Love this. Reminds me of Sally Field: "The task as a grown up person is to realize what garment you knit for yourself to survive as a child, in the winter of your childhood. But when you're in the summer, so to speak, of your adulthood, you're boiling hot and you can't figure out, "Why am I so fucking hot all the time?" And it's because you can't take off this garment that you knitted for yourself as a child that you no longer need. You can't realize, you don't realize that this way of behaving, this functional way that your brain taught you to behave, to survive, it gets in your way now."
"Punditry is self-portraiture" reminds me of something Nietzche wrote: “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography."
I've certainly found the Enneagram and other personality typing systems helpful for self-study; Schema Therapy (a form of CBT) is another interesting frame. They talk about developing "schema mindfulness" which is awareness of our default shapes/stories.
And I think it is more than metaphor. The becoming we have been involved in up to now is not stored in our brain like a hard drive, it is formed into a geometric “shape” that both molds our present and is re-formed by encounter.
It is not a triangle or a square - many more dimensions - but it is strangely “shaped” (current neurophysics is demonstrating this). What we carry forward into the present is a shape, and your intuition is fantastic.
Fantastic post. I'm still cracking up at, "this lens produces annoying people, but also, great poets." The EnneaFours who see that part will cackle and then cry.
Cate, I want a shape quiz. No, I DEMAND a shape quiz ... please make a shape quiz :) Even if it isn't scientifically valid, I will still find it tremendous fun, especially if the art is good.
On a more serious note... I was recently discussing with my best friend whether people are default yes people or default no people. My partner is a yes person. Before he even thinks, he says yes... to whatever other people are bringing to him. I think I am a default no person (and I deeply dislike that if it is true). This post gave me a little hope that perhaps the default yes/default no is more nuanced (and therefore more palatable).
So the questions below aren't a personality quiz — they're angles for catching the same reflex from several directions. Answer whichever pull at you; vague gut reactions are more useful here than tidy analysis. Then I'll try to name a candidate shape and the wound it might be guarding.
1. The cross-domain reflex (the main event)
When a new project, relationship, or plan begins, what's the first feeling that arrives before any thought — excitement, dread, suspicion, relief, the urge to check something?
Think of three unrelated situations from this week: a work thing, something with a person you're close to, and a piece of news. Is there a single emotional posture underneath all three?
When something is going well, what do you tend to do with that — savor it, brace for it to end, look for the catch, start the next thing?
2. The felt sense, not the story
Where in your body or mood do you first register that "something is off"? What is that signal actually telling you to do?
Finish this honestly, fast, without editing: "The thing I'm always quietly scanning for is ___."
Cate's runs roughly "We must get this exactly right or it'll be irrevocably ruined"; Sasha's is "Everything must be okay." If you had to caption your own background hum in one blunt sentence, what would it say?
3. Where the shape is a superpower
What do other people find genuinely hard that comes easy or even pleasurable to you?
What have you been praised for so often it feels unremarkable to you?
The article says skill grows from "fascination — acting on the detail that excites you." What detail reliably grabs your attention that others walk past?
4. The same shape as a cost
What do you reliably avoid, overdo, or can't leave alone — the thing that, in your honest moments, you'd call compulsive rather than chosen?
When you're stressed, what's your one available move, the response that crowds out all the others?
5. The tells (the article's sharper instruments)
Your reaction to the very claim "everything you perceive is colored by your default shape" — does it make you want to relax, get cautious, or feel "I'm the exception"? (The piece says that reaction is itself the shape talking.)
What do you find quietly intolerable in other people — the trait that makes you think "how can they live like that"? (Often the disowned opposite of your own shape.)
What do you most long for or admire from a distance — peace, freedom, security, recognition, intensity? People describe what they lack far more vividly than what they have.
6. The wound underneath
When was the earliest moment you remember feeling the core fear from question 2? (Less to find "the cause" — the authors argue the shape decides what you found wounding, not the reverse — and more to feel its age.)
If the lens dropped for a day and you didn't have to manage the thing you're always managing, what do you imagine you'd feel — and is any part of that frightening?
You don't need to answer all of these. Even four or five honest ones across different groups will give me enough to triangulate. Want to take a pass and send them back?
Something interesting to note is how they keep getting re-borrowed and re-labeled. Reich started with his labels and his student Lowen carried them forward. More recently, NARM is a growing therapeutic modality that has added their own labels and subtypes: https://melissaknighttaylor.com/narm-adaptive-survival-styles/
I also like that it's physicalized and for myself and the people close to me who register strongly with one type, it tracks as to how their body looks.
I think as systems learnt from books this stuff often won't resonate, but as a general principle to look at someone's body and movement pattern and asking, what's the overall gestalt here, what's hidden, expressed, what's the overall bodily expression and orientation towards the world - that's where it becomes valuable.
I'm a Reichian psychotherapist so obviously, thoroughly endorse this post. I often describe them as character positions and note that we all have a few we move through, depending on circumstance. Reich's genius was connecting these patterns to physiology, you could say the bodily shapes our shapes make! I often find myself probing or drawing attention to a surface defence and trying to bring the vulnerabilities that have maybe shaped this into view.
The interesting thing to me isn't that people don't believe this, it's that they don't *want* to believe it. Any number of reasons why, I guess. It involves introspection (that works, i.e. produces actual insight) and trying to observe or otherwise guess another's theory of mind.
But it's true, and I've been working with this for years as a consultant. Basically, everyone has a very limited set of levers with which they understand the world and behave in it. (The set of all levers is not large, and nobody has more than a small subset of their own.) Oddly, in a particular situation you tend to see clusters of the same subset. This isn't obvious without digging, but, to name one example, it's why certain products take off and others don't.
I think there's something deeply unsettling about the idea that you have patterned reactions which are self-referential rather than based on some objective truth out there! I think I would've rejected this idea for a lot of my life...
It was absolutely wild when I realised I was bringing my same neuroticism to my sport as I was to my work. It feels like such a simple realisation, but I was obtuse to it for years!
This reminds me of a quote I just sent to a friend: "When adaptive intelligence out lives the conditions it was built for, it turns into compulsion. Productivity without presence.". I'm not sure who to attribute to. But it's gold..and seems to be a theme for me at the moment. Time to shed and let go of what no longer serves.
Hmm. This reminds me of a lot of comms/interdisciplinary and general cognition work about assumptions and narratives (even Brene Brown is useful here). The assumptions we make about the world affect the narrative we experience/create, our experiences cocreate those assumptions, and it does/would take active effort to rewrite any/all those variables.
I, too, love this! What you’re calling “default shape” is what I generally refer to as “worldview”. If identity is what we believe about how we are/work, worldview is what we believe about how the world is/works. Both are just as ingrained and just as malleable.
Love this. Reminds me of Sally Field: "The task as a grown up person is to realize what garment you knit for yourself to survive as a child, in the winter of your childhood. But when you're in the summer, so to speak, of your adulthood, you're boiling hot and you can't figure out, "Why am I so fucking hot all the time?" And it's because you can't take off this garment that you knitted for yourself as a child that you no longer need. You can't realize, you don't realize that this way of behaving, this functional way that your brain taught you to behave, to survive, it gets in your way now."
oh man I wish I’d known that quote before! totally would have put it in our book!!!
It is excellent, isn’t it?
I saw the title & thought, "oh circle, well maybe square". Turns out, I was totally wrong about the content but this is a good article!
I had a math professor who would always draw a two-holed torus when drawing a generic surface.
Me too!
"Punditry is self-portraiture" reminds me of something Nietzche wrote: “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography."
I've certainly found the Enneagram and other personality typing systems helpful for self-study; Schema Therapy (a form of CBT) is another interesting frame. They talk about developing "schema mindfulness" which is awareness of our default shapes/stories.
whoa that’s incredible
I love this.
And I think it is more than metaphor. The becoming we have been involved in up to now is not stored in our brain like a hard drive, it is formed into a geometric “shape” that both molds our present and is re-formed by encounter.
It is not a triangle or a square - many more dimensions - but it is strangely “shaped” (current neurophysics is demonstrating this). What we carry forward into the present is a shape, and your intuition is fantastic.
Yes, quite a lot of overlap with the active inference / predictive processing view of cognition
Fantastic post. I'm still cracking up at, "this lens produces annoying people, but also, great poets." The EnneaFours who see that part will cackle and then cry.
It takes all kinds, even fours
Cate, I want a shape quiz. No, I DEMAND a shape quiz ... please make a shape quiz :) Even if it isn't scientifically valid, I will still find it tremendous fun, especially if the art is good.
On a more serious note... I was recently discussing with my best friend whether people are default yes people or default no people. My partner is a yes person. Before he even thinks, he says yes... to whatever other people are bringing to him. I think I am a default no person (and I deeply dislike that if it is true). This post gave me a little hope that perhaps the default yes/default no is more nuanced (and therefore more palatable).
P.S. This is the quiz I have been working on for, like... 5 years now. Still working on it... https://misformerigold.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-life
Quiz please!
love it!
Here are the questions AI Claude gave me:
----
So the questions below aren't a personality quiz — they're angles for catching the same reflex from several directions. Answer whichever pull at you; vague gut reactions are more useful here than tidy analysis. Then I'll try to name a candidate shape and the wound it might be guarding.
1. The cross-domain reflex (the main event)
When a new project, relationship, or plan begins, what's the first feeling that arrives before any thought — excitement, dread, suspicion, relief, the urge to check something?
Think of three unrelated situations from this week: a work thing, something with a person you're close to, and a piece of news. Is there a single emotional posture underneath all three?
When something is going well, what do you tend to do with that — savor it, brace for it to end, look for the catch, start the next thing?
2. The felt sense, not the story
Where in your body or mood do you first register that "something is off"? What is that signal actually telling you to do?
Finish this honestly, fast, without editing: "The thing I'm always quietly scanning for is ___."
Cate's runs roughly "We must get this exactly right or it'll be irrevocably ruined"; Sasha's is "Everything must be okay." If you had to caption your own background hum in one blunt sentence, what would it say?
3. Where the shape is a superpower
What do other people find genuinely hard that comes easy or even pleasurable to you?
What have you been praised for so often it feels unremarkable to you?
The article says skill grows from "fascination — acting on the detail that excites you." What detail reliably grabs your attention that others walk past?
4. The same shape as a cost
What do you reliably avoid, overdo, or can't leave alone — the thing that, in your honest moments, you'd call compulsive rather than chosen?
When you're stressed, what's your one available move, the response that crowds out all the others?
5. The tells (the article's sharper instruments)
Your reaction to the very claim "everything you perceive is colored by your default shape" — does it make you want to relax, get cautious, or feel "I'm the exception"? (The piece says that reaction is itself the shape talking.)
What do you find quietly intolerable in other people — the trait that makes you think "how can they live like that"? (Often the disowned opposite of your own shape.)
What do you most long for or admire from a distance — peace, freedom, security, recognition, intensity? People describe what they lack far more vividly than what they have.
6. The wound underneath
When was the earliest moment you remember feeling the core fear from question 2? (Less to find "the cause" — the authors argue the shape decides what you found wounding, not the reverse — and more to feel its age.)
If the lens dropped for a day and you didn't have to manage the thing you're always managing, what do you imagine you'd feel — and is any part of that frightening?
You don't need to answer all of these. Even four or five honest ones across different groups will give me enough to triangulate. Want to take a pass and send them back?
Wilhelm Reich and his lineage make a fun rabbit hole to go down on this line of thinking, they call it character armor. Best resource I've seen: https://www.reichandlowentherapy.org/Content/Character/Overview/general_character.html
What's the case for the Reichian types? Talking with devotees of the system has left me unconvinced, but I'm open to checking it out...
Something interesting to note is how they keep getting re-borrowed and re-labeled. Reich started with his labels and his student Lowen carried them forward. More recently, NARM is a growing therapeutic modality that has added their own labels and subtypes: https://melissaknighttaylor.com/narm-adaptive-survival-styles/
I find the general points to make sense and it feels like a typing system (not unlike enneagram) that people vary in carrying predominantly one type or sometimes multiple by degrees. It tends to be built around a "core wounding" concept, again similar to enneagram: https://drlaurenceheller.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Excerpt-Survival-Style-Manual.pdf
I also like that it's physicalized and for myself and the people close to me who register strongly with one type, it tracks as to how their body looks.
I think as systems learnt from books this stuff often won't resonate, but as a general principle to look at someone's body and movement pattern and asking, what's the overall gestalt here, what's hidden, expressed, what's the overall bodily expression and orientation towards the world - that's where it becomes valuable.
I'm a Reichian psychotherapist so obviously, thoroughly endorse this post. I often describe them as character positions and note that we all have a few we move through, depending on circumstance. Reich's genius was connecting these patterns to physiology, you could say the bodily shapes our shapes make! I often find myself probing or drawing attention to a surface defence and trying to bring the vulnerabilities that have maybe shaped this into view.
The interesting thing to me isn't that people don't believe this, it's that they don't *want* to believe it. Any number of reasons why, I guess. It involves introspection (that works, i.e. produces actual insight) and trying to observe or otherwise guess another's theory of mind.
But it's true, and I've been working with this for years as a consultant. Basically, everyone has a very limited set of levers with which they understand the world and behave in it. (The set of all levers is not large, and nobody has more than a small subset of their own.) Oddly, in a particular situation you tend to see clusters of the same subset. This isn't obvious without digging, but, to name one example, it's why certain products take off and others don't.
I think there's something deeply unsettling about the idea that you have patterned reactions which are self-referential rather than based on some objective truth out there! I think I would've rejected this idea for a lot of my life...
Nietzsche had a bit to say on this via the notion of 'perspectivism': https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/#Pers
And there's also a literature on 'Worldview' or what the Germans termed 'Weltanschauung' which echoes some of the points here: https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~funkk/Personal/worldview.html
Parallels also to be found in stance empiricism, theory ladenness, orientational pluralism and many more besides.
Overall a fascinating topic, and one that doesn't get enough attention in a world biased towards dispassionate positivism.
You could even take it up a level: Does your own 'default shape' commit you to noticing others'? :)
It was absolutely wild when I realised I was bringing my same neuroticism to my sport as I was to my work. It feels like such a simple realisation, but I was obtuse to it for years!
I think both of us feel the same way. We all make sense to ourselves...
My default shape reaction while reading this was "This couple probably has some valuable wisdom to share with me. I better focus and take it all in."
I think you've reinvented enneagram from first principles
it’s lovely, honestly
YOOOO i was thinking the same!!!
This reminds me of a quote I just sent to a friend: "When adaptive intelligence out lives the conditions it was built for, it turns into compulsion. Productivity without presence.". I'm not sure who to attribute to. But it's gold..and seems to be a theme for me at the moment. Time to shed and let go of what no longer serves.
"People can’t accurately describe what they have, but they’re wonderfully articulate about what they long for." A little louder for my eardrums.
Hmm. This reminds me of a lot of comms/interdisciplinary and general cognition work about assumptions and narratives (even Brene Brown is useful here). The assumptions we make about the world affect the narrative we experience/create, our experiences cocreate those assumptions, and it does/would take active effort to rewrite any/all those variables.
I, too, love this! What you’re calling “default shape” is what I generally refer to as “worldview”. If identity is what we believe about how we are/work, worldview is what we believe about how the world is/works. Both are just as ingrained and just as malleable.