Point Two represents the archetype of care and nourishment. It is the part of us that strives to instil affection and please others by giving help in a selfless and warm way.
When we experience the high qualities of this point we feel capable of loving unconditionally and without limits. We feel overflowing with love and sweetness, at the service of abundance, in communion and in the deep and delicate connection of our heart with another heart. We experience the presence of others in our life as a privilege.
Point Two is part of the intelligence Center of the Heart and emotion. People with this dominant personality type are oriented towards relationship and image.
Type Two wants to give support, help and service. His core value is a loving, kind and generous world in which everyone recognises and nurtures each other. He wants to live his life in union, closeness and contact, making the other feel good, giving love and feeling loved without reserve.
At his best he is a good-hearted person who cares about others, caring, interested, loving, affectionate and warm. He is compassionate and charitable, capable of empathy and forgiveness, inclined to participation and service. He is a free and intuitive spirit, capable of silent and sincere harmony of heart with the other. He is very expressive, understanding, supportive, encouraging and grateful. He is able to see the good in others, give good positive reflection and great support.
When type Two loses connection with their inner sense of overflowing love, he feels the need to recreate affection and abundance by dedicating himself to others.
He begins to believe that by abandoning himself and taking care only of others he will receive in return the love and emotional fusion he desires.
His self-esteem begins to depend on the outside and his need to do good things and express admiration and support for the other increases. He becomes more and more attentive to the needs of others, convinced that everything he does is never enough to receive the love he desires in return.
Then everything becomes insistence on getting attention and connection, pervading more and more the life of the other, avoiding listening to what they really feel and removing the emotions that they consider difficult, disturbing, shameful and unlovable. Force relationship projects that he does not want to give up even though he knows they are bankruptcy. He wants to feel more desired and wants more closeness and tries to get it by offering seductive attention, applauding, smoothing or using deliberately cute and flirty tones.
To create contact, he becomes the special, overly familiar and expansive intimate friend. He is often seen by others as manipulative, intrusive and possessive, although this is not how he perceives himself.
The reactive emotional environment that matures, the passion of this type, is pride. Pride is a false sense of inner abundance, the belief of having infinite love to give without the need for a return other than the happiness of the other. It is the feeling to be the source of goodness in the life of others, the conviction of knowing how to love better than the other can love himself. It is to worship your own highest worth and not hesitate to talk about it.
This reactivity leads type Two to believe that he always has good intentions, never has bad feelings and the power to provoke in others the emotions and behaviours he wants. The more he gives and strives to make relationships go the way he wants, the more he feels taken for granted and rejected, and this leads him to easily transition from a sense of grandeur to a sense of deep inferiority and smallness.
He increasingly needs to feel indispensable and gives exclusively with the hidden motivation to get a return. This leads him to manipulate by discovering or provoking needs and desires in others in a bewitching way in order to satisfy them. Doing so creates addictions and co-dependencies that make him feel important, but in which he feels overloaded, used and never enough loved and recognised.
Type Two at his worst needs people to constantly acknowledge how wonderful and martyr he is. He overestimates himself and is more and more full and pleased with himself. He fears that he has forever alienated those he loves and makes others feel unworthy of his love. He deceives himself tremendously about his own motives, denies the evidence, is angry, boycotts and forces the other to play the game and pay him back. He is selfish, insatiable, indiscriminate, dominant and coercive. He falls into obsessive love affairs and uses illness and disability to receive attention and care.
Point Two invites us to take care of ourselves and others and puts us in contact with the desire for love. To contact this inner dimension it is necessary to recognise one’s needs and welcome them and accept and love being human with all one’s limitations. Only then we can take care of others more sincerely and rejoice for those who are happy regardless of us and our intervention. We feel that we are valid for who we are, that love happens and the connection is already present.
(selected and translated from “Crescere con l’Enneagramma” Maura Amelia Bonanno, 2018, Armenia Edizioni)