We took the Enneagram personality test at work and reviewed the results today.
According to Enneagram, I am a:
Helper
Loyalist
Achiever
In reading more about the Helper (aka ‘Two’), I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
Although on the surface Twos appear to feel at ease with others and to be a source of emotional sustenance for the people in their lives, they also suffer from well-hidden feelings of rejection. Twos expect people to not want them around, and they often feel that they need to be extraordinarily kind and supportive to get people to accept and love them. They usually try to conceal the depths of their loneliness or hurt beneath an image of concern for others, focusing on others’ needs to help them feel better. Sometimes it does, but just as often, Twos may feel that others are not appreciating them for their efforts, thus rekindling their feelings of rejection. Then they may become touchy or even openly angry, revealing the extent of the disappointment they are hiding.
Wowza. For the first part of my life, it was just me and my mom. Then she met and married The Pedophile, and had my baby brother in the span of ten months. I was simply a four-year old lost in the shuffle and much too young to understand why I wasn’t the center of my mom’s universe anymore.
Growing up, when I wasn’t merely an object of The Pedophile’s perversion, I had to work very hard to be well-liked by him in order to get him to be a dad. On the converse, when my mom wasn’t sick, I purposefully drove her into a rage knowing she would lash out. If my mom was hitting me, that meant she cared enough to discipline me. She gave her love freely to us, but it wasn’t her love I wanted. I wanted desperately for her to be my mom and if she wasn’t going to stand up for me, the least she could do was stand up to me.
At age 26, when I told my mom and my brothers what The Pedophile did to me, I already knew my mom couldn’t / wouldn’t leave him. But my brothers? They were 20 and 22, I was so hopeful that they would stick up for me. I didn’t ask them to make a choice, but deep down I really wanted them to pick me. When they decided to ride the fence with one foot in each camp, I turned that deep and painful rejection into something positive. I took care of them (and everyone else) instead. And I spun their disloyalty into loyalty of my own with rationalizations like, ‘I know what it’s like not to have a dad and I don’t want that for them’ and ‘my mom is too dependent on my dad to leave’ and I resolved to blame everyone’s ambivalence on the person who had caused all of this.
No wonder I quit shortly after credit was given to others and my efforts were ignored by leadership after pulling off an extraorinary 1,100-person, 28-day, 4-wave incentive trip that I planned in six months mostly by myself. It makes sense that I would banish RT3 from my life when he opted to hang out more with his new girlfriend than with me all the time. And the fog is clearing as to why I was a master at shunning boys and friends who hurt my heart.
Huh. I didn’t expect to learn this enlightenment today. I think I have a few things to share with my brothers.
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