The Defense Mechanisms of Type 9

(w000, I’m actually about to complete the series! Sometimes I am not completely useless! * does a little happy dance of joy *

If you’re wondering why it took so long, I blame the recent heat wave. Must save some $$$ for air conditioning before the demonic evil known as “summer” strikes again next year. In the meantime, I guess I shall resort to periodically dipping myself in cold water until my brain feels like braining again. )

dissociation

The main one, in that the others are somewhat built around sustaining it to a degree.

Sometimes characterized as the withdrawing of awareness or attention from an unpleasant experience, that is, zoning out, going away to your happy place, trying not to think about it all the way up to lowkey pretending it isn’t really happening, so as to master, minimize or soften anything from mild boredom (as in the case of daydreaming) or conflict situations to full on traumatic experiences.

Correspondingly dissociation as a response can go from some mild emotional numbing to keep your calm in a conflict situation, disengaging from work stress or casual daydreaming to escape a boring moment on the subclinical end to, on the other extreme in the cases of people who’ve been through serious abuse, a tendency for the person to full on shut down in stress situations or lack a solid sense of identity altogether – extreme, pathological dissociation all the way to telling yourself it didn’t happen or must have happened to someone else is of course a common result of childhood trauma.

Here, here, here or here are some artistic renderings of what it probably subjectively feels like.

Various authors have observed that some degree of ‘withdrawing of awareness’ is ultimately at the base of all the defense mechanisms since they all involve the blunting, tuning out or pushing out of awareness of some facet of reality.

Perhaps as a corollary of having the most ‘holistic’ perception of all the types, it follows that 9 is also the least discriminate in blocking their experience out when something not so pleasant is happening, so that the whole stream of experience can get ‘muffled’ or ‘tuned out’ completely, as one thing.

Though, another factor to keep in mind is the ‘specific reaction’ of 9 to adversity (to figure they are probably somehow lacking/not loveable/unimportant in a way that makes it impossible to get what they really want, leading to generally responding to adversity with resigned inertia) as well as its ‘passion’ (to stop pushing when an obstacle is encountered that doesn’t seem worth the effort or the hassle)

Basically 9 tends to give up easily but unlike the other withdrawn types its positive + attachment & hence is driven to preserve a sense of ‘okayness’ and ‘connectedness’.

When you consider this ‘starting situation’, it might become apparent what problem the 9-specific defenses are largely designed to ‘solve’ - in a sense, it is reconciling the ‘positive’ with the ‘withdrawn’ part. Or even attachment insofar as it involves ‘taking what you get’.

Hence, the constellation of defenses is rather ‘palliative’, geared mostly to soften & make bearable the present situation, to make ‘what you can get’ be ‘okay’ on such occasions that it isn’t, or that it’s presently somewhat difficult to be content with it.

So as with the other types, what we might see as natural virtues that these people just ‘have’ (such as being content with the little things, humility, patience, not being obsessed with big-headed ambitions) as well as the exessive negative counterparts (such as apathy, indolence, naiveté, self-neglect) is actually the result of an ongoing, dynamic process.

Probably the person’s natural temperament was such that being a 9 was easier than being any of the other types (I could imagine that some variants of dopamine receptor genes would greatly change your odds of winding up a 9 vs some flavor of assertive triad), but 9s are by no means immune to discontent, resentment or dissatisfaction.

Those things, however, vital as they might seem to others, are inconvenient when your goal (or perceived need, rather) is to be okay with the present. When anger, frustration or desire are seen as positive, that is because they show you that the present sucks in an unacceptable way, and/or that you should leave and get something better.

In other words, it’s built on the assumption that a) better is readily attainable and/or b) the cost of breaking away from the present is if not low then at least manageable.

For your average 9, the calculus does not look like that. If you’re sensitive to disuption and/or separation, the cost looks a lot steeper, and if you don’t strongly respond to rewards that better place doesn’t look so appetizing especially if it’s going to be a hassle to get to.

Plus, there is sometimes a sense of resignation that you can’t really get what you want anyway, that it’s all pointless so all you can do is grin & bear it, make it tolerable, arrange yourself with what you have.

Note that depending on the want, this can be a reasonable thing: We probably won’t all become heads of state or famous movie stars. Some ppl out there (lots of 3s, 7s and 4s, for example) out there could probably use a bit more of ‘making the most of what you have’ in their lives.

But it can get exaggerated/overdone, especially if there was a not so great upbringing where the person made the experience that any disagreement gets you yelled at, attempts at improving things seldom work, or if you often got ignored in a way that led you to think you’re not important, not worth the effort, or lacking/flawed in a way that precludes being ‘deserving’ of anything better.

If that’s how you see the world - that the present is basically all that ‘someone like you’ can hope for and that losing what little is nice in your surroundings would be intolerable – then realizing how awful the present truly is (and for some, how you yourself really are) is basically the worst that could happen to you, because –

The assumption is that you’d just be stuck with that, an awful life, and your awful self. Not a nice predicament – so, no wonder then that someone might prefer to ‘check out’ of their experience.

Another thing that may predispose 9s to that particular reaction is that they already tend to be good at ‘co-processing’, that is to do routine tasks on intuition and ‘muscle memory’ alone without having to think about it or even while thinking about something else.

For example when someone is holding a conversation while driving but then realizes they took the turn towards their workplace out of habit.

It’s the same ‘split’ between the dominant center & the rest that you kind of see with all the attachment types, but with 9s it’s between the part of them that responds to the environment & their thoughts & feelings. As with the other types this is a feature in moderation but a bug if exaggerated. Like how a 3 might put the feelings aside for a moment to handle a crisis situation, a 9 can be typing up a letter for the boss, fishing, watering plants, exchange pleasantries etc & other repetititive habitual tasks without needing to pay a lot of attention & maybe at the same time their mind & heart are busy composing a novel or just contemplating life & having a deeper experience of it for it, being able to find the beauty & meaningfulness in ordinary life that surrounds us all the time & the little things. See those stories of Tolkien taking forever to take a walk cause he’d frequently stop and admire some cool tree.

But having this nifty capacity to do stuff without full attention also makes it tempting to withdraw the attention when something unpleasant’s going on.

Notice that this can go both ways: The attention can be pushed to the heart & mind to some imagination land detached from reality while the you in real life just kinda walks around on automatic, but it’s also possibible to do the reverse, to be focussed on the concrete world & tune out the ‘inner’ experience of the heart & mind.

(sometimes subjectively experienced as ‘fuzzy’ contrasted with the ‘sharper’ quality of consciousness when one is more fully present)

What ‘mode’ is more used probably depends on situation, talents, circumstances, mbti, or just what works, some individuals will use both as needed whereas some skew heavily to one side.

Much like we have more phobic & more counterphobic 6s as well as people who oscillate a lot, there are differing descriptions of the 9s ‘inner world’ showing up the literature where you get either the ‘inner sanctum’ – a comforting fantasy world that is escaped to but sensitive to outside perturbations, sometimes what is called a ‘paracosm’ (a consistent fantasy world, these authors who put a lot of material in the same world/setting rather than, say, thinking up a new one each time) but other descriptions, such as Naranjo’s and Maitri’s, rather describe something more like an ‘inner morass’, a difficulty accessing their inner world, what their thoughts & opinions even are or what their true self in like.

For some it goes so far as the subjective experience of ‘dissappearing’ when they’re around others because they just follow the past of least resistance if following habits, going along with others or just not doing much at all.

Either one can reinforce itself given a tragic backstory – the escapist 9 becoming all the more escapist because ‘no one cares about them in reality’ & showing their thoughts outwardly would bring disharmony or just get ignored & not cared about, whereas the over-concrete 9 may with time have some fear of investigating what their preferences & opinions might be or what’s ‘inside them’ because what if there’s nothing there & it confirms that they’re flawed, not lovable and less special than others?

Alas, it is engagement & paying attention that makes our experience memorable and important to us, what makes us care about it. To some extent the 9 might of course prefer not to be too affected, disrupted or pushed around by what’s going on around them, and the chill & patience of healthier 9s sure is to be envied, but if someone came out with over-active defenses as a result of childhood abuse or adolescent peer rejection, the result can look like basically not paying any attention to anything in your life.

Imagine your SO wants to have a significant talk with you & because the prospect of an argument upsets you you get so mentally checked out that you barely noticed what their complaint was. This brings you relief in the short term, but 3 days later they’re livid because you forgot to do the dishes again. The 9 probably barely registered/ didn’t retain the details of the complaint & is likely to claim they just forgot or got confused, which the spouse might then take as apathy, laziness or not taking her seriously, but the reality is probably that the information went in one ear & out the other cause the 9 was checked out during the argument (ironically, because they find arguing with the spouse stressful & actually would be upset if they split.)

Even so, the result is counterproductive: If your goal is avoiding arguments or even just avoiding hassle (from a selfish place), listening to what the spouse said & making it a habit to do the dishes would probably have worked better.

Others can easily see such behavior as conscious/intentional negligence & they’d certainly be justified in complaining about a readily apparent lack of attention being paid to them.

(I recall that there was one enneagram book, I don’t recall which one rn, where the author who was married to a 9 & figured eventually eventually that if she keeps forgetting or half-assing stuff or seeming distracted, she is probably upset about something, & the marriage improved since he started taking such distracted-looking behavior as a sign to check in on the wife & ask her how she’s feeling. (the previous approach of nagging probably tended to create more upset & hence more distracteness) Talking it out tended to resolve the distractedness issue & the marriage was much improved.)

Not only is that liable to make you seem emotionally unavailable or frustrating to deal with to partners, family and friends (probably the opposite of what one would want if you’re trying to not have drama and/or keep connections), it is also be of great detriment to the person themselves.

Absenting yourself from, paying limited attention or, if you wanna use the cliched phrase of the esoterics crowd, “falling asleep to” your own life can lead you to stumble into situations without much input on your own. Instead of consulting your own feelings or thoughts (which would require engaging with the situation), you end up just kind of going on automatic, following your habits, going along with others etc. until eventually you realize you’ve sunk a long, long time into a job or relationship you didn’t really want, or that your marriage has slowly but steadily desintegrated while you weren’t looking.

You might even struggle to recall where the time went, since being emotionally engaged and/or mentally alert is a big part of what makes a situation stick in your memory.

In some cases, you hear people talking about ‘lost time’ that they ‘missed’, especially following disruptive life events. I recall this one blogger describing how she fell into a total apathy after the death of her parent and barely recalls what she did in the time immediately following his death (eventually, a turning point happened when her friends noticed she was struggling & turned up en masse to help her unpack the boxes at her new appartment, something she’d lacked the bandwith for due to her grief)

Here one should probably draw a contrast to 5 which at their low points can also tend toward feeling that their life is passing them by, but in that case the person is usually still acutely aware of what’s happening, just feeling like they’re kind of watching it from the distance, either in impotent horror, or just seeing it all as grey, dreary, trivial and meaningless.

The 9 might also have moments of feeling quite fatalistic like there’s no point in bothering with anything but the person would rather tend to try & escape from that by numbing themselves further rather than simply calmly accept it/ consciously resign themselves to it.

Another contrast one might draw is with the opposite effect sometimes seen in 4s where those tend to have relatively detailed biographic memories – probably internalizing everything & connecting it with some personal significance tends to get the memory reinforced more, though this of course comes with the temptation to ruminate about it & have difficulty moving on from stuff.

In any case, this leads to the great irony that, depending on upbringing & current mood 9s can be some of the most attentive & great listeners out there, but also, well, the opposite of that.

Just like you can get those people who seem to think the world will end if they let anyone see they have a personality or give over-vague indistinct one-liner answers to everything on ‘type me’ posts, whereas more well-balanced specimens where the ‘internal disconnect’ (more or less their form of being on guard) isn’t a permanent state, will be the most confidently quirky, hidden-dephts-having ppl you’ll ever meet.

It’s common to see average-level 9s get a lot more animated and expressive in settings where they’re comfortable enough to drop their defenses – basically when they feel they can be themselves or be ‘okay’ without having to censor themselves or their experience.

In one case I witnessed a person was classmates with a certain 9 and also friends with his sister, but didn’t interact much with the guy himself. Then they went on a class trip together & when she came back she asked ‘what have you done with this poor guy?’ - cause she was used to him being shy & quiet in class or while she was visiting her friend, but then she got to interact with him more up-close during the class trip and was shocked to see what a funny, likeable & reliable guy he could be in more comfortable settings. He would tend to just blend into big crowds or be shy & reluctant with new people, but with family or established friends he’d come out of his shell more to the point of being an universally beloved family member.

Useful Question:

There was a textpost posted here once that went something like “You know when you’re kind of zones out but you notice you’re zoned out but you also don’t wanna zone back in?”

Basically, developing awareness like that through self-observation would be desirable so a conscious choice can be made.

It’s especially important here not to fall right back into Ye Olde Specific Reaction when you notice & beaut yourself up over it in a way that makes you fall right back into yet more resigned apathy ‘here I go, being passive or escapistic again, I will never change’

Awareness of suck will at first be unpleasant and seem like it’s making things worse rather than helping since it’s precisely what the defense is there to get away from.

Have compassion for yourself, existing is hard. Just think of it as continuing to build the muscle of noticing.

Another possible angle of attack is:

If others call you out on forgetting stuff, half-assing stuff, seeming distracted, not listening etc. consider if there is some underlying upset that you’re trying to get away from. Like being dissatisfied with your direction in life, feelings of insecurity or repressed anger/frustration.

Again, the keyword is ‘consider if’. Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake and you forgot cause brains do that sometimes.

narcotization

If I had to summarize all possible forms of this in one statement, I would say that it means dealing with an upsetting situation from the ‘hardware side’, by changing your physical state.

As those amazingly annoying health advice posts never fail to remind us, your mood and sense of well-being is somewhat influenced by your physical state. No matter what level of cranky you are, you are going to be a lot crankier if you were also dehydrated, hungry, tired, unwashed, overstimulated or otherwise uncomfortable, and you’ll be less cranky if you were washed, fed, watered, well-rested and given the right balance of socialization & introvert time.

In a way it’s a reverse of what you might see with 4 and 5 who might be more likely to pin their shitty mood on their tragic backstory, the general imperfections of the human condition or the laws of physics before it ever occurs to them to maybe take a nap or swipe the floors.

Ultimately, both existential concerns and ‘complicated houseplant’ factors probably play their part to varying degrees depending on the existential problems.

In moderation this can be a helpful coping mechanism as whatever the problem is, it’s probably easier to tackle well-rested on a full stomach after taking a nice refreshing walk in nature.

Some problems really aren’t per se ‘solveable’ (no immortality potion yet) and managing the ‘symptoms’ is the best you can do. There’s not necessarily any virtue in feeling bad when you would prefer not to & have a way to fix it.

Where we get a problem is when you try to drink-more-water your way out of a serious problem without adressing the root cause, or where it leads to overindulgence in food, drugs, TV etc. - and the first often leads directly to the other because if every time you are upset about some gripe you have with your roommate, you eat more ice cream, the ice cream might temporarily soothe you, but as you haven’t adressed the actual root problem, it will just make you upset again next time an argument happens, or even next time you think of it.

The problem is not solved with icecream, but since the icecream is often defaulted to without pausing to think, the person ends up just eating more if they are still upset.

But it doesn’t have to be food or literal narcotics, really anything that is pleasurable or calming can do the trick, including low-effort leisure activities.

A frequent one is naps. Sleep does, to an extent, ‘reset’ your mood a little bit, so you can use a nap to apply the old IT advice of “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” to a human.

To some extent situations where you have to use self-control are intrinsically exhausting to the point your blood sugar can get measurably lower from the mental effort required (maybe reactive types have more energy for arguments because they’re not holding themselves back as much, unless there is conscious effort to do so), but with 9s in particular the sudden desire to seek a comfy pillow after an upsetting situation is not just a reaction to the exhaustion of the argument itself, but also a coping mechanism to soothe the upset. (whereas, say, a 6 for example might project & convince themselves that it was definitely the other guy who was being ridiculous)

Sometimes, 9s may even try to involve you – a classic scenario is when your spouse wants to have a serious conversation that you kind of dread, but you insist that you should first have dinner.

When you’re both halfway into a food coma, the Serious Argument is likely to end up a lot less fiery than it otherwise might have been – not only because of the full stomach but because the waiting time & pleasant activity in between probably gave the spouse’s hot temper to time to dissipate. Maybe you don’t even end up having an argument at all, because once you’re both calmed down & chilling, your spouse would have to bring it up out of nowhere & cast themselves in the part of the ass ruining the nice moment (deflection and confluence (see the next two points) may also be employed to make this strategy more efficient)

There’s a natural synergy with dissociation in that it’s easier to ignore the unpleasant reality when you’ve put your body in a calm state or at least further numbed the pain with some short-term pleasure, and that in turn makes it easier to zone out.

A classic example of a situation where both might be happening at once could be vegging out on a comfortable couch in front of an easy to follow, formulaic TV program or video game while munching on chips or soda. (at least when you’re doing that instead of adressing genuine dissatisfaction in your life)

This interesting music video is probably a sort of commentary on narcotization - at first seems contrary to the lyrics - the song talks about always forgiving & coming back despite feeling kind of insecure whereas in the vid she throws out the guy after catching him cheating. The video is probably portraying what happens when the PoV character finally snaps. She starts eating everything in her appartment (first the food, then random stuff like furniture etc) & an interesting thing is that at first it just seems like mindless depress eating, but then you notice that there is actually a pattern: she is destroying specifically everything that had to do with the boyfriend. (like the wineglass with the mistress’ lipstick stain on it etc.)

So she goes from simply ‘eating her feelings’ to a kind of leisurely, aggressive act of getting rid of all that reminds her of him, I suppose.

Useful Question:

When you find yourself responding to an upsetting situation by seeking creature comforts, ask yourself: are you treating the problem or the symptoms?

If you have a temporary upset or an unchangeable situation, putting yourself in a better state might be the correct course of action, but if there is a recurring issue or underlying big picture dissatisfaction, you might actually have to do something about it.

You might also think about ‘replacing’ potentially unhealthy copes. Drinking booze every single day might mess up your liver long term, so instead of reaching for a beer for your default after-work stress, perhaps calm yourself by taking a short walk in the park.

Also be careful with attention-requiring activities when pissed off/upset, so you don’t drive into a tree or injure yourself working because you’re all zoned out. Good advice for anyone regardless of type really, but lots of books have some anecdote about a 9 who almost cut off their finger while working in their garage after a marital spat. (this is probably also cause the person will often actually crave to do some relatively ‘mindless’ routine activity to distract themselves from the anger - see ‘distraction’ below. Maybe chose a video game instead of home improvement.)

Part II