I read your
article on Sevens. My fear is not nearly so much of pain as of confinement. The enthusiasm
you so accurately describe is a type of inner expansion. I bear my arthritis pain quite
nicely, thank you, but the confinement of it really gets me down. We
Sevens fear we'll
be bored, have no options, and if I had to face life imprisonment or death, I'm with
Patrick Henry...
This reader is referring to the article on the Seven's path of
transformation, where I wrote:
(The Seven's) determined cheerfulness manifests a coping
strategy developed as children to blunt or cover up any pain. Because they've avoided pain
all their lives, their pain threshold is low and they feel pain very deeply... we can all
identify with the urge to escape pain by doing something pleasurable.
I
agree the Seven's issues are not necessarily with
physical pain, though
my language and the example of my mother's avoidance of pain from broken ribs could lead
to that inference. My mother's a
Nine, and I meant the example as a metaphor.
It's been true of Sevens I've coached that "pain" refers
to whatever for that person brings discomfort, and for most (maybe all?) Sevens,
being confined is extremely uncomfortable. The Seven's avoidance of
"pain" is really more accurately understood as a
passion for pleasure,
a compulsion to seek variety that, according to Claudio Naranjo, is "not lessened by
reality." In other words, reality itself is not a satisfaction, and that's the
real burden of pain the unexamined Seven bears.
One of my Seven clients is also an
ENTP on the Myers-Briggs,
which exaggerates his "Seven-ness" beyond belief. Go to the ENTP link and you'll
see what I mean. Neither Sevens nor ENTPs like to bother with detail; both are
future-oriented, like to leave things open, crave activity and variety. Like my
reader, this person also told me the worst possible thing he could imagine was being
jailed. And he'd felt almost unbearably trapped in his job because the newness had
worn off and he was stuck dealing with corporate politics. He'd been fantasizing about people he could connect with in the hierarchy to get him out
of there.
Instead, I suggested he use his discomfort as a clue that his
Enneagram "stuff" was kicking into gear; that he was, in fact, feeling
imprisoned right then and there and feeling compelled to be released. To
his credit he did stick with it, felt less constrained by his own compulsive wish for
escape, and ended up succeeding his boss as division manager (I'm not sure if that last
part is a happy ending or not).