The Journey to
Loving Kindness
One day you finally knew
what you had to do,
and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!" each voice cried....
(From
The Journey, a poem by Mary Oliver)
All of us
want love. And all of us, if we are honest, have at some time in our lives attached
strings to our caring for someone else. For those who are
Twos on the Enneagram this is a core dilemma, particularly so because
what Twos experience is that others depend on them utterly, and that dependence
can become a "drag".
Twos thrive
on being needed and thus create the very
dependency
that burdens them. This is the passion of
pride, the basis for their fixation
of entitlement: Twos feel that they are "owed" because of all they have
given.
An
unfortunate caricature is often created of this style, that Twos are solicitously,
hand-wringingly, helpful people. I have only once run into someone this obvious (a
personal assistant to one of my clients, who punctuated every response with, "Was
that helpful?").
So if you're
a "Two" you may not recognize yourself in the caricature. You're
likely, instead, to experience yourself as certain of your ability to cope with
whatever is required and as being needed to resolve difficult situations.
Your pride
may show up as a genuine feeling of satisfaction that you were
able to have an impact.
let's say you've mentored someone who,
because of your attention, has achieved a personal goal.
As much as
your efforts may have contributed to that achievement, pride is still a problem for you if
your help has strings. And it takes great personal honesty to admit there are
strings. If this person you've mentored, for example, decides to move in a different
direction, how will you feel about all the effort you've expended? Will you feel let down?
Even betrayed?
Twos create their own burdens because they find it so difficult
to turn people down. One client observed, "My boss gets me to do things by saying,
'There's no one else here who can do it as well as you.'"
Most people
react to their discovery of such self-defeating characteristics by deciding they just
won't "be that way" anymore. But while "deciding" to change helps,
that alone won't make it happen. These unconscious patterns have a life of their own, and
in the end they can only be transformed by the
development of a neutral self-observer.
The counter
to pride is
humility, not in the sense of self-abasement or of a noisy
humility, but in accepting ourselves as we are, in acknowledging our own limitations
instead of focusing on the imperfections and neediness of those we care about and support.
The transformation will occur not by our "doing" anything, but by simply
acknowledging and accepting the evidences of pride when they show up:
When we're
no longer attached to pride, when we're able to offer support without
strings, we're on the journey to true loving-kindness.
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