Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(11)

8


     THE CHALLENGER


Enneagram Type Eight

The Powerful, Dominating Type:

Self-Confident, Decisive, Willful, and Confrontational

TYPE EIGHT IN BRIEF

Eights are self-confident, strong, and assertive. Protective, resourceful, straight-talking, and decisive, but can also be ego-centric and domineering. Eights feel they must control their environment, especially people, sometimes becoming confrontational and intimidating. Eights typically have problems with their tempers and with allowing themselves to be vulnerable. At their best: self-mastering, they use their strength to improve others’ lives, becoming heroic, magnanimous, and inspiring.

     Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others

Basic Desire: To protect themselves (to be in control of their own life and destiny)

Key Motivations: Want to be self-reliant, to prove their strength and resist weakness, to be important in their world, to dominate the environment, and to stay in control of their situation.

“I’m an eight.”

“Okay, you’re an eight, then.”

“Do you think I’m an eight?”

“That’s the thing about the Enneagram,” he said. “You can’t assess someone else. Each person has to assess themselves.”

“That’s what I do,” I told Dan. “I’m a fixer. I charge in and clean up messes. Everyone’s except my own. What are the bad qualities about being an eight?”

He reassured me that there were no bad numbers, and I reassured him that I wasn’t sensitive enough to care if some numbers were bad or good, but that if we were going to work on my weaknesses, we needed to get real.

Dan told me about a conference he attended where he sat alone with groups of only sevens or groups of only eights and had asked them all what the best-kept secret of being that number was—the one thing that each number needed to work on the most.

“And?”

“All the eights said that their hidden secret is that eights lack empathy,” Dan said.

Lack of empathy. Huh.

“Like a Republican?”

     I had to think about the difference between empathy and sympathy. I can be too sympathetic to people. I’m a sucker for a sob story and I will lavish sympathy on any stranger who needs a hand. But empathy? I had to talk that through with him.

“Empathy and sympathy? What’s the distinction, again?”

“Sympathy is feeling bad for someone or for their situation. Sympathy is more like pity. Empathy is imagining what it’s like to be in that person’s shoes. Thinking about what it feels like to be another person and the understanding that their experiences and outlooks may have been unlike your own. Actually, thinking about what it’s like to be them.”

Dan asked me about those instances when I show up for people I care about and if, while I’m doing it, I think about what it feels like to be in that person’s predicament.

The answer was no.

I went to their bedside, or doorstep, or lay in bed with any of my friends who needed a friend in order to do one thing: fix the situation.

To show up repeatedly, time and time again. Whenever that happens, my sympathy is in full gear, but rarely if ever do I consider what it’s like to be that person in that moment. I want to wrap their injury and patch them up. I never stop showing up, but I don’t put myself in their shoes. Often we think we are showing up for someone, when really all we’re doing is showing everyone how great we are at showing up.

Lack of empathy.

That hit me over the head.

I have no empathy. Yes! That’s right! Like how I feel about people who like room temperature water. Some people don’t care about the temperature of their drink or the quality of ice. I don’t understand those people. Like, when flight attendants hand out room temperature Dasani water, I want to throw it out the airplane window. I’ve always looked sideways at this community of humans who are okay with room temperature water, or—God forbid—prefer it. Or people who like pineapple on their pizza or, for that matter, any other hot food with pineapple on it.

     Rosemary annoys the shit out of me too, but everyone else seems to fucking love it. Then again, I love cilantro, and people can have a visceral reaction to that, and I don’t get that at all. How could anyone hate cilantro? It feels like I just need to meet more people who hate rosemary as much as I do. But mostly everything and everyone, at some point, ends up annoying me. And now I know why. I’m not thinking about them. I have gone through life failing to understand why people have different reactions to things than I do.

Lack of empathy made total sense. I never understand why everyone doesn’t just do what I would do: Get up and trudge on. Power through. So: I have sympathy, but not empathy. I also have zero sentimentality. It’s almost like I’m allergic to it—like, when people talk about missing an old car or a home they’ve sold…I just want to tell them to please move on to the next topic, quickly. I can’t relate at all.

I was on board with being an Eight who lacked empathy. Doorways in my brain were opening.

I realize the hypocrisy of me espousing a philosophy that used a number to describe my personality, for fuck’s sake, but I do feel passionately about takeaways, especially honest ones, and this was the first time a professional had told me something about myself that was negative. I had a takeaway. No empathy was huge. That was something tangible that I could learn from—a growth edge. I didn’t care how hokey this sounded; the bottom line was that I had more information. Finding out what my weaknesses were opened the floodgates. Even if it’s a theory or a little astrology-or numerology-adjacent, if it rings true with you, then it is true to you, and that’s really all anyone needs in order to forge ahead and improve themselves. I needed to get past a roadblock, and understanding I had no empathy was a big first step.