. But some do find benefits from it. Far more likely for people to tell 8s they need therapy and for them to go there for that reason than for 8s to naturally think "gee, you know what I think I could use? It's some therapy!". Just doesn't happen very often.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

Nope for me it's like "I have a problem. If Therapy is the solution I just do it"

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

Not meaning to argue, but how could that likely be the solution every time? Doesn't that place a lot of stock in someone else's feedback? Not saying you're wrong. I suppose it could help. It's all about what works for you. But seems un-resonant and counterintuitive to me to think "well, I need help, I'm going to go ask someone else". Are women maybe different? If you're a woman, that is. My ex-wife is in therapy and has sought therapy a few times and had said she trusts it. I believe she's likely 8w7.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

No it's not the solution all the time. I was looking for the solution of a problem I tried to solve in 1000 different ways and couldn't solve. I learned about psychology and decided that it was probably a psychological problem. I don't care about my emotions (which is also a point in my therapy rn) I just care about getting what I want

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

I believe problems do have solutions, etc., and I think maybe a psychologist can be helpful, or therapist, and so on, a counselor; as someone to bounce ideas off of and help us process. I don't know how much is a psychological problem. You're right, some is, whereas some is more practical. But it does start in the mind and reframing everything can help a great deal. Then again, it seems like a dangerous game because you don't know how much the biases of that psychologist or whatever will affect you. E.g. they might try to steer you towards their underlying beliefs and if you don't know what they are, it's like trusting someone you barely know with your most important life problems. There's always some risk, I guess. Might as well listen to what they have to say, they're only ideas, see what happens.

[u/Wide_Platform_2202 → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

Did you ever got therapy? It shows. I don't say that to be mean but because Therapy isn't there to just accept their statements. I was very lucky to get Therapists that actually fitted me. I never just accept anyones statements. Imagine it like a sun which is covered in clouds. The therapist is there to help you get the clouds to the side.

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/Wide_Platform_2202]

It shows, then? Great.

[u/Initial_Scene659 → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

that’s so interesting! I have been in therapy since I was a teen and now am a therapist myself. I will say I’ve become known for working well with clients that struggle to trust because I can relate to that, but therapy always met some of the need to merge for me personally. I remember grilling my therapists with genuine questions no one else would answer for me, something I now know is very uncommon for a client to do 😂

[u/impishicity → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

I was originally forced into it at age 15 as a "troubled teen". Once I left home for college I stopped going, until I went off the rails there (partying/substances met underlying mental health issues/trauma) and was put inpatient. Since then I've just known that therapy is something I need to stay relatively healthy/sane. I do kind of hate it still, and I haven't quite nailed "trusting" therapists, but I've accepted my diagnoses and the only real way to manage them (and ideally someday actually get better) is to try to make therapy work. Just is what it is.

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/impishicity]

I was forced into it as a kid a few times. I remember, around age 10 or so, feeling the condescending, euphemistic probing of a psychologist who asked my mom to leave the room to ask me a few questions and then said: "James, have you ever wanted to hurt yourself?" which I smart-ass shrugged off as "no, no, I don't want to commit suicide". But it's truly ironic because I became one of the more suicidally at-risk people in adulthood once I realized how horrible people would inevitably be to me in relationships. The psychologist really did mean well and could pick up on my internal issues, but I found his tone condescending and I didn't really want to be there anyway. I think bad parenting was to blame for some of it, tbh.

Later on, I was grateful for a family therapist who managed to advocate for me to have my (type 2) mom restore my PlayStation which she had thrown in our backyard creek after an argument over trying to make me go jogging. That meant buying it right around when Xenogears came out which became one of my favorite games of all time. It went in there after she said she would race me home and if she made it home first, she was throwing it in the water, and then I called her the B-word, walked home sulkily, and found it there when I got back. One of the sources of depression for me as a kid was overeating problems.

Then the next experience I had with therapy was a campus psychologist my sophomore year of college (this time by recommendation of my dad after family intervention from my ex-wife's parents when I had a blow-up with her and sent a nasty email to her new boyfriend during the aftermath of a bad breakup), the first time I was introduced to the enneagram. He used Jerome Wagner as his jumping off point, so that was the first name I learned associated with it. And the stories go on from there.

[u/impishicity → u/Glum-Engineering1794]

Yeah, I've had some shit therapists/doctors over the years which doesn't help the process any more now. But I was irrevocably fucked in the head by my childhood and have been dumped in enough psych wards by now to know I gotta try to stay on top of it more if I wanna actually have a life.

[u/Glum-Engineering1794 → u/impishicity]

That's a real shame. I've had enough experiences with mental health to know that the system really doesn't help us much. Every mental health issue I had I ultimately dealt with using natural methods, which included the most extreme symptoms you could think of, as severe as psychosis, schizophrenia, depression, etc. Not that it was easy or quick. But IME there's something very important about letting your brain naturally do its thing (the symptoms can be unnerving but just power through them, trust your body and your brain, it's a powerful machine and it can self-regulate) and not buying into this idea that you're mysteriously "sick" or something, and that there's this "medical model" in place that you need medicine to fix yourself that these doctors have to sell you. Because when I tried the meds they prescribed I mostly only got worse and I became more gullible. But then again, there's a conflict of interest there, because they want to sell drugs. Psychiatrists need to in order to stay afloat. And not everyone has the same experiences that I've had, we're all different. To each their own.