Style Five

The Observer

The life of the style Five centers on their thinking. Healthy Fives are both highly intellectual and involved in activity. They can be, if not geniuses, then extraordinarily accomplished. As the most intellectual of the nine Styles, they are often superb teachers and/or researchers. Many healthy Fives are fine writers because of their acute observational skills and a developed idealism. They are highly objective and able to see all sides of a question and understand them.

When Fives become less healthy, they tend to withdraw. Instead of dealing with their sensitivity by being emotionally detached from results, they split off from reality, living in worlds of their own creating and not answering the demands of active living. Their natural independence as a thinker degenerates into arrogance. They can become quite arrogant or eccentric. In the movies, Fives are the "mad professors."

Fives you may know: Bill Gates, Scrooge, Buddha, T. S. Eliot, John Paul Sartre, Rene Descartes, Timothy McVeigh, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein, H. R. Haldeman, Ted Kaczynski, Dick Cheney, Jacqueline Onassis and Vladimir Lenin.

Recognizing Style Five

  1. Despite high intelligence, they may be inarticulate, at least until they think carefully.
  2. They may be threatened by new information if it clashes with their system. Try to link new information to what you think they already know
  3. Their real world may be a mental, private one.
  4. They may not be introspective or in touch with their feelings, even though they might talk "about" them.
  5. Conformity may be a way of maintaining privacy.
  6. As they mature, locked up feelings may erupt.
  7. They may report that commitment feels like a loss.
  8. They may report privacy feels both like safety and a prison.
  9. They may have lots of pious practices as defense.
  10. They may avoid any strong feelings.

How you can help

  1. Help them enlarge their range of emotions, activities, and interests.
  2. Help them articulate their inner world.
  3. Help them put words on experiences. (They're more real after being talked through).
  4. Remind them: involvement in activity isn't the same as involvement with people who are participating in the lactivity.
  5. Help them see that beneath the desire to know is the desire for love.
  6. Maturity is found in developing relationships with the external world.
  7. Reframe commitment as a gain instead of a loss.
  8. Castle/home/prison can become interchangeable. Untangle the different feelings.
  9. Bodywork is often quite helpful.
  10. Sex can be a means to reach out to the external world. It is non-verbal.