Radical Allowing for Expanding Self-awareness
“Pardon me, buddy, can you spare some change?”
The personal development / spiritual growth industry is a multi-billion dollar market. People want to change everything—jobs, cars, houses, mates, hair color, facial structure, attitudes—there is nothing we don’t want to change except ourselves. Lip service and money are the two primary contributions most of us make to the idea of change. Real change requires radical allowing.
In the realm of spiritual transformation, change doesn’t mean alteration. It’s not a question of trading up, exchange, or renovation. It’s not a matter of degree — quantity or quality. It’s a journey into a mysterious metamorphosis, a radical allowing: from the known into the unknown, from the habitual into the forgotten. Only later do we see and understand how upside-down our situation was.
In addition to its facility as a map of character structure and human behavior, the enneagram reflects specific dynamic laws (processes) of manifestation and transformation. The two-dimensional diagram is symbolic of a dynamic process. Part of the downside in writing about the enneagram is that this plays into the mind’s belief that it can avail itself of a dynamic, alchemical process through intellectual understanding. The mind’s knowing is insignificant compared to what mystics call knowing. The mind’s way of knowing is one of the most significant barriers to real knowledge. It is the personality’s most formidable defense mechanism.
Each personality type has a particular strategy or methodology for dealing with dynamics (issues, conflicts, situations, sensations, etc.) that are universal to the human experience, such as anxiety. It would be easy to map each fixation’s relationship with anxiety onto the enneagram.
Anxiety is:
- a precursor to exposure
- a source of energy or fuel
- a trigger for histrionics, acting out
- defended against by contraction and avoidance
A more intimate understanding with deeper insight can be gained through a radical allowing of experiential exploration into one’s history and current relationship with the experience of anxiety.
What is anxiety? Why is an exploration of it worth anyone’s time and attention?
“Anxiety is the space between the now and the then.” Richard Abell
The dictionary defines anxiety as concern about a future event or uncertainty that disturbs the mind and keeps it in a state of painful uneasiness. Anxiety has the same Latin root as anger. Synonyms include uneasy, disturbed, concerned, restless, watchful, worried, and apprehensive. Psychologically, anxiety is seen as apprehension due to unconscious conflicts.
So, anxiety has an energetic or dynamic quality, but you can observe that this energy is not free-flowing; it’s bound up. Anxiety involves a constrained state of agitation experienced in all three centers (head, heart, gut) or throughout the nervous system. People discharge this energy in various ways (thinking, emoting, doing), and each personality type is predisposed to specific conditioned patterns of binding (tension) and discharge.
Anxiety can be understood as — a response to the anticipation or threat of danger with psychological, emotional, and physiological components. This has far-reaching implications for those of us deeply exploring the self because the false self (character structure and identity based on image and history) projects its subjective reality, associated dangers, and fears onto the external world. Ego-life is a life of constant tension and anxiety, most of which is kept at an unconscious level.
So, we have four critical aspects of this dynamic:
- Danger and Threat
- Bound-up energy
- Projection of the past onto the present or into the future
- Unconsciousness
Danger and threat are intimately involved with the self-preservation instinct. A human organism (infant) going through a psychological (physical, mental, and emotional) development process cannot yet separate the appearance of danger from real objective danger. Every threat, real or imagined, is experienced by the child as being on the brink of annihilation. Children experience things totally — there isn’t 50% danger or a 10% possibility of annihilation — it’s 100% — total — and the experience permeates every cell, every neuron.
As we grow and our perception broadens, we learn how to bind the energies associated with painful experiences like rejection, punishment, guilt, shame, abandonment, disgust, judgment, invalidation, etc. This is a survival need because immature neurology can’t deal with the magnitude of the pain and energy.
With its expanding perception, the developing mind assists our survival by looking for possible threats and dangers so we can avoid or deal with them as soon as possible. It does this by projecting the past onto the present. Since the past is now the present and contains material that is too painful to keep in the present, we repress this material to stay functional.
So, where does anxiety fit into this situation, and how does it relate to the enneagram of personality types? Wilhelm Reich’s insights reveal how character structure, with its associated body armor (tension), is primarily a system of dealing with (binding) anxiety. So, each fixation or personality type is a strategy to contain anxiety.
Sigmund Freud observed that increasing anxiety signals the rising of defense mechanisms. The enneagram of personality types reveals the primary defense mechanism used by each type. This provides us with one entrance into some very revealing personal exploration.
The growth we long for is primarily an evolution into greater consciousness and a deeper, more intimate involvement in life. A big part or step in this evolution is deconditioning, freeing the arrested parts of ourselves bound up by the compulsive ways we respond to life. This requires a radical allowing, a conscious effort to cooperate with the uncomfortable and the scary.
Anxiety can be seen as a precursor to, or a herald for, the possibility of greater self-awareness. Intrapsychic development and integration involve an increasing capacity to tolerate anxiety. As our capacity to tolerate the painful, unpleasant feelings of the past increases, the associated defense mechanisms are no longer needed, and consciousness expands — the unconscious becomes conscious.
Of course, this isn’t a cakewalk. The mind’s understanding can hardly prepare us for what lies ahead. The whole process becomes more complex when considering the superego’s anti-life functioning (inner critic). Dissolving the defenses makes us vulnerable to inner attacks. Working on and dissolving the superego structure is some of the most valuable work a person can do in the service of truth.
If anxiety is a herald for greater self-awareness, we are impeding their growth opportunities by unconsciously colluding with others to help them avoid anxious states. Generally, we do this (unconsciously) to defend against our arising anxiety.
Consider anxiety not just as a barrier but as a potential gateway to deeper understanding and self-realization. According to the Diamond Approach, experiencing anxiety can signify the presence of inner boundaries and resistance. Engaging with these feelings, rather than shying away, can lead to a transformation of these blockages into opportunities for personal growth and expansion of consciousness. Anxiety, in this light, is not merely an obstacle but an invitation—an invitation to explore and transform our understanding of our vulnerabilities and the rigid defenses we construct against perceived threats. This perspective encourages embracing anxiety as a crucible for change, whereby the experiences that seem to undermine our stability become the means through which we achieve greater clarity and insight into our true nature.
I wonder:
- What is the nature of the energy that is bound up?
- What is its purpose and function?
- What would happen if it was allowed to flow freely?
Probably something radical.
Points for personal exploration:
- Are you aware of anxiety? If not, why do you think that is — since anxiety is intrinsic to ego identity?
- Look for physical symptoms of anxiety in yourself and others — nail biting, gum chewing, chattering, jingling change, tapping fingers, etc.
- Could increasing your capacity to tolerate awareness of anxiety further a deeper exploration of it and the associated issues? How?
- What can other enneagram types teach you (through observation) about anxiety? How does your mind think it will benefit from understanding anxiety? As your awareness of anxiety increases, how does that affect your sensitivity to anxiety in your environment?