Instinctual subtype
Enneagram sx6: a Six named for strength and beauty
Strength and beauty, the full name of sx6, sounds like the lettering over the door of an old boxing gym. Strength you may well recognize in yourself; beauty is harder to claim, and the fear that gets filed under Six fits into neither word. Where that fear goes in a Six led by the sexual instinct, and why it needs both words, is what the rest of this page takes apart. The name tells you where to look, not whether the subtype is yours.
- leading
- second
- neglected
The code does not say which of the other two is second and which is neglected
Countertype: the passion turns back against itself
01
What this instinct guards
- spI cover my own needs first
- soI read where I stand with people
- sxI go all in on one person
An sx6 leaves the desk lamp on all night in a hotel room, and exactly one person knows it. What the sexual instinct keeps charged is a single pairing, and for a Six that pairing is also the one place where fear doesn't have to pass for nerve: everyone else meets someone hard to rattle, and one person gets the man who sleeps with the light on. He holds on to that pairing because he needs ground that holds without a show of strength.
The lump they find on his wife in March will turn out to be nothing a month later, but for that month the one place he gets to be afraid is taken up by her fear. On the second night he turns off the bedroom light himself, first, and lies in the dark with his eyes open until she is asleep. By the day of the biopsy he knows three routes to the cancer center and keeps a printout of all her appointments in the glove box.
Through a winter of double shifts on five hours of sleep, the Sunday plunge stays on the calendar: at seven in the morning he and his wife walk down to Lake Michigan, three minutes in the water, then a thermos on the hood of the car. He always finds the energy for that hour, though there has been none for company or the movies since November.
02
How it colors the passion
- The type's passion goes outward through the instinct
- Countertype: the passion turns back against itself
Fear, which wants to know where the blow will come from, turns in a single bond into a pull toward whoever once threw it. His best friend is the kid who broke his nose behind the school in seventh grade; thirty years later that man is godfather to his son. Next to someone whose punch is already known, fear has nothing left to check.
His father-in-law has called him "that one" for five years. Before the old man's seventieth the Six spends a morning at the barber and picks up a tailored jacket: he walks into the meeting he dreads looking handsome, the way someone else would walk in with a folder of paperwork. Strength is for people who might hit him, beauty for people who might turn him away.
Self-preservation would take that fear to someone reliable, social to a rule; the sexual instinct points it straight into the unknown. Nothing is more unknown for a Six than the start of a romance, and he gets through it at speed: on the fifth date he sets down a ring bought that morning. She laughs and says to ask again in six months. For six months he lives as if the answer were yes: he meets her sister, regrouts her bathroom, teaches her to drive. When the six months are up, she asks for the ring.
03
How it differs from the other two
- This page
- Countertype
sp6, warmth
Walking into a new crowd, both know within thirty minutes who not to trust. Both once rode out bad turbulence over the Rockies. Since then sp6 flies only with his wife and holds her hand from takeoff to landing. A month later sx6 books a discovery flight in a Cessna and sits in the right seat while the instructor shows him why the wing holds. What gets you back on a plane afterward: a hand on the armrest next to yours, or having worked out for yourself how the thing stays up?
so6, duty
Both keep their word even after the person they gave it to has forgotten. Both have a widowed mother who remarries, and the new husband starts running Sunday dinner his way: assigned seats, toasts in turn, phones in a basket by the door. By the third Sunday so6 knows the order better than the stepfather does and helps him keep it. On the first Sunday sx6 sets his phone next to his plate and waits to see what the man will do. When do you start trusting someone like that: once you have learned his order, or once he has stayed steady while you broke it?
04
Place in the stacking, and the neglected one
- sx/sp/so
- sx
- sp
- so
- sx/so/sp
- sx
- so
- sp
With this leading instinct, two stackings are possible
His over-forty hockey team, where he has played Saturdays for twelve years, votes on whether to drop his friend from the roster after a fight on the ice. He is the one vote against, and in the locker room he picks up his bag and walks out with his friend. The Saturday ice he got up at five for, twelve years running, stays with the team.
Fear that can tell from one word of his wife's voice that somebody was rude to her on the bus can't hear his brake pads squealing since fall. Social comes second in this stacking and self-preservation is neglected, so the car goes on like that until the state inspection in March fails it at the gate.
At his uncle's funeral he stays by his wife all day, since she is taking it hard, and sits down with her in the chair the family meant for the dead man's older brother. Leading sexual, self-preservation second: social is the neglected one here, and fear that won't leave one face never checks the room. The aunts don't speak to him until spring.
05
What the test shows
Everything separated: subtype and the full stacking
Second and neglected close: subtype without the stacking
Leading and second close: two candidates
The test reports four things, and the instinct is the one we're least sure about. We'd rather tell you that than bury it. For about half the people who take it, the three instincts come out too close to call, and when that happens we show you the top two instead of picking one. The fear of this Six can easily speak the social instinct's language in self-report: noticing right away who runs the room, having no patience for abuse of power, stepping in for whoever is being leaned on. Those are statements about where people stand relative to each other, which is how the social instinct describes itself. The one bond all of it is for sounds quieter in the answers, since he talks about it less than about bosses. Social may then take the lead on the result, or come out level with sexual.
06
Questions
Why do I start shaking after the danger is over, not during it?
Because during it the fear had a job. While you act, fear turns into movement and gets used up as it comes. Once the thing is behind you there is nowhere left to move, and the fear that was being spent arrives all at once, unconverted. The shaking isn't cowardice showing up late. It is the bill for the courage, and an hour of it is a fair price.
How do I help someone close to me with a fear I can't walk through for them?
Your way with fear is to go at it, and the pull is to go at theirs the same way: book the appointment, drive them there, drag them through. That works for you because you chose the direction. Someone who gets dragged through only gains one more thing to be afraid of. Better to stand where they can see you while they take their own step, at their own speed.
Why does it bother me when the person closest to me feels sorry for me?
Knowing about your fear and pitying you are different things. The first gives you a place where the fear doesn't have to pass for something else; the second treats the fear as all there is to you. Pity takes away the part of you that acts, and without it the fear you showed looks like the whole story. Ask for company rather than sympathy: "stay with me" asks for less than "feel for me."
How do I teach my kids that being scared is normal when they've never seen me scared?
They have seen what you do with fear, which is turn it into action on the spot. Without the start of it they will take that for fearlessness and hold themselves to it. Now and then, let them see the start: say out loud that the thing scares you, and then do it. Hearing both ends, they learn that the fear and the step go together, and that the step doesn't have to wait for the fear to leave.