Type 6: Notepad for the Collective

[Animal]

Share your ideas, questions and musings about Type 6.
Discuss the meaning of the type & how it manifests.
Address misconceptions.
Debate is welcome.

Discussion of Exemplars is welcome - but if it turns into a typing thread for someone, the mods can move the posts to a separate thread.

[Vive]

Bits that come to mind:

• The fact that you barely ever feel fear is not an indication you're not a six.
• You don't need to have any 'authority' figures you look up to or 'secretly fear'.
• Not all sixes are visibly afraid. Sure, someone well trained or experienced in picking up on body-language and mannerisms, might pick up on certain patterns. Like high-tension, an overt alertness, strong reactiveness, etc etc. Point being that there's a lot of variation in expression.

Type 6
"The extinguished flame"
Inspired by Daeva's article on type 6 in the 'Library' section of the forum along with my own experiences.
The six is someone whose sense of hope extinguished early. Winds named nature and nurture have silenced that flame and made it die. The world is cold, harsh, unforgiving. Good things might happen, but there's always the bad, the dangerous and unreliable unknown. Things won't be all right, because you never know what is coming. Why believe in the good if it could make you unprepared for the bad that could come? You might as well expect the shit to hit the fan, so you get your ass covered, so that has but a slim chance of happening (I was proud when I thought of this sentence). There are many liabilities that could lead to the loss of what's important from things minor (like keys) to major (like your life). Other people might be dangerous, but perhaps they have proven to be reliable to you in the past, or you've found that you can hardly control what other people do.

In any case, there's one liability you can control; yourself. You can prepare for the danger. Now, you've adequately prepared and you succeed in protecting yourself from danger. However, uncertainty never ends. There's always a next time, a new plan, there's always this sense of dread, frozen fear. Even when you realize all should be well and there's no practical reason to fear anything. You still feel it somewhere. It makes you want to run away from the feeling, fight it with all you have and even sublimate it by intellectualizing it. No matter what happens, you never feel quite ready, there's always some liability, something way beyond your control.

However, uncertainty is a fact in life. Hiding from or fighting against uncertainty is avoiding reality. There's a reason a six has so much fear, it's because they care, a lot about what happens to them and/or (beloved) others. Fear is just a signal that something matters to you and that you perceive that there's something at stake. Acknowledge it, listen to it and let it have weight in your decisions. Don't live your life controlled by your fears and fighting against them, live your life informed by your fears. Once start to learn to stop fighting and to truly accept the fear, the coals will begin to smoulder once more, because you realize that although you have no idea what you will end up with, you are doing your best, going with your gut when all else fails, knowing that even with every misstep you take, you learn more about how to thrive and how not to in this reality. Eventually, the flame will once more burn brightly.

For me, the coals are smouldering, barely, but smouldering. Acceptance takes time and can be a real pain in the ass, but it's a million times better than living your whole life in fear of fear, unnecessarily.

[Daeva]

To be, or not to be

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(from Hamlet, spoken by Hamlet)

[Daeva]