Fear is very useful. It helps us survive. Whether that’s through finding sustenance and shelter, seeking protection of a group, or being prepared to defend ourselves when confronted with a real threat.
But since we don’t spend our time living in the wilds of nature anymore, let’s take a moment to reconnect to the sensations of fear. For some, it will be extremely easy to recall the last time jitters of anxiety coursed through their bodies. Others might need to actively remember that one terrifying moment from their favourite horror movie.
But whatever sensations arise, just notice them. Notice if the fear is in your belly, your chest, your arms or your legs. Or maybe it feels like a tornado of thoughts crashing together in your head.
Fear is useful
Beyond the fight, flight and freeze response design to keep us alive in the face of real dangers, that inner spidery sense alerts us when there’s something we need to know.
A piece of information that’s missing from our awareness that might spell trouble for our project, our job, our business, our relationship. It lets us know that there is something we need to learn or something we need to face.
But we can also fear things that aren’t real. We can experience anxiety in our bodies from mental pictures and scenarios we imagine. It can be tricky to determine which fears are real and which are imagined.
What we fear by Enneagram type
And it’s not just the Type Six that benefits from teasing out the difference between real and imagined fears. Every type, every person, fears something.
What scares you?
What do you fear?
What keeps you awake at night?
Type Six tend to have a more generalised fear, a nameless driving force within them. Other types tend to have more specific fears, such as Type Two fearing for their relationships and being rejected. Type Three fear failure or being blamed for failing. Type Four can fear feeling lost, misunderstood or abandoned. Type Five can fear being engulfed by others or losing the little they have. Type Seven fear boredom, grunt work and being seen as superficial. Type Eight fear not being in charge, in control or feeling weak. Type Nine can fear being overlooked, while also fearing separation, conflict and disharmony. Type One can fear criticism or that something is wrong with them.
Again, these are still generalisations.
What specific things worry you?
What are you scared for in your work, relationships, health, life, hobbies?
I feared my apartment would be broken into. Partway through the pandemic I found myself living alone. Anxiety took over every night. I locked all the doors, sometimes barring them with a chair. I triple checked I’d locked the doors. When I heard a noise I would peek through the looking hole to see what was happening on the landing.
My apartment had never actually been broken into. But once when I was 9 or 10, we returned home one day to find we’d been burgled. I don’t remember if anything was taken, but it was that sense that someone had come in without me knowing that I struggled with. A loss of safety and security. Yes, we changed the locks, but I never really slept peacefully after that.
When did you last feel anxious about an imagined fear?
When was the last time you faced a real fear?
It’s taken me a minute to recall one time I was truly afraid for my safety. That was many years ago, in college in Vancouver. One night, someone I no longer wanted to see came by the apartment, drunk, wanting to talk to me. I locked myself in my room and just refused to come out until he was gone. Thankfully my flatmates were able to send him back to his own dorm.
What we fear by survival instinct
I realise both my examples are about feeling safe at home. Which brings me to instincts. As fear can originate from our survival instincts, we may also fear things related to our dominant instinct.
For example, Self-Preservation subtypes can have fears around physical safety, income, home environment, food, and health of their body. Social subtypes have fears about their social standing and place in the group, including things like level of prestige, power, inclusion, belonging and having friends. Sexual subtypes are more likely to worry about being attractive to others, intimacy, closeness, sexuality and being loved by someone special (that doesn’t have to be a intimate partner, it can also be a friend, parent or someone else in one’s life.)
As I look over that list, I recall times when I’ve had crippling anxiety about having friends, fitting in and being attractive. But those fears come and go, the fears that influence my day to day life are those associated with my dominant instinct and core type.
What themes or trends did you notice about your fears?
So now we know that we are actually more scared than we realised, what do we actually do about it?
Here’s my suggestion:
- Remember fear is natural
- Become more aware of your fears and sensations of fear
- Notice how fear influences your life everyday
- Explore which fears are real, which are imagined and which are memory
- If it’s memory, work with a somatic therapist to help heal and integrate that past wound
- If it’s imagined, ask what information is this trying to bring me? What do I need to learn or face here?
- If it’s real, what plans or action is that fear asking you to take?
As we get more familiar with fear and allow it to rise and fall within us without our personality structure hijacking it and turning it into a story we need to react to, then we can go deeper with fear.
We learn to make peace with the uncertainty of life. Learning to accept that we can’t remove all risk, that we can’t control everything. That we cannot plan away all possible futures in order to create a future in which we feel completely safe all the time.
That is not life. That is not living. That is not inner resilience. That is ego.
And that when we allow for life to unfold just as it is, we discover that we don’t have to fear life at all, we can welcome whatever happens and respond to it without fear running the show.
If you’re questioning your Enneagram type, that’s natural. There are many reasons for mistyping, and many people who are mistyped.
My free reflection guide helps you explore what might be creating the confusion—from stress responses to missing subtype knowledge—and find your clearest next steps.