A
New Voice
(Interview with an
Enneagram Two)
I'm collecting real-life
stories of the change process through these interviews so others
can see what it's like
for each of the Enneagram styles as they go through increasing
self-awareness; for people who are younger or less experienced
or new to the Enneagram, to learn from your story the high
points and low points, to give them a bit of a roadmap. To
start, what does the word "transformation" mean to you?
For me it
means a sense of "enlightenment," the awareness of what has
happened to bring me to this point, and how I digest it. Some
things take me a long time to understand, and I tend to want to
know, "Why am I doing this?" "Why is this affecting me this
way?" So it seems to take longer for me to go from an
awareness, to the enlightenment, to a willingness to change the
behavior.
Some people, when they go through
the process of change, find it very difficult.
Something
that's been tough for me in the journey is finding a lot of
behaviors I didn't like about myself. Those are painful to look
at. I joined Overeaters Anonymous, and going through the
journey of atoning, admitting to some of the things I've done to
people has been incredibly hard. I'll warn you that I'm really,
really tired today, and very emotional. Lots of anger last
week, lots of stress and frustration.
Do you
want to talk about that a little bit, get it off your chest?
I don't
know that there is any getting it off my chest, because
it's a recurring thing and it's getting worse, here in the
workplace. And much of it is going to be me no longer taking
responsibility for the things I can't control. I had a
commitment for a project over the weekend to build a playground,
and I walked out of here Friday when some bad things happened
because it wasn't my responsibility to change it. I took a serious step away from trying to fix everybody's
life around me about four years ago. That was an easy
process. The hard part is taking charge of my own life.
So you
experience some kind of emotional shift, and then lay out some sort of framework around it
to explain what's
happening.
Yes. A
big glaring one is that I have a terrible history of only having
relationships with married men, and that goes against everything
in my spiritual upbringing. It appears to have been a
worthiness issue, where I didn't feel I was worth anything
better. It was also avoidance. I didn't have to make any kind
of emotional commitment because I could give them 75% of me. And
it was an incredible 75%. I was a wonderful mistress! I
married my second husband for the wrong reasons. I was a
caretaker. He took care of me and my daughter financially, but
I took care of him and his family for a long time. But he was someone else's husband, someone else's
father when I met him. The most important men in my life have always been
someone else's husband. After I went through IPI, I made a conscious decision that
even though I had wonderful emotional ties to these men, it
still wasn't enough. I said, "Nope, this doesn't fit, and I'm not going to
do this anymore!"
Something
had shifted. What's IPI?
Interpersonal Intensive. It's an experiential, five-day seminar
with a facilitator. It brought a major
shift in many areas of my life. It was
the beginning of things just not fitting anymore. Losing a lot
of baggage.
As you to look back over your
life, was that was the first event that was transforming for
you?
That was
the first one of any huge impact.
And it
was because you experienced yourself in a different way?
Yes. The whole premise is loving and
accepting myself and other people for who they are. And it's O.K. if I'm screwed up, it's just who I am and there are no
apologies for that. That was a big thing. And also, a real heavy governing
issue in my whole life had been with my mother, the non-relationship or whatever
I'd had
with her over the years. There was a whole basket of stuff I'd
been carrying around.
And what
was that "basket"? Could you describe that a little bit?
What was in it?
It was
more like a big, heavy backpack. Stuff I'd carried
around. Mom,
control issues with my whole family, my self-image or lack
thereof.
Mom's an only child who married much too soon, divorced back
when it wasn't cool to get a divorce, 48 years ago. In all
likelihood she suffered some the same things I did, for
different reasons, when my grandfather died. Her father was a
huge force in both our lives. We buried him on my fifth
birthday, four months after I got a new stepfather, eight months
after I lost my real father. He moved out of town, joined the
Air Force, so there was a lot of stuff about men leaving my
life, and my Mom suffering the same kind of thing. She was
critical of me because I was so much like my father. I was
probably a constant reminder of him. She stayed mad at him for
twenty years.
O.K., so
what kinds of things did she criticize in you?
It wasn't
so much criticism as that I was kind of a non-person. She had a
second family and my sister and I kind of got lost in the
shuffle. Lots of anger in my family, lots of fights. I remember
myself as a child with Two qualities. If I was sweet like my sister and nurturing,
everybody would love me. I
took care of so much as a young child. I was fixing
meals by the time I was ten years old. And childcare--because I
had four younger siblings. My mom worked out of the home and I
took care of her. I also took care of my invalid grandmother. In fact I went to live with her when I was fourteen because I
couldn't get along with my stepfather and my mom. It worked
very well for me to go stay with my grandmother. It was a
school district I really liked where there was an opportunity
for me to be artistic at school. My grandmother
had diabetes and had had multiple amputations. She was my
spiritual connection. She and I went to church together. I
never saw it as taking care of her. Never! That was
the best time of my life... (cries). And it's
come full circle because I had such a deep relationship with
Mom's
mother that she didn't. It took me a while to see she
wanted that with her mom but didn't have it. he was close to
her father when she was growing up on the farm. I
was able to take the time to stop and think what it was really
like for my mom to be a young woman in those years, being
divorced. took the time to interview her after my group went
through the Inner Child workbook, and it was an incredibly
enlightening time. We just stepped into each other 65 more
degrees in the emotional connection. There were things I didn't know that were very painful for her. She didn't mean to
be that way. I truly believe no one wants to be the way they
are, it just happens. And she
did finally talk about how she knew that she was never there for
us back then. And I said, "You know what, Mom, very seldom are
Moms there; that's what grandparents are for. There was
no question of forgiveness. She didn't mean to do it.
And the self-image you mentioned that was also one of the issues
that showed up for you; the work was around accepting yourself
and others, but there was some question of worthiness and
self-image. Can you talk more about that?
The poor
self-image, even though I was talented musically and in dance
and athletically, there was a stereotype back then that cute
little blond-haired girls were the ones who were loved the most,
or admired the most, got the most attention. And I
certainly didn't fit that mold; I was very dark-haired, and
dark-skinned, and just looked different. I was in
all the school plays, played volleyball, softball, was always
very competitive--never the best but certainly could get
out there and hang in with the best of them, and I got strokes
for that, but never from my Mom. It wasn't
till I was a teenager and started to become a woman that I began
to get appreciation for what I was physically, and that was
another bag of worms because that was wonderful attention but it
wasn't good attention.
You tried to find self-worth through sexuality.
Absolutely! Oh yes. I knew
early on that nothing was going to appear for me magically, that
I had to rely on my own resources to get what I wanted. I was a
mother early, 17 when I got pregnant with my daughter,
turned 18 a month before she was born. Her father was nine years
older than I was. I'm glad I married him. My mother forced me
to marry him, because I did give my daughter a name and she does have a
father, which was very important at the time. But I knew
I wasn't going to be married long, and it was always in the
back of my mind, "O.K., how are we going to make it?" Because
welfare was really never an option for my family.
So once
again, you couldn't depend on anyone else but yourself.
Absolutely! I had a lot of emotional support from my
grandmother. hen I found out I was pregnant she and I talked
it over, and I was going to give
my daughter up for adoption. That didn't set well with my
mother and she had my daughter's father arrested for statutory
rape. It was an ugly situation. So the Juvenile Court judge at
the time decided that whatever we could work out that would be
best for all is what we should do. So we got
married and tried to make the best of it, but I knew it
wasn't going to be for very long. And my family never ostracized me for what happened.
They rallied
around.
Although you
were accomplished, you did things well, and you had a
relationship with your grandmother, there was the sense that in
the eyes of someone very important, you somehow didn't measure
up. You weren't the little, cute, curly-headed blonde.
And
then
my grandfather died. The sun rose and set for him in
everything I did; you would have thought I was a blonde! And I
had a relatively good relationship with my Dad, but he he was out of the country in the Air Force,
so he really wasn't around much. My early recollections of
him were pretty violent because he and my Mom fought a lot and I
got caught in the cross-fire. But I guess it seemed like I
never really fit into my family. My only blood sibling is one
of these loving little cute, cuddly, everybody-loved-her sweet
things, never did anything wrong. And I was a renegade, getting
in fist fights in the neighborhood, always in trouble. I used
to chalk it up to being the oldest because my Mom was so strict
with me as the first one. But it was kind of a
pattern. I was always on the edge, doing something that I
probably shouldn't, and I got caught, too much. I lied
when I was fifteen, said I was eighteen so I could jump out of
an airplane. I did
some really stupid things when I was young, and I'm very
fortunate to be here. I think it took becoming a mother to
change that.
So being a mother was a transforming process for you
as well. In what ways do you feel
you're changed because of being a mother?
Other
than my grandmother, my daughter was the first unconditional
love. I mean, there was no doubt in anybody's mind how the two
of us felt about each other. We were on our own from the time
she was three, and we were very close. I took her everywhere,
did everything with her. There
really wasn't a sense of belonging to anyone before her.
It was,
"Wow, this is a real connection, this is part of me." I
struggled for a while with the fact that I'd come close to
giving her up for adoption, and she became more precious as she
got older, because I could never carry another child. My
second child was a full-term stillbirth. My daughter turned two in May
and he was born in September, and then I ended my marriage two
months later. We went through some rough times--I was
physically incapacitated for about nine months, broke my leg in
five places in an ice skating accident. And we were on our own,
again. We're just so close. Back then we were kind of a team,
even though there was never any doubt who was the Mom and who
was the child. What makes me so different after her? She
wasn't going to go away.
A kind of
trust developed, a trust in relationship.
Yes. I was working two jobs and would leave the
one job Friday, pick her up, take her to my Mom's, go to the
other job, and would finish working at 2:30 in the morning and
would go out to breakfast. My Mom wasn't happy about that. She thought I
should come right home. And she would tell my daughter
"Your Mom doesn't care about you," and that kind of
thing. But my daughter just wouldn't believe her! We had a
little bit of a rocky time where if I was late, she would be
afraid I wasn't going to come get her. In that same time span,
my Mom tried to talk my daughter's father into taking custody of
her away from me, because I wasn't living my life the way my
mother thought I should. It
infuriated her how devoted my daughter was to me. My Mom
was generally out of my life when I got older. She had a lot of
anger to deal with. Every one of my brothers and sisters
suffered the same thing I did when they got to a certain age.
She was a very ugly, ugly person for a number of years, a very
vicious person. She's come out of a lot of it, and she's gotten
the message that it's unacceptable behavior. In a lot of my
talks with her, I tried to explain why I had to move away from
her for a three-year period. "Mom, this just won't work. I
can't allow you to do this to me. I can't allow you to do this
to my daughter."
And did
you do that before IPI; it was something you initiated?
It was a
terrible, terrible situation. My sister can't have children,
and I found a child for her through a private situation. It
was a very delicate situation. My Mom's a very big
gossip, and while my sister and her husband were making the
decision about this child that was to be born, they were living
in another state and I told no one, but when the baby was born
and everything got under way we told everybody. My fiancé at
the time knew because we were living together. I told him and my
daughter a week before the baby was born. My mother was so
furious that she didn't have anything to do with this and no one told her about it that she left town, and she wouldn't
acknowledge that baby for a year! And that was the straw that
broke the camel's back. Oh, my Mom's so vicious, revengeful! She has uncles who have killed people! My grandfather's side of
the family are very angry people, though my grandfather left; he
got away from them. So it was, "I cannot do this
anymore, I cannot be a part of this anymore." This baby was a
gift to the whole family! This ranks right up there with the birth of my own
daughter: going to the hospital and getting this little girl and
taking her home to my sister, who had driven in from out of
state. The people who were there when I brought her still talk
about what an incredibly beautiful experience it was. And no
one knows that this little girl is my best friend's grand-child,
who had been given up for adoption. And my friend has never crossed the line. The child is now
sixteen, and my friend is comfortable with it. So that was a
time when I had to say, "Mom, I can't do this anymore." I made
sure my daughter spent Christmas with them, and everything,
but I had to back out of family functions.
It was a
path for you to stand up for yourself and say, "You know what?
This really isn't O.K. I don't need your love so much that I'm
going to bow to this situation."
I
couldn't say it for myself but I could for that baby. And it was
a move in the right direction.
You've
said you felt "unworthy," yet that was a way of coping, in that if
"I'm not O.K." in
the view of significant others, then to stand out and be who I
am openly is not O.K. either, so I have to get my needs met indirectly. You did what you could with the self-image you'd been able to develop so far.
My second
husband was capable of standing up for himself. He was so bright. I just wish I
could have dealt with his dependencies. Had I been a little
more mature I might have hung in, because there was so much good
in him. He accepted the blackest parts of my heart, he
recognized and really saluted my quiet power. He always told me, "You know, you're really
unstoppable! There's nothing you can't do." And every vehicle
I ever needed was available to do whatever I wanted to do while
I was married to him.
But he
needed you to take care of him.
He was
fun, handsome, rich, and a drunk! I was his toy for a
while, and he was so good to my daughter. He's the only father
she identifies with. She still feels his loss tremendously. She couldn't even ask her own father to give her away at her
wedding because she wanted my second husband to. I said,
"Sweetie, don't ask either one of them," so she took that part
out because she loved this man so much. But I really felt we
had to come down to reality. We had businesses to run, and his
children came to live with us when we'd only been married four
months. I couldn't go out and play and go for lunch and go for
cocktail hour. He basically played all day but I couldn't do it
and hold down the house. And I really took it that he didn't
love me anymore when he started drinking without me. We made it
ten years. Quite frankly, he got into cocaine and I just
couldn't go there.
And again, that choice, that decision, you initiated for yourself.
Yes.
I could see the writing on the
wall. Everybody laughed at me when I went out and got a job
while I had a brand new Cadillac and a Corvette in the garage. "Why are you working?" "Well, I need to feel a purpose," and I
made myself a new career because I knew I wasn't going to be
married to him. And I divorced him three years later.
Whatever awareness you developed as a consequence of the
IPI seminar, you were already coming to grips with
your role
of taking care of people.
Yes. I had started
pulling away and not
taking on responsibilities I used to take on in the whole family,
both sides of my family.
So what
is the part you mentioned at the beginning of our talk, the
behaviors you don't like to see in yourself?
I have a vicious temper. I've worked hard to
curb it and I'm proud that very few people see it, but
there are times when I just am out of control. I absolutely
went through the phone at my son-in-law. I caught myself and
didn't go totally over the edge because I want to
preserve and make sure I have a relationship with my daughter
and my son-in-law and my grand-daughters. But I came close, and I don't like being that out of control.
Also I want to be thinner and I know it's my choice, to be thin
or not, so I'm
discouraged to see I'm so lazy about this. Why do I not
care? I'm
journaling about the fact that it's no
coincidence the last married man I was involved with also decided he needed
more than two of us in his life. He met someone else while he
and I were still deeply involved. I was always a nurturer, but
also very sexual. Sex was a big part of who we were as a
couple. And the third woman was the "golfing gal."
Then he
developed prostate cancer. I took care of him up until he died,
and packed on sixty pounds in a four-month period. I attributed
it to my thyroid gland going wacky, going through the change of
life, quitting smoking. But here it has stayed and now it's going
up. So I think my self-image has something to do with, "It's
O.K. to be a sexual being with someone who isn't married," that
I have to get it through my head but it's still so gray, and
there's shame there.
And
since him?
I've been
totally celibate for almost two years. I've stopped being a
physical sexual person. And I'm thinking, "Gee, is this an
internal punishment?" Because I was a Jezebel all these years? And one
of the men who was very big in my life is the husband of a
dear friend who we think put us together. She had
a very serious heart condition and was not a sexual person for
five years before she got a new heart two years ago. I thought,
"No I'm not going to do this anymore either!" I dearly love
this man and I'm feeling a lot of guilt, even though her
son and her husband both think she gave her husband to me
because she trusted me not to make any bad things happen,
because I've never wrecked a marriage. I'm very
discrete. But I feel
so terribly guilty, though obviously not guilty enough or I
wouldn't have done it!
You
believed you had the implicit approval of his wife. In a way you were taking
care of her, and him, and you at the same time. So how do you
move through the feeling of shame?
I stay
with the feeling, journal it. I went to visit my friend and
her husband and had a good, good
weekend with them. A couple of months later he called and said
she was going to be out of town and wanted me to come down, and
I had a bad feeling. I told him I couldn't
come, hung up the phone, and started feeling a tightness,
started crying. I did some journaling about what I was feeling,
wrote letters to him I never mailed. It was probably an
eight-hour process where I was absolutely miserable, and I
finally realized that probably in the back of my mind I had envisioned taking her place in their life. I love
him, I have a good time with him, and I fit so well. I had to
grieve the fact that there's no place for me
there except as a friend. I was a real mess, crying and
hurting. A lot of hurt. But I
don't feel any more shame around the two of them. I spent a week
with them after that incident, and it was like we'd moved to a
different place.
Journaling is one way you go about building self-awareness,
personal change. Are there other ways
you help yourself when you're feeling
stuck?
Centering, meditating. Sometimes I meditate two or three times
a day. I got
started with a tape called Rainbow Centering, where you go down down through the
colors of the rainbow, each color representing a physical,
mental, spiritual plane; to slow everything down: your body,
mind, spirit. By
the time you get through you've basically opened everything up. I've had a couple of breath-work sessions and
that was an extremely cleansing situation. But the centering
helps me get a clean slate, helps me stay balanced.
You let
go. Is there anything else about letting go?
Absolutely! There is no doubt in my mind that I have spoken
with God. I really have handed my life over to God. I truly
trust and know that even in my darkest hours whatever I need
will always be there. It may not be what I want, but… I totally know and admit I don't have all the
answers, but I'm to the point where I don't make any more deals
with God.
You experience yourself as having changed. Could you summarize the ways in which
you feel you are changed?
Probably
the biggest shift for me was knowing I really had to shrink
it down, that I can't take care of everybody, I really do
need to devote a lot of my time to take care of me, and I
have to pick and choose where I go with my nurturing. I
do feel I need to give back to my community and my God
through service, but I also need to take care of myself. I'm just not that capable anymore (laughs). I pick
and choose my friends very carefully, people who share
the same path. I don't want to wallow in what happened in the past. I
want to move forward and learn more. And
there are people who are going to be needy, and if God feels
I need to take care of them in some way, I'll be moved to
do so.
You have a gift you can
choose to use, but
you're not compelled to be that way anymore.
If
something comes in my face a couple of times and I think I've
dealt with it, but it keeps coming back, I know I haven't dealt
with it!On Saturday I was just running ragged over a community
project and there was a lot of petty political squabbling going
on between the politicians and the big cheeses on this project. I kept asking, "O.K., what's the message? I'm not a centered
human being; what can I do?" Just at that time somebody walked
up and asked, "Hey, does anybody know where there's a drop-in
center? We've got twelve cases of canned food." I said, "Yes I
do!" Made a phone call, loaded my car, took it to the drop-in
center, and that's where God showed me I needed to
nurture. That's where I moved from a terrible spot I'd gotten
myself into, and I thought "Thank you, Lord." It's just staying
open to hearing. The other
way I'm really different is with my daughter. I used to fix
everything because I didn't want her to hurt, I didn't want her
to do without, I didn't want her kids to do without. I didn't
want her to go through what I did when I was raising her. It ended up that I enabled her to avoid reality, and I've not
done her a service. So I've gently eased out of that. I'm
responsible to love her and support her at her endeavors, I'm
not responsible for her actions anymore. And that was a
struggle. She'd say, "Mom, my daughter forgot this, can you run
it by?" "No, honey, I'm sorry, I'm late for work." I've changed
in that
monetary things don't matter anymore. I was very driven. I was
very lucky in that the men in my life were always well-heeled. I got expensive gifts, cars, and what-have-you. That was, I'm
sure, a trade-off. There's no one like that in my life anymore,
and it's O.K. I drive a beat-up old car, won't go into debt for
anything.
And that
was your choice. You said, "I'm not going to do this anymore."
And it
just doesn't matter. I don't care if I have a man in my life
anymore. In my last serious relationship I was engaged for nine
years. I've been on my own without living with a man for over
ten years, and it's comfortable. It used to be not
comfortable, but I'm truly content. My family's not as content
with it. I don't have
time for a man right now. When I go home at night I'd rather
bury myself in an Enneagram book or do nothing than fix dinner
for a man. I'm almost afraid that I would stop my forward progress. Because
that's my history.
The more free you feel to choose, the easier it will
be. O.K. a couple of other questions before you go. Are you aware of any ways in which you get in your own way on
the path? Any resistances or barriers you create?
Typical
barriers like "not enough time." I withdraw; I've been
known to hide for a whole month. Typical avoidances where I'll
find myself almost on purpose heading into an ice cream parlor. A
workshop I went to described eating disorders as
stuffing things in our mouths to take the place of other
things. I need to research that because the standard
things aren't working. I feel I had a sexual addiction
at one time and I've exchanged one addiction for
another, because when I've been in love and sexually active
I'm sleek and preened.
Both Twos
and Nines merge with another, and with Sexual
subtypes that may show up sexually, seeking the essential
Self through the sexual relationship. And there's a similar
experience with food.
I'd
rather go back to sex! (Laughter)
Last question:
When you think of your path, what metaphor or picture
or vision do you have for it?
Mine is
definitely stages, some more deep than others. There was a
total awareness of, "This is the world order, this is the way
God takes care of us and loves us" at a very young age with my
grandmother. Then I hung out with the Devil for awhile! And
always remembering that beautiful, soft garden; even when I was
hanging out with the Devil it wasn't as focused as it had been
but always knowing that wherever my path took me, He was always
there. I can even remember an incident when I was actually in
the process of making love and thinking, "I shouldn't be here."
And if there was any point where the stage became more clear it
was when I started centering with real conviction and
relaxation--then it was, "It's O.K. that I've been off the
path." I almost smiled when I came to that realization: "O.K.,
you're back, now let's go." It is a journey and I know I'm
going to slip off the path, but not quite as deep anymore.
And how
would you describe where the path is going?
Heaven is
a peaceful place in my mind. I don't know that it's a real
place. After death I still hope my soul will go on,
because I feel my grandmother's soul with me from time to time.
But this is more a state of mind and peacefulness in my
heart. If I were to find out tomorrow I'm going to die in
two weeks, it's O.K., I'm really in a good spot, and the things
that aren't done--like my physical being--don't stand in the way
of what's really important. All is
right with the world. Desolation is a feeling I remember, feeling so black, as a friend
described it "absolutely in the dungeon," where I would
actually go outside so I could feel the stark horror of
being so cold, being bone-chillingly cold, to really magnify
the desolation. If
nothing else, being able to recognize when bad stuff is coming
has been such a gift. I always know that no matter what
happens I'll get through it.
