All of us have things that we deny about ourselves. Denial is a defense mechanism to combat core beliefs that we fabricate as part of our identity. Our core beliefs are associate with the pain, hurt or “wound” we experience from a small child when it seems that our needs are not being met.
As a defense mechanism, we attempt to protect ourself from the perceived “wounding” we believe exists and we use strategies where we avoid or deny aspects of ourself in order to maintain being safe or being able to survive.
Denial, it’s not a river in Egypt. Instead, it is the action of declaring something to be untrue. A refusal, a rebuttal, a repudiation of the truth.
When we refuse to see or admit the truth, what are we forgetting about ourselves?
The Sufi’s have a saying, “The dysfunctional personality is the gateway to the soul.”
What gifts are you are refusing to see, are you choosing to ignore, make invisible, turn a blind eye to because you are making a choice for the comfort of what you believe you know instead of allowing yourself to sit in the “tension” of the unknown and be in the truth of who you really are?
While the status quo is a great leveler, it is the truth that shall set you free!
There is a system of personality typing known as the Enneagram. In the Enneagram there are 9 “Core Beliefs” or fundamental beliefs from which our dysfunctional behavior stems from. Below is a snapshot of each of the 9 personality types, their associated core beliefs, what they deny and what they have forgotten about themselves.
Twos – The Helper/Giver
Core Belief: “I’m Not Worthy”
Denies: Being Bad & Fulfilling Their Own Needs
The Helpers were raised with the understanding that survival depends upon the approval of others, so relationships stand out as the most important area of existence.
Helpers run the risk of losing touch with their authentic feelings. Their own feelings are forgotten as their focus of attention merges with the wishes of others.
Their habit is to have their attention so focused on making others happy, people pleasing, fulfilling the needs of others as a way to buy love that they forget their own needs and/or suppress their own needs.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on fulfilling the needs of others that they forget about fulfilling their own needs and their true heart’s desire.
Threes – The Achiever/Performer
Core Belief: “I’m Not Good Enough”
Denies: Failure & Emotions (Especially Depression)
Achievers learned as a child that performance and image were rewarded rather than emotional connections or a deep involvement in other people’s lives.
Because they were loved for their achievements, they learned to suspend their own emotions and focus their attention on earning the status that would guarantee them love. The idea was to work hard for recognition, to take on leadership roles and to win. It was very important to avoid failure, because only winners were worthy of love.
The Achiever’s worth depends on what you do & achieve rather than on who you are. They go into action and suspend their feelings.
Achievers suffer from the habit of deceiving themselves and others by taking on the image that guarantees respect. They focus on the achievement and suspend their emotions.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on believing they need to earn their way to be loved based upon their image and what they produce/achieve that they forget that they can be loved for who they are.
Fours – The Tragic Romantic
Core Belief: “I Don’t Belong”
Denies: Rejection & Being Ordinary
The Romantic remembers abandonment in childhood and as a result they suffer a sense of deprivation and loss.
Depression is a frequent mood. They are regretfully attached to some unalterable past mistake. “If only, if only.” The core issue is loss and a subsequent lowering of self-esteem. “Would I have been abandoned if … I was more worthy?” They live with the conviction that there was an original source of love that was taken away.
There is a sense of something missing from life and others have what I am missing.
Romantics are likely to sabotage real gains. There is a push-pull pattern to relationships: pushing away what is available and pulling for what’s hard to get. They keep life at a safe arm’s length. They yearn for intimacy with another however actual intimacy triggers the fear of being found deficient and potentially re-abandoned.
They have a habit of bypassing their genuine feelings or reactions and overlay it with an exaggerated feeling or reaction. Relationships are afflicted by the Romantic’s habit of focusing attention on the negative aspect of whatever is present.
Forgotten: They are so focused on believing that someone or something outside of themselves will complete them that they forget that they’re whole and complete already.
Fives – The Thinker/Observer
Core Belief: “I need To Control Myself/My Space”
Denies: Intimacy
The Thinkers/Observers are very private people. They like to live in secluded places away from emotional strain.
As children, Thinkers learned to detach from their feelings in order to survive. They may have been utterly abandoned as a child and disconnected to survive or more commonly their family may have been so psychically intrusive that the child closed down emotionally to get away.
Thinkers felt intruded on as children – the castle walls were breached and their privacy stolen. Their strategic defense is withdrawal to minimize contact, to simplify their needs to do whatever they can to protect their private space. (They retreat into their heads where, “You can’t touch me!”)
They invent elaborate ways to create safe distance because once someone gets too close, they have lost their primary defense. The outside world feels invasive and dangerous.
They can tend to be reclusive or hermit like and live their life primarily focused in their head (mentally focused). Safe distance means not getting involved. They will tend to hide or isolate themselves from intimacy and intimate contact.
Thinkers are independent people. Their independence however, is based on their ability to detach their attention from their emotional and instinctual life, which has the expensive secondary gain of forcing them to live in their minds.
They are afraid to feel. They have a fear of feeling.
As a strategy, they withdraw from whatever makes them afraid and instead of connecting they become aloof and disconnected.
Forgotten: They are so focused on disconnecting, withdrawing and detaching from their feelings and believing that it’s safer to be in their minds that they forget that they can connect and have true intimate connection (to themselves and others through their feelings.)
Sixes – The Loyalist/Terrorist (Devil’s Advocate)
Core Belief: Trust – “I’m Not Safe”
Denies: Intelligence & Authority (Other People’s Power)
The Loyalist/Terrorist lost faith in authority when they were young. They remember being afraid of those who had power over them, of being unable to act on their own behalf. Those memories have been carried over into adult life as suspiciousness of other people’s motives. They try to ease this insecurity by either seeking a strong protector or by going against authority in the Devil’s Advocate stance.
They’re afraid to act on their own behalf and have problems with follow through.
Thinking replaces doing because the attention shifts from the impulse to act on a good idea, to an intense questioning of that idea from the point of view of those who might disagree. Procrastination instead of following through.
Sixes report that they were raised by authorities who were untrustworthy. Lack of trust commonly centered on punishment and humiliation by parents particularly when the parents were unpredictable and erratic in how they dealt with the child. Young sixes had to predict the behavior of adults who were likely to flare up without any clear indication about what the child had done.
They are sensitive to the possibility of worst-case outcomes and so tend to imagine the worst without realizing they have not paid equal attention to imagining the best. As a strategy for dealing with childhood fear, they over prepare by vigilantly scanning the environment. They are hypervigilant.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on imagining the worst (fear) that they’ve forgotten to imagine the best.
Sevens – The Epicure/Optimist
Core Belief: “I Don’t Have The Capacity. There Is A Way”
Denies: Commitment & Negativity
As a strategy for dealing with childhood fear, the Epicures move towards people in an attempt to charm and disarm with pleasantry. Faced with a frightening early life, Epicure/Optimist children diffused their fear by escaping into the limitless possibilities of imagination.
They don’t broadcast anxiety or look afraid. They tend to be lighthearted and sunny often addicted to planning and play. Their core of paranoia (like Sixes) doesn’t surface as long as thinking can be channeled into visionary plans of future success. They hold the most optimistic of all worldviews. They are the “Eternal Optimists”.
Epicures are buoyed by a belief that life is unlimited. There are always interesting things to do. The buoyancy of a belief in life’s opportunities is greatly enhanced by the habit of keeping multiple options open and making commitments with back up plans.
As a defense strategy, planning for the future along the line of contingency options is intended to enhance life’s pleasures by eliminating the problems of boredom and pain.
They desire to stay emotionally high. Epicures, moving towards pleasure and away from pain, tend to remember the best.
There’s a fear of going too deeply into any one thing, which is masked by a fascination with many things. They have difficulty in limiting themselves. Hence the bright & shiny syndrome.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on escaping the pain of life by living in pleasant constructs of their imagination and future events that they’ve forgotten that they can enjoy living in the present moment.
Eights – The Boss
Core Belief: “I Am Powerless”
Denies: Vulnerability & Weakness
Bosses describe a combative childhood, where the strong were respected and the weak were not. Expecting to be disadvantaged, Eights learned to protect themselves, becoming exquisitely sensitive to the negative intentions of others. They see themselves as protectors, shielding friends & innocents by placing them behind their own protective bodies while continuing to struggle against unjust odds. The Bosses finds their identity as enforcers of justice, taking great pride in their willingness to defend the weak.
Love is more often expressed through protection than through demonstrations of tender feeling. Commitment means taking the beloved under the wing and making the way safe.
The central issue is control. The preferred position is to take charge, to exert one’s own power over the situation and to maintain control over other strong contenders.
Eights survived their childhood by taking a tough personal stand. Their world felt dominated by bigger, stronger people who wanted to control their lives. The child struggled against a sense of unfair odds and survived by any form of confrontation that would make enemies back down. They deny their personal limitations in order to appear strong. They believe they’ll be hurt if they show their vulnerable side.
Bosses try to maintain territorial control over anything that can influence their lives. Eights feel secure when they can control a situation by calling the shots and making other people obey. They also feel powerful when they can go against the rules of conduct to which others submit.
They can become so focused on winning that they’re oblivious to the fact that the other people involved are becoming alienated by a display of force.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on believing that they need to be in charge, controlling others and their situation to secure power that they’ve forgotten that their true power is vulnerability. Living in the vulnerability of being who they are.
Nines – The Peacemaker/Dreamer
Core Belief: “I’m Not Allowed To Be Capable”
Denies: Conflict, Tension, Anger & Their Own Direction (I.e. What They Want)
The Peacemakers/Dreamers are the children who felt overlooked when they were young. They remember that their point of view was seldom heard and that other people’s needs were more important than their own. Eventually they fell asleep in the sense that their attention turned from real wishes and they became preoccupied with small comforts and substitutes for love. Realizing that their own priorities were likely to be discounted, they learned to numb themselves to divert their energy from priorities and to forget themselves.
They have learned to incorporate other people’s feelings and excitement as their own. Saying “No” is particularly difficult for people who are prone to taking on the feelings of others. The connection between the Nine child and others depended on keeping the peace, on being able to sense out other’s wishes and to go along with them.
Nines may be so internally preoccupied with other thoughts, that they become oblivious to the environment. They go on automatic pilot. They discount or deny their own essential needs. Many Nines develop high-level replacements for real priorities.
Forgotten: They’re so focused on what they believe to be priorities, going along with other people’s agendas and keeping the peace that they’ve forgotten about themselves and what’s most precious to them in life.
Ones – The Perfectionist
Core Belief: “I Need To Be Perfect. There Is A Right Way”
Denies: Their Own Imperfection & Their Own Shadow
The Perfectionist’s attention is so focused on the question of what should be done or what must be done, that there’s no mental space left for their own real wishes to emerge into awareness. They are therefore resentful – a chronic feeling of irritation.
Resentment could be defined as the degree of difference between forgotten real desires and the compulsion to work hard in order to satisfy their mental inner critics demands.
Their habit is to focus on being angry or resentful instead of realizing that they can go for what they want and can have what they want. There is a habit of doing what is necessary, what they’re obligated to do and forgetting to allow themselves pleasure.
Forgotten: They’re so focus on doing what’s necessary, what they believe to be necessary and must be done, that they forget their heart, they forget to give themselves their heart and the pleasure that comes from fulfilling their true heart’s desires.
Here’s an exercise you can do to gain insight:
Think of some issue or problem about yourself that you don’t like or want. An issue that you have or habit that you do that you wish you didn’t have or do but it is still there.
Take a moment of introspection to see what you’re denying and where you are not admitting the truth.
What are you choosing to forget in order to prove that your core belief is true? How are you actually creating separation from what you love?
Next time you recognize a conflict within yourself, a habit or an issue take a moment to reflect. Are you coming from what you’d love to be, do or have, are you coming from the truth of who you are…. Or are you being driven by something else?
You may find you are being driven by an unconscious belief that keeps you stuck in denial, refusing to see who you really are.
When you dig a little deeper, you’ll discover the gift that is contained in the wound, the very thing that you’ve forgotten about yourself, that is hidden from conscious view. This is the gold of your true nature & purpose.
Receive it, embrace it for the truth shall set you free!
