# 5w6 so sp sx differences



## Kynx (Feb 6, 2012)

I'm pretty sure that I'm 5w6 9w1 2w1, but I don't seem to relate to any of the instinctual variants, what would be the difference in each for my tri-type?


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## Entropic (Jun 15, 2012)

You don't relate to any of them for core 5? Since they are rather different and not easily confused or mistaken for each other. I find this site to have good descriptions:

The Intimate Five It's just you and me All of the intimate styles tend to gravitate to one-on-one relationships. In the case of the intimate Five, the relationship is often one of shared secrecy. It's you and me against or at least without the rest of the world.
In the case of the intimate Five, part of the focus on the partner is parsimony. "I only have enough emotional juice for one person." The other person becomes the focus of attention, but also the only place to put the precious resource of time and affection. There is not much, so they don't waste it on anybody other than the chosen one.
Because Fives live in their head (remember Descartes, "I think, therefore I am") a primary way of showing affection is sharing secrets. While everyone else in the world is kept at arms length and privacy is an obsession, Fives can share everything with this one person.
Sometimes sharing information can actually replace sexual intimacy. Sex, Lies and Videotape is an old movie that has stood the test of time. It may seem a bit kinky to some because James Spader plays an intimate Five who substitutes video taping girls talking about sex but does not have sex with them. The movie is an Enneagram clinic and Spader nails the dynamic of an intimate subtype Five. 
Fives have a general fear of being overwhelmed by the demands of others. They are acutely aware of their emotional poverty, feeling unable to meet the expectations and desires of others. So when an intimate Five falls in love, there is often an accompanying fear of being owned. The relationship can feel like a contract with terms they can't meet.
Like everyone, Fives want to be loved, but they also fear being loved because they understand that love and affection can only be repaid by love and affection. Their central fear is around the difficulty of adequate emotional response.
However, if an intimate Five can become confident of their ability to respond, then they can make wonderful spouses and lovers because they focus all their attention on the one they love. Like someone on a strict budget, they do not waste their resources on impulse or adventure. 


The Self-Preservation Five Something Like a Recluse The self-preservation subtype of the Five is usually characterized as most like a hermit. I read a book on fasting by a monk and his opinion was that you could fast quite easily all day long as long as you were in the hermitage, because it was contact with people that drained one's energy. He felt highly energetic, even without eating until 5 - 6 pm, as long as he could be alone. He had lots of ideas, he felt confident in his creative writing and his scholarship. He recommended this discipline to all serious people who were interested in the hermit's life. And this life was pleasurable to him. Can you imagine what it would do to an emotional Two, looking for juice in interpersonal relationships?
Many Fives of this type are thin, whether they formally fast or not because they try to control both their intake and their output because of a deep feeling of impoverishment.
One way other people drain a self-preservation Five's energy is through their expectations. The acute sensitivity of the self-preservation Five senses what the other person wants and feels obliged to respond to their wants and expectations. Even though self-preservation Fives are usually quite introverted, they can often be pulled into a social role if that is expected of them.
These are the Fives who can live in their rooms for long periods of time. A library can be heavenly. Enforced silence and lots of information around. I know a scripture scholar, fluent in French, German, Polish, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, English, Italian and Aramaic who told me that he used to do term papers for people in high school and college because he simply loved footnotes! He said he was never so happy as when looking things up in the library and then making footnotes when he found his quarry.
The self-preservation Five strategy is illustrated in Awakenings. Robin Williams does a good job playing the self-preservation Five with his consuming interest in research, his energy drawn in sharply, his reluctance to make any moves romantically and his habit of liking to be alone. The SP Five is perhaps the most alienated of all the subtypes.
I talked to a self-preservation Five on an airplane six months ago and he told me his life was best symbolized by a battery. People drained him, solitude restored his battery - his life. He liked to golf - alone. This is where he recharged.
Fives love privacy and none more than the self-preservation Five. They tend to hoard space and time even more than money. My Father was a self-preservation Five. He loved to fix radios. He would not allow any of us 10 kids (!) in the "radio room" and he would stay in there from 8 pm until 2 am, fixing anything electric. He loved the intellectual challenge and the detailed information he had to apply. He had the thin body of a Five, 6' 2", 140 pounds. 
All Fives tend to compartmentalize their life, having friends who do not know each other, having a strong relationship but not thinking about that person for long periods of time because they're thinking about something else. The self-preservation Five tends to physically act this out a bit more, hiding in books and removing themselves from social engagements for long periods. The self-preservation Five will have to physically isolate him or herself in order to let strong feelings emerge into awareness. Only when they are alone can they trust these feelings not to get them into trouble. Like all self-preservation's they tend to worry more than the other two subtypes. 
Self-preservation Fives, if they have any connection to Eight, tend to identify with Scrooge. I know several Fives who pride themselves on being scrooge-like, despite that gentlemen's seasonal bad press.
As with all the subtypes, their isolation and stinginess is for the sake of superiority and safety from being overwhelmed by emotions. They are intensely sensitive, so they build extra sound boundaries and the self-preservation Five builds their boundaries physically. They stay home and haunt their own castle. (Some self-preservations have a ghost-like quality, with their thin bodies, love of solitude and emotional distance.)


The Social Five Superior, but not Separate Social Five may seem like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, but Fives have their social subtype just like all the rest of the numbers.
In any fixation that practices detachment, the detachment is for the sake of superiority. The reason people withdraw is to establish themselves as independent, not needing others. Well, anyone who can get along without other people feels superior to them, and "ordinary" folk tend to look up to people who can "go it alone." We often attribute great wisdom to them. Literature is full of wise old men or women who live alone in the woods. They spend their time thinking, while we are practicing commerce or some other mundane thing. They are spiritually superior. When the hermit speaks, the seeker listens.
Now, the problem for the social Five is to be superior while still somehow in the group. A common way they do this is by joining a group that it itself superior. I'll bet anything Mensa (the elite group of high IQ people to whom you can belong if you can prove you have a 140 IQ or better) was started by a 5. At any rate, IQ scores measure what Fives do best.
They love to belong to a group that shares superior information. The ideal job for a social Five is editor of a newsletter that only goes to 32 people, and these 32 people are the only people in the world in this field of high level arcane research. And they never meet, they communicate through the newsletter.
Says who? The social Five does not care what the crowd thinks, but they are intensely concerned about their position in the elite group. The question is what do the people who matter think?
Social Fives are often a bit more extroverted than the other two subtypes, but the extroversion usually shows up when they are dealing with information. Jerome Wagner, who has a PhD in the Enneagram and its relationship to the Myers-Briggs typology sounds and looks like a Seven when he presents his material. He is funny, lively and thoroughly enjoys himself, as do his students. But he loves research, something a Seven might not relish.
The superiority might not be entirely intellectual. A social Five, like Johnny Carson, has an unerring sense of what needs to be laughed at. Humor is distancing. The person making the jokes is the person on top. The person laughed at can be humiliated.
Social Fives can work within an organization or community, but they require a lot of autonomy. The faculty member who fusses and fumes over all the paperwork and social obligations of teaching, who resents faculty meetings, who nevertheless wants to be invited to a symposium on marine microbiology as an expert could easily be a social Five. The autonomy is also for the sake of self-sufficiency. When you combine self-sufficiency with distance, you get hierarchy. Not necessarily a political hierarchy, but a hierarchy of whose opinions are the most valuable.
Natural habitat In an organization, Fives can work with others, but a private office is pure gold.
Fives often flourish in academia where intellectual prowess is valued, where research is valued more highly than teaching, where bureaucracies are kept at arms length by tradition or policy and where  one's social needs can be met by exchanging information. This exchange can be in the form of teaching, but it can also be sharing research or publishing.
The function of the group is not so to provide support or much pleasant companionship, it serves rather to establish identity. The social Five is concerned about where he or she stands in the group. Is their work, their intelligence, adequately respected? Respect is as important as love. This can flip, however. If a social Five cannot achieve independence, they may become abjectly concerned about their relationships, especially romantic and family relationships.
Social Fives will probably be friendly. They feel distant, not hostile. So if you have something real to talk to them about, they will be fine conversationalists. But they don't like small talk much and you can see them fade from immediate presence. Actually what you feel is yourself fading from their view. They can be fierce snobs. The feel themselves civilized, proper, but several steps above the mundane and ordinary, especially in the quality of their information and their judgments about complex matters.

This blog is what helped me settle that I'm not a core 4 because I possess zero traits of dauntlessness but sp/sx is spot on for 5. 

Also, Naranjo speaks a bit about instincts in this video:





He starts talking about 5s about 13:38 minutes into the video.


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## Kynx (Feb 6, 2012)

Thanks @LeaT 
I can't watch videos but the descriptions have been very helpful


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## SharkT00th (Sep 5, 2012)

There are natural energy usage by each instinctual variants. 

Sx-Full energy!
SP-Preserve energy, I need to conserve (For all types not only 5's)
So-Moderate usage, more directed energy usage towards a group.


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## cyamitide (Jul 8, 2010)

Neverontime said:


> I'm pretty sure that I'm 5w6 9w1 2w1, but I don't seem to relate to any of the instinctual variants, what would be the difference in each for my tri-type?


take a look at these (I'm too lazy to repost all of them)
http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/164-Fauvres-Profiles-for-Enneagram-Subtypes
http://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...iptions-from-Oceanmoonshine-and-Other-Sources


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## Entropic (Jun 15, 2012)

cyamitide said:


> take a look at these (I'm too lazy to repost all of them)
> http://www.the16types.info/vbulletin/content.php/164-Fauvres-Profiles-for-Enneagram-Subtypes
> http://www.the16types.info/vbulleti...iptions-from-Oceanmoonshine-and-Other-Sources


Not because I want to be anal, I know you didn't write it, but a lot of that doesn't really go into much to be honest. Like a lot of the stuff written for 1 sx could be applied to 8 or even 4 sx, or a combination of the two. It doesn't describe why possessivenes of a partner is important for example. I'm not a 1 but I'm very possessive, but it's just 8 marking territory. It's mine, no one else's.


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## enneathusiast (Dec 15, 2012)

Took me a long time to get the instinctual subtype because it's often explained in terms of survival. But here's a way it made sense for me.

As type 5, a lot of time is spent analyzing and understanding. You do that within your 2nd instinct and then try to apply it within your 1st instinct. So for example, *5 sx/sp* would research and learn on their own (sp 2nd) and have a desire to bring that knowledge/interest into relationship with another (sx 1st) with very little interest or hope that it would be understood in the social (so last).


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## cyamitide (Jul 8, 2010)

LeaT said:


> Not because I want to be anal, I know you didn't write it, but a lot of that doesn't really go into much to be honest.


I found it easy to tell them apart reading through those decriptions, not sure what you mean by this.


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