Give Me Liberty, Or Give Me Death!

I once wrote, The determined cheerfulness of Enneagram Sevens is a coping strategy developed as children to blunt or cover up any pain. Their pain threshold is low because they've avoided it all their lives, and they feel pain very deeply. . . we can all identify with the urge to escape pain by doing something pleasurable.

In response, a friend asked, "Were you implying our fear of pain is fear of physical pain? My fear is not nearly so much of pain as of confinement. The enthusiasm you so accurately describe is a type of inner expansion. I bear my arthritis pain quite nicely, but the confinement of it really gets me down. We Sevens fear we'll be bored, have no options, and if I had to face life imprisonment or death, I'm with Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death."

It's true of those I've coached that pain refers to whatever brings discomfort, and being confined is uncomfortable for those with Enneagram style Seven. Their avoidance of pain is more accurately understood as a passion for pleasure, a compulsion to seek variety because reality itself is not satisfying, and that's the real burden of such pain.

One of my style Seven clients was also an ENTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which substantially exaggerated his Seven-ness. Read this ENTP description and you'll see what I mean. Neither Enneagram Sevens nor Myers Briggs Type ENTPs like to bother with detail; both are future-oriented, like to leave things open, crave activity and variety.

That same client (also described in Out of the Box Coaching with the Enneagram) said the worst possible thing he could imagine was being jailed. And he'd felt almost unbearably imprisoned in his job because the newness had worn off and he was stuck dealing with corporate politics. He'd been fantasizing about people he could connect with in the hierarchy to "Get me out of here!"

I suggested he use his discomfort as a clue that his habitual patterns were kicking into gear; that he was "in jail" then and there, feeling compelled to be released. To his credit, he did stick with it, became less constrained by his own compulsive wish for escape, and eventually succeeded his boss as division manager.

I'm not sure that was a happy ending.