Worldview & Motivation

Driving your personality is the worldview that the world is intrusive and overwhelming and you need to protect yourself by withdrawing into your own mind and detaching from emotions. Type 5s often experienced either being left alone or being smothered in childhood.

As a type 5, your underlying motivation is to protect your time, energy, space or other resources from intrusion in order to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Too much emotion or human contact feels overwhelming to you, so you avoid being dependent or involved in emotional entanglements. You feel safe when you are in your mind - thinking, reading, learning or analyzing.

Habitual Patterns of Thinking

Because of this underlying belief, your focus of attention naturally goes to potential demands or intrusions on your time, space or energy and how to maintain your autonomy and privacy. Your habitual patterns of thinking also include facts, information, knowledge or anything in the intellectual domain.

Your blind spots are abundance, the natural support available from others, your own feelings and your own self-deprivation.

To expand your focus of attention, practice becoming more aware of where your attention naturally goes. As you notice these habits of mind they will begin to loosen and allow you to intentionally shift your attention and be more open and available to the present moment. Develop a practice of intentionally looking for your blind spots in order to gain a more balanced perspective.

Habitual Patterns of Feeling

The emotional drive of type 5 is called avarice and refers to the need to protect your time, space, energy and other resources from intrusion in order to avoid feeling depleted or exhausted. Related to a sense of scarcity of resources, you may feel a need to hold on to what is yours, keep life simple and develop a strong sense of autonomy and independence. In Enneagram language avarice is the Passion or Vice of type 5.

What is missing is non-attachment, which refers to a letting go of the need to protect your resources and trusting that the natural flow will provide sufficiently. As you move toward non-attachment your will be able to more fully engage in life as it occurs. In Enneagram language, non-attachment is the virtue of type 5.

The path from avarice to non-attachment is to become more aware of how avarice is operating in your life and how you cling to beliefs and assumptions in order to stay safe. Practice letting go of the need to protect your resources and learn to tap into the support and abundance that is available to you.

Strengths & Challenges

As a type 5, you have many strengths which when integrated in a healthy and balanced way support you and your well-being. Paradoxically, these strengths can work against you when they are overdone or not
appropriately integrated.

When you are at your best, you exhibit these strengths:

  • You are rational, and analytical and like to spend time pursuing intellectual interests

  • You are independent, self-sufficient and autonomous and tend to minimize your needs

  • You keep confidences well and respectful of boundaries and privacy

  • You are observant, objective and perceptive and like to process information cognitively
    before speaking

  • You are trustworthy and dependable

  • You detach from feelings in the moment and therefore you are calm and rational in crisis

When you move toward the unhealthy aspects of your personality you exhibit these characteristics:

  • You become emotionally withdrawn, detached and isolated

  • You are overly analytical and can be arrogant about your ideas

  • You magnify demands on your time energy and other resources

  • You hold yourself back from social interactions out of fear of being overwhelmed or depleted

  • You lack empathy and can be disconnected from feelings

Centers of Intelligence

The Enneagram recognizes our three centers of intelligence: the head center, which is the intelligence of the mind; the body center, which is the energy and sensations of the body; and the heart center, which is the intelligence of feelings and emotions. While we each have all three centers, most people tend to favor one center over the others. Ideally, we want to balance all three centers because each carries valuable wisdom.

Each Enneagram type is rooted in one of these three centers. The way this affects us is that we tend to perceive the world and rely most heavily for information from our own center of intelligence. We also tend to have the most dysfunction in connection with this center. It is both our strength and our weakness.

As a type 5, you are a head type and most likely process information primarily through your mind, which for type 5s means rational, objective thinking, analyzing, gathering information and processing cognitively before expressing. The underlying emotion of head types in fear. As a type 5 you likely minimize fear by withdrawing into your mind and detaching from the emotion.

The path to growth is to balance the three centers of intelligence, which for you as a type 5 means to quiet your mind by getting more grounded in your body and connecting more with your heart.