Defectiveness, Brokenness, and Enneagram

[Animal]

Some of the enneagram literature emphasizes 'defectiveness' and 'brokenness' for fours. Yet most people I've ever been close to have confessed some feeling that they were 'not good enough.'

To me, it's clear that these feelings tie into type - but there must be a feeling of defectiveness in every type. I know a 7w8 and an 8w7 and I have seen both of them talk about ways in which they felt defective. The 8, for example has posted versions of this complaint publicly: "My energy is too big, no one can keep up, and that's why I get dumped."

So that leads to my question. In what ways do you feel defective, broken, not good enough? Where do you struggle to love yourself, and how does it tie into your type?

[Animal]

I can't speak for all fours, but to speak for myself, I don't feel 'not good enough' in some pervasive way. It's more that I'm on the wrong planet, in the wrong body (chronically ill), at the wrong time, in the wrong species.

I feel like I'd be fine if only I were on my home planet Erosia, but I made the choice to follow Sky into exile. He stopped believing in love and disappeared from Erosia - and I was warned I'd lose my magic powers, but I decided it was more important to have him in my life, even without a 'relationship.' Because without a muse, music is just math. And he was my muse.

So I chose to sacrifice and martyr myself and I ended up in Dystopia, carrying his guitar with me. When I got here I was left speaking in a whisper, because singing had been my magic power. So this broken version of myself was just dropped here in this foreign land. Thus I was left with my mission to bring Erosia to Sky , and by extension, to bring it to Earth.

My challenge is to build myself into a vessel through which Erosia may emerge through the arts - by practicing skills so its beauty may shine, unhindered by my own lack of talent. There is always something lost in translation, but I want the art to capture the essence of Erosia. In my work, I hope to touch on the "Erosia" in everyone - something universal - so that (at least some) others might see part of themselves reflected in it, too. And this is the "holy origin" that ties me to them and makes me 'cut from the same fabric' as them ---- I may have come from another planet, but underneath our species and background, we all share Eros, Passion, Beauty... and the will to express it.

This is the best way I have managed to describe the way I felt all my life. Obviously I have talked about my personal mythology here, which came out unplanned and raw through songs. I didn't sit down and write that story; it wrote itself through me organically over a long period of time. It showed up in my pictures of alter egos (who also crept up on me by accident), and in songs etc , until it formed a cohesive narrative. But that narrative encapsulates how I have always felt and I really cannot explain it better. The crux of it is, I have this strong sense of identity, but I'm never quite good enough at expressing it. My expression can always be more accurate, more pure, more honest, more beautiful. But that's up to me - to make myself into this vessel - and I will follow this muse at any cost and surrender my life to the expression of Erosia.

[Mahat]

My malaise comes from the feeling that I've fallen from grace, from a previous state of perfection that I'll never get back. I'm not concerned with moral perfection or perfectionism in the conventional sense, but more like there's a vision of myself of what I should be. There's that nagging superego that tells me that I'm not good enough, that shames me into trying to reach that state of perfection. I should be smarter, I should be thinner, I should be more interesting, I should be prettier, and on and on it goes. I lost my crown and now I'm grasping for it. In the facebook groups I wrote this,

I live and breathe ressentiment, and it's the primary motivation for anything I do.

[Daeva]

Defectiveness, brokenness, feeling not good enough.. Oh boy. I have written so many posts talking about myself in this way across the internet.

I feel inept, incapable, at life.

I even feel incapable at being myself. But not being myself is worse.

I also am kind of sleep deprived right now. Forgive the formatting of this post.

Social anxiety starting at 10 or 12 yrs of age. Boom! Your life sucks. Good luck, have fun.

Social isolation increases throughout my teens. No problemo.

Depression seeps in there somewhere along the way. Misery loves company.

Unwanted. Unlovable. Failure is greatest fear.

Fuck the world. Fuck school. Fuck work. Fuck life.

I felt I needed to work on myself and build myself up before daring to inflict myself upon someone else romantically.

Turns out, things didn't go as planned. Probably for the better.

Enneagram ?f?r?a?u?d?s? "teachers" speaking about type 4 as if the focus on misery and envy is theirs alone... Pricks.

[SpiritoftheGael]

Volcana I've had a huge complex since I was a small child, like three years old maybe, that seems to come mostly from my five fix. But I have always suffered severe anxiety that I was not at all capable of handling things or grasping them. When I was a child it lead me to try to shut everything out to avoid overwhelm, as well as to avoid doing many things. It was incredibly painful because I felt like I couldn't get past the blocks and ask for help or try and I really really hated myself. I honestly, at the time, did not think I would survive being an adult. Obviously I got past a lot of that, but I tend to be a very very slow bloomer. I generally just don't want to do things unless I feel 110% prepared to do them. I HATE just being thrown in. It feels overwhelming and terrifying. My mind has to mentally process all the ins and outs first. I think I've learned to use a bit of 7 in the recent future, because this semester I've taken on more than I ever have before and actually felt capable of rolling with it, but that's only because of past experience seeing what I was capable of and knowing where to go if I needed help, plus just having a much larger knowledge base. And I'm technically going mildly crazy right now, but I still don't feel like I made the wrong decision. It's just I tend to wait in the shadows and then suddenly I'm running. But people don't usually realize the hours of research and thought I put into anything before doing it, so it can seem like everything is just coming easy to me suddenly, but that was usually after I spent months not doing anything and feeling miserable and stressed out and anxious.

[Animal]

I felt I needed to work on myself and build myself up before daring to inflict myself upon someone else romantically.

Turns out, things didn't go as planned. Probably for the better.

[Vive]

In what ways do you feel defective, broken, not good enough? Where do you struggle to love yourself, and how does it tie into your type?

I can feel like I am too passive, too apathetic and disconnected to make a real difference in the world. I feel like I am an abstraction in human form sometimes. I am all talk, I let important things slide, I stay inside my mental fortress and nothing happens, nothing real happens. All the challenge I face imposed by myself, and only myself. I feel trapped in myself, like there's no way to get out, no power to act, no strength to connect. Having used the blade of thought so much, I've cut away everything, until only a void remains, not a numbness, but a void, a cold, empty and bitter void.

And I keep swinging that blade of thought:
Compliments are just to make you feel better.

Love gets conceptually reduced to a mere craving for validation and positive feeling

Connections get reduced to mere trade agreements 'you give me something, and only then I will provide something in return'

Achievements are mere temporary victories in a grand scheme of endless challenges.


...in the background of your mind, as you cut more and more away, there's still something longing for connections, deeply craving it even. After a while, you start becoming desperate for the validitation you claim you didn't want or need. Reaching to others out in desperation, nagging and turning into a emotionally labile liability. Expressing those desires in entirely the wrong way, by exploding at people. Wanting the validation, but not even having the ability to accept it even if you do receive it. You feel alone and bitter and frustration and nothing provides real consolation.

--------
This is what I've felt in my lowest points, or I came very close to seeing that as my truth and if I feel low in general I start experiencing it in small fragments. Daeva 's experience is very relatable, minus the depression and the social anxiety. I must say, your post struck a chord, displayed a feeling of brokenness/defectiveness I am very familiar with and which I've also tried to approach and expand upon in this post from my perspective and in my way. I wish in no way to reduce your experience to theory, but I believe what you and I have been touching upon here is perhaps the struggle between (dominant) Ti and (inferior) Fe . Please correct me if you feel/believe I'm wrong.

---
Small sidetrack:

I felt I needed to work on myself and build myself up before daring to inflict myself upon someone else romantically.

Turns out, things didn't go as planned. Probably for the better.

I thought the exact same thing. However, from my limited life experience, I have now come to believe that loving someone else and struggling together with them, is in itself a way to build you up a way to work on yourself, if you allow it to be. I can feel pretty crappy being myself and can also get stuck feeling broken, but it really helps having someone else that loves you and accepts you for who you are, even if you don't yet exactly know what/who that is.

I don't mean to say that working on yourself is a thing that's bad, it's definitely a good thing, but I do think that as long as you are working on yourself it is completely okay to try for a romantic and more intimate relationship.

So, in my case I'd say, it's not just probably for the better, but it's most definitely for the better that I tried and am now learning within the relationship I currently have with my girlfriend.
----

I don't know exactly what my Enneagram type is, currently I see 1w9 as the most viable. I typed as a six for a while, but my distrust is oriented only towards myself. I trust others, but often distrust myself. I tend to trust others, even at my lowest points. At my low points I don't trust in positivity when it's related to me. What I just described is just my feeling of brokenness. When I feel low, I feel like love is just other people trying to validate me, but I do then feel other people are capable of true love and that I am not. So, to over-simplify: when in a low mood I feel that I suck as a person, but I feel like other people don't. It's a ridiculous double standard. I feel like I don't deserve people's love as much as others do. Which is a very nine sentiment, but still I am not completely convinced of my type. What is most dominant in general is a frustration with myself for not reaching my standards, which draws me to type 1.

[ledyanoy]

[Fragmented]

[PleasureToBurn]

Mental illness aside, I don't really feel like that except maybe in the sense that I've done bad things, hurt people, and shit like that. I used to feel like a monster, but I've reconciled the dark parts within myself. I think knowing that I have that capacity within me helps me to keep it in check.

I also think I can be a very intense person at times, but I don't really think that's a bad thing. Most of my insecurities stem from circumstances, and not from who I am as a person.

[Animal]

"Most of my insecurities stem from circumstances, and not from who I am as a person."
I actually relate to this muchly. I will expand later.

[vermilionplum]

feelsdefectiveman at anything social- making friends, having people to talk to/hang out with, etc...

[[redacted]]

Well, that's the thing that I've had some difficulty with, because when it comes to 4, the only thing I can think of relating to is that I feel defective. Yet since 4 isn't the only type that feels defective that's not a good enough explanation. Idk, 4 is just confusing to me but it's the only one that makes sense for my heart-fix when I look at my patterns. Sometimes I feel like rejecting the idea of tritype althogether because what am I supposed to do with a fix that doesn't make any sense to me?

Lets see, I feel ugly and awkward a lot, one reason I tend toward isolation is that the awkwardness is so unbearably repulsive and going outside just accentuates this feeling. Like a disgusting slug trying to be a person. I think it comes in part from feeling out of place, but... I'm actually pretty ugly lol.

Beyond that, I feel rotten on the inside as well. Like even if I haven't actually done anything wrong, there's a feeling that I'm a terrible person and a fear that I'll be exposed for my crimes. Although this feels more about fear than shame, fear of the consequences I'll face if I'm ever found out. But it can inspire shame in some ways as well, like I feel humiliated easily because I think I'll be punished.

And well, there's always a lot of things to feel defective over, like nothing I do is ever good enough and I ruin everything, I'm too emotional and needy etc, but to explain the core of it, it comes down to feeling ugly and rotten lol.

[Qassim]

This is an interesting question. I would actually question the leap from "defective/broken" to "not good enough". The two are not the same to me..."not good enough" implies someone else's standards, which I seldom take into account and wouldn't want to waste my time perpetually failing at if I did. My own standards...well, that's not usually what I feel this way about. I'm just not a "standards" type of person.

For me, there's just a sense that I "came out wrong". I can't really tell what it is. Again, there isn't some objective (or subjective) standard that I'm referencing. More just like I'm malformed, but everyone can see it except me. I have no clue what it is. I just feel defective. A very vague, but very unpleasant sense of self.

I do feel "broken" in that life has broken me multiple times. I kind of glued the pieces back together but...the cracks and weaknesses remain. I'm just damaged, mentally, physically, and emotionally. I'm not quite what I used to be.

And thus, people throw me away.

And you know. Even with enneagram, I still haven't figured out what this is. I don't think it's type-related in my case...if anything, it is probably related to a damaged social instinct (not saying I'm soc-first).

My enneagram type itself...I'm not gonna discuss it here, but it opened a whole new can of worms for me. So now I have even more things to be ashamed of and disgusted by. Hooray for inner work. I also used to spend a lot of time castigating myself for not living up to my ego ideals, ideal sense of self, super-ego, whatever you call it. I know I'm not good enough to be my type, so I'm in the odd position of always feeling like I fail at being what I want to be, while beating myself up for being it.

[Animal]

A bunch of posts were written in the four thread, here:
https://archetribe.com/forum/typolog...-and-enneagram

And also I just started a diary so maybe some themes will emerge. I'm going to try to collect important posts around the forum and copy them there too, but I just started the thread. I felt like that might better organize my internal experience of being a four. For those who agree with my typing I can use certain posts as a reference to point them to, for points that might come up about my type and how I experience it. It's hard for me to write a general description but the experience of 'living it' can be articulated in spurts of inspiration. Of course, if someone doesn't agree with my type or if one day I should discover that another one leads, the same would apply for that type --- but I don't think it's going to happen. Anyway, the first post I wrote today, is about feeling wrong in my body. (It's one of my more intimate posts ever, about the concrete nature of my shame.) The second one is closer to how I really experience things, more of an illustration of my symbolism, although not nearly as comprehensive as it would be in my own private diary. (Not because I'm particularly private ?? but because I have such a huge inner world that makes its way into anything I write, but I can't share it for copyright reasons, until my books are published.) I had posted it a short while back in a flurry of inspiration.

https://archetribe.com/forum/soul/ar...-animal-s-cave

[The Bismuth Bard]

It's weird...I have always felt defective and inherently different from others but I don't have a concrete reason for feeling that way. I mean, I can come up with reasons, but it's just this perspective I've carried with me since I was a kid, which is why I identify with 4. I have been wondering, do 4s even need to have a concrete reason?

This is hard to put in to words, but I don't feel as... human as other people? It's like when I look at other people, they seem to have experienced more than me, or have more passion than me and are naturally happier. I've also felt more introspective than most people my age growing up. I can't read minds, but eh, it's just hard for them to imagine them having many existential crises as me watching them chit chat and actually do stuff rather than sit around daydreaming like me. I think it's years of feeling like I didn't fit in too that influenced things. From not really fitting into any friend groups as a kid to feeling like I never really distinguished myself as an adult(like having a clear identity), I've never felt like I quite belonged.

For more concrete reasons, there's a bunch of things. Feeling less street smart than others, feeling clumsier than others, feeling more socially awkward than others, having problems with my looks. I mull over my mistakes a lot, because even the littlest mistakes make me feel defective. And yet, I'd feel odd without those flaws, because I consider them defining traits for me like I would my strengths or any other trait in general.