At Their Best:
Warm, generous, helpful, empathic, nurturing, supportive, and relationship-oriented.
When Struggling:
Intrusive, clingy, possessive, martyr-like, and preoccupied with gaining approval from others.
What Type Twos say about themselves:
- I am preoccupied with the needs of others.
- I take pride in giving and helping.
- I sometimes feel that people take advantage of me.
- I have a hard time expressing my own needs.
- I can be manipulative and alter how I present myself to others.
From www.narrativeenneagram.org
We each feel that we must show up in a certain way in the world in order to deserve love.
These are internal messages that resonate with Twos:
BASIC FEAR: Of being unwanted, unworthy of being loved.
BASIC DESIRE: To feel loved.
BASIC PROPOSITION: “You gain love and approval, and fulfill your personal needs, through giving to others.”
AVOIDANCE: Showing anger, losing self-control, or making mistakes.
FOCUS of ATTENTION: Others’ needs, feelings, or desires.
- Positive aspect: The ability to sense and respond intuitively to others’ needs in a genuinely helpful manner.
- Negative aspect: The tendency to ignore/repress their own needs, which can create exhaustion and fester into resentment.
Strategies For Growth:
- Remember that if you aren’t addressing your own needs, it is unlikely that you will be able to fully meet other people’s needs either.. at least not without resentment and frustration. Be intentional in taking time to take care of your own needs: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
- When you are tempted to step in and “help”, try to become more conscious of your own motives. Are you doing it with the expectation of gaining approval or appreciation? If so, this is a recipe for disappointment and can feed into codependency. The goal is to be able to give when you are able to do so with no expectation of getting something in return.
