Emotional Redemption
I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for personality tests. That probably came from the obsession that my church (and many churches) had with them back in the early to mid-2000’s. Our young adult group was given a variety of personality tests as a way to help us understand the areas we needed to ask God for strength, to change to be more Christ-like, and how we could use our natural gifts and abilities to donate our time, energy, and resources to serve the local church.
I took the Meyers Briggs for the first time when I was 18 years old; I had just begun really diving into church life, volunteering and a more rigid theology on a more personal and consistent basis. I was trying to be “sold out” for God. The results of the Meyers Briggs came back saying I was an INFJ. I couldn’t deny that reading the results struck a chord within me because of how deeply the descriptions resonated. And yet, I began to panic. I intrinsically knew that these core personality traits–intuition, introversion, and feeling were unacceptable when it came to religion. I wasn’t supposed to rely on my own intuition; I needed the Holy Spirit and others who were wiser than me to guide me. Feelings were abhorred–I needed to lean heavily into my mind, cognition, and thoughts. And extroversion was expected. I couldn’t be a witness for the Lord if social situations, crowds, and engaging with strangers wasn’t my jam.
I kept the results of my Meyers Briggs test hidden from others–literally and in my own actions. I made intentions to ignore inner wisdom, my own energy limitations and all emotion. I became excellent at putting on a front of logical, rational, measured, cold and judgemental while also being on fire for God. I practiced this so much, it became my personality.
***
When I moved to Nashville, TN, I was at a breaking point in my life. I was exhausted and burnt out (though I didn’t have a term for that). I could feel things bubbling up inside me, but with no safe place to vent them out, I just kept stuffing things down. I reasoned, however, that the move to Nashville would offer me a fresh start–having very few people who knew me in my “former life” would allow me to be whomever I wanted to be.
It was a nice thought that I had, but as we all know, when push comes to shove, familiarity wins out and we fall back to old patterns, habits, and characteristics. I truly did want to be different, but I had no practice of being anything other than who I had willed myself to be for the past decade.
However, the longer I was away from the religious community I grew up in, I began to see little cracks in my armor that on the one hand felt like relief, but on the other hand felt really scary. I had no idea how to navigate emotions, uncertainty, doubt, dissonance, or my own desires, awareness, and wisdom.
Then one night I began having panic attacks–for hours. Cognitively, as a trained therapist, I was aware of what was happening. But no matter how much I willed myself to stop or gave myself rational solutions, my body took over and I eventually wore out and rode the waves of panic. By this point I had enough people in my life that were offering different solutions and answers than simply prayer and repentance. My (therapy) licensure supervisor told me that panic attacks were our body’s way of waving a red flag to let us know that something is wrong when we have failed to listen to all the other signals.
Immediately I knew she was right. A brief moment of reflection showed me that my panic attacks had not come out of nowhere. They were the result of months of mounting stress, psychological and physical danger, confusion, terror, relational and familial issues. I had felt it in my body, but having no outlet, still, meant that my suppression techniques were the only thing I had at my disposal. Until one day my body said “no more…you don’t want to take me seriously when I’ve been telling you something is wrong, I will lay you out so that you cannot ignore me” (I still chuckle at this sentiment!)
I am grateful for the network of support that I had been building around me without even realizing it. I immediately began working with a therapist, got on to medicine, quit my job, opened my private practice and started living in a different way.
I mean yes, it was that easy. Kind of.
I mean it was easy to make those decisions–even if I was opening a private practice a full year before I had (financially) planned to. That intuition part was starting to come back on and gave me at least enough sense to recognize that the pace I had been running at was untenable.
The therapy part…that wasn’t so easy. At my first session I shared a brief history of my familial and religious upbringing and brought him up to speed on the dangerous working conditions I was experiencing in my community mental health job. I assured him that was no longer an issue though since I had quit–I just needed him to help me make sure the panic attacks didn’t happen again.
He asked me what I thought about my odd history of working in environments and with people that seemed to take advantage of me to the point where I was in a lot of danger. I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled something to the effect of “well, it’s just what I have to do, no job is perfect.”
He looked at me with sincerity and said “It’s alarming to me how frequently you have been in physical, relational, and emotional danger and abuse and that you believe that it’s not that big of a deal.”
An entire can…no case…of worms was opened that I was not yet ready to deal with. And yet, there was no looking away. I could not have imagined at that point how deep some of my wounds were and how much I had been impacted by my life’s experiences up until that point.
Before I knew it, I was shoulder deep in various therapeutic modalities, researching various phenomena, and trying to figure out what was wrong with me as well as who I was.
This led me to my friend and colleague Philip, who I had been partnered with for licensure supervision. Philip was like a walking encyclopedia. Everytime I had supervision with him, I left our sessions with at least 7 book recommendations. Frequently he would talk about his client cases through the lens of the Enneagram–this elusive personality profile that I was green to. After hearing about it a few times and how powerful it was with his clients, I asked Philip if he would teach me about it. He agreed to but suggested that I get a specific book and read through the various types to see which ones I connected with the most–then we could meet for coffee to discuss.
A month or so later, I sat across the table from Philip with a list of questions–both about how I could use this with my clients as well as my own Enneagram type. I was desperate to find some sort of a “key” that would help me unlock who I was so that I could move through everything that had been coming up for me. I figured if I knew what type I was, I would have a clue as to childhood wounds, underlying messages, fears, and strengths.
Philip was not about to “prescribe me” with a type; instead we engaged in dialogue around the types that I most resonated with. I quickly shared I identified with the Type 9, 2, and a little bit of the 1. He, an expert on the Enneagram, said that since all of those numbers were right next to each other on the Enneagram graphic, I might consider that the number in the middle (the Type 1) would be my primary number and then the other two numbers (Type 9 and Type 2) would be my wing numbers. I let out a sigh of relief and he asked what was going on. I told him I was relieved that I was a Type 1. He had a puzzled look on his face and hesitantly shared with me that he didn’t experience me as a Type 1 but he wasn’t interested in trying to convince me that I was something else; instead he wanted me to trust my inner wisdom. I appreciated how he handled the situation; we were getting ready to leave but he quietly asked if there were any types that I despised on the Enneagram. Without missing a beat I said “oh, the Enneagram 4! I would hate to be a Four–they are moody, self-absorbed, soft, weak and have a hard time being logical and rational!” He smiled and nodded, and we went along our way.
***
Five years later, I sat in my therapist’s office–the therapist who introduced me to terms and diagnoses like ‘complex trauma’, ‘dissociation’, and taught me how to become embodied, taught me about my nervous system, and used Somatic Experiencing with me. I had done plenty of therapeutic work before her, which I was grateful for, but my work with her was transformative. I was a different person.
“I am either the healthiest Enneagram One in the entire world, or I am not an Enneagram One!”, I exclaimed.
She chuckled and asked me to go on. I told her that many of the traits that I had resonated with previously no longer seemed to be characteristic of who I was. I wasn’t harsh, perfectionistic, or judgemental. (I should note: the characteristics I previously identified the most with, in the personality of an Enneagram One were the characteristics that tended to be viewed as negative or what this type would demonstrate when under stress.) I was actually warm, compassionate, and very rarely saw any issue or person through a rigid, binary lens of right or wrong. I shared that while I was proud of the work I had done, I didn’t think I was the healthiest Enneagram One in the world; I reasoned aloud that I was probably not a One.
I’ll spare the details of my deep dive into Enneagram podcasts, books, and blogs…it’s not that exciting.
However, there did come a day as I listened to an Enneagram podcast going through Beatrice Chestnut’s Enneagram book where I nearly had to pull my car over to deal with the absolute shock of what I was hearing. They were discussing the Self-Preservation Enneagram Four. Scratch that, they were discussing me. Before I could put the pieces together, I made a sarcastic comment to myself that it was rude they were discussing the inner workings of my life without my consent–I chuckled to myself. And then I realized what it meant. I identified as an Enneagram 4–those moody, self-absorbed, emotional people who were all dark and gloomy and loved to be sad.
And yet…I made myself soften enough to consider…was that me?
I dug in further; I grabbed my copy of Chestnut’s book and dove into the chapter on Four’s, paying special attention to the Self-Preservation Four. My mouth was agape when I read that Self-Preservation Four’s were the “sunniest” of the Four’s who’s uncharacteristic motivation and follow through often made them mistake themselves for Enneagram Ones.
It felt like a spiritual moment–a coming home to myself.
As if it were on cue, puzzle pieces began to assemble in my mind as scenes from my childhood flashed before me: getting in trouble for my emotions, my extreme passion, my creative nature, uncanny intuition that was well beyond my years or what I should have known. But also: being punished all the time for these things. Daily spankings, being sent to my room for hours (which I secretly loved because it allowed me to escape into my imagination where there was an entire world of my creation ready to explore), reprimanded for emotional expression, squashing my propensity toward a romantic outlook.
I recognized at that moment that the very parts of the Enneagram Four that I had so loathed–even hated–were the very parts of myself that I had learned to cut off and fragment in order to survive a high control environment. My tender, sensitive, emotional self would not survive in a space where those very qualities were vilified and called sinful.
Tears began to roll down my face and my arms intuitively reached up and crossed to give myself a hug. That tender little girl who was so vibrant, intuitive, and passionate–who had been silenced for nearly 3 decades, was un-freezing and there was finally permission to come back out.
***
I shared this all when I was in my therapist’s office a few weeks later. She helped me lean into my anger for the way I needed to cut myself off in order to survive; she helped me see that my anger was powerful. She helped me create space for the fragmented parts of myself who needed room to re-emerge and reintegrate into my life.
Several months later while watching TV one evening, I caught a commercial that was the pulling on your heartstrings type. My eyes began to tear up and I could feel my heart bursting at the scene on the TV. In a brief out of body experience, I looked at myself from above and asked “so this is how it’s going to be huh? Crying at commercials? Feeling everything”. My body seemed to chuckle back and with a sigh said “yes, this is how it will be.” In a split second I was back in my body. The tears were only for a moment, something else flashed on TV and my emotions changed.
These moments became more regular and I learned that this was my new normal. Embracing my emotions, leaning into them, letting them pass through me–riding them like a wave.
It was not always a fun or easy process, but I was astounded to find that when I allowed myself permission to lean into emotions–to develop a robust spectrum of emotions–I felt alive again. I saw color, vividness, and complexity in beautiful ways. I saw humans in different ways; I saw myself differently too.