Fine Distinctions - Twos (Tom Condon)

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Self Preservation Twos

• Healthy Self-preservation Twos are often more in touch with how they feel and what they want.
• Have the courage and social skills to express their preferences.
• Appropriately “self-referenced” – know what they want and yet include the wishes of others.

• Can be unusually materialistic.

• Highly effective; in touch with the forceful high side of Eight.
• Take good care of themselves but are equally concerned about friends and family.
• Can begin to feel burdened with the needs of others and want recognition and pampering in return.
• Can actively worry about the health of others while neglecting their own. • Believe: “I do so much for everyone – I deserve to be treated as someone special.” Overestimate their contribution and what they are due for it.
• Can display a striking sense of entitlement as if the shame button has been removed from their brains. Self-important, diva-like behavior possible.
• Can drop more easily to the aggressive low side of Eight and are sometimes mistaken for Eights.
• More prone to melancholy martyrdom and psychosomatic illness than the other Two subtypes.
• Illness gets them attention and gives them permission to self-care and may also be a way to indirectly express anger by making those who care about them suffer.
• Hidden agendas; may set events in motion involving other people which ultimately lead to the Two getting what he/she wants.

Intimate Twos

• Highly emotionally intelligent and capable of deep personal intimacy.
• Have superb social skills; able to make direct, empathetic contact with others on a one-to-one basis.
• Can be excellent biographers, therapists, counselors; excel in occupations that depend on effectively entering another individual’s subjective reality.
• Generous, sensitive and thoughtful towards their beloved.
• Especially good at reading and responding to nonverbal behavior.
• Can see beyond roles and contexts to identify someone’s essential humanity.
• Tend to act seductive and aggressive by turns.
• Generally confuse being sexually desirable with being loved.
• Can seem receptively interested in others, offering inviting touches while oozing a combination of charm and sexuality.

• May harbor a melancholy desire for total enmeshed connection with another person; related to the low side of Four.
• Like Fours, Intimate Twos may be attracted to distant or unavailable partners; this replicates a distant relationship with a parent.

• Offer their beloved an intensely focused interest, an interest they secretly want to have returned.
• If someone resists an Intimate Two’s drive to intimacy the Two may then push and challenge, trying to find a way around their beloved’s objection to becoming fully united. If this fails, the Two may grow angry or even physically violent.
• Intimate Twos can be “processing queens” and “processing kings,” people who are so focused on their relationships that they need to talk about, analyze and understand any barriers to intimacy.
• Sometimes proud of their seductive powers and the status of those they seduce. Some get hooked on the challenge of seduction and on winning people over.
• Once a catch is secured they may lose interest; can feel closer to people they don’t know well.
• Some Intimate Twos are highly sexual, Others are not but still role-play an image of sexuality that they are disconnected from.

Social Twos

• Have a strong sense of mission about helping others and will work assiduously to that end.
• Attempt the ambitious and the difficult and succeed at it.
• Can be exceptionally persuasive and unstoppable.

• Especially good at moving through various stratas of society; able to switch communication styles and social modes in the service of getting things done.
• Will take stands on unpopular issues even if those positions contradict their own beliefs or politics.

• Might function at the center of a group, be the lynch-pin person upon whom everyone depends, drawing around them “a we of me.”
• Other Social Twos act out their ambition through their affiliations with accomplished or powerful people.

• Might marry someone influential and concentrate their energies on fulfilling the spouse’s ambitions. Or groom their children to become achievers.

• Stage mothers and political spouses are possible roles.
• Generally confuse being recognized with being loved.
• Especially prone to conflicts between fulfilling the group’s needs versus taking care of themselves.
• Can also be martyrs, blaming others for their unhappy sacrifices or for not living up to the Two’s expectations.
• Twos with this subtype are easy to confuse with Threes especially when they have a Three wing.
• Their ambition becomes grandiose and stems from feeling unworthy and unfulfilled.
• Unlike Intimate Twos who send their needs over to live in one specific person, Social Twos send a sliver of themselves over to live in each individual member of their chosen group.

Connecting Points Two with a One Wing

• Brings Twos conscience and emotional containment.
• Their ethics come before their pride and they hold themselves to high standards.
• Have conscious, philosophical principles about the value of serving others: “We are put on this earth to help one another.” Also believe in taking care of themselves.
• Idealistic, hopeful for change; can have a strong sense of mission especially on behalf of others.
• More discreet and intuitively respectful of other people’s boundaries.
• Less likely to dramatize their feelings.
• When upset, they tend to go quiet and experience strong swirling emotions internally.
• More melancholy than Twos with a Three wing and usually more introverted.
• Can confuse their sense of mission with more self-centered needs.
• May invade and dominate others, believing their actions are justified by their ethic of helping.
• Repress their personal desires and focus on others as a way to avoid the guilty dilemma they feel between obeying rules versus satisfying their inner needs.

• Can warp their ethics to justify personal selfishness and prideful hostility.
• The anger of both One and Eight can support a nasty self-serving forcefulness.
• Prone to depression; often self-critical especially about being selfish.

Two with a Three Wing

• Brings Twos more interpersonal warmth, sociability and the capacity to initiate.
• Can be charming, good-natured and heartfelt.
• Dynamic and highly effective, especially at projects or enterprises that support the well-being of others.

• Thrive on group process and are generally good communicators.
• May enjoy multitasking, keeping several threads or projects going at once.
• Supremely adaptable, able to match the external environment and blend with new circumstances. Often driven and ambitious as well as disciplined.
• Could excel in a corporate context and then work with homeless people on weekends.
• Less acutely moral and more worldly than Twos with a One wing; identify with status and power like a Three. Can also be unapologetically materialistic.
• This wing brings a double dose of vanity as their Twoish pride combines with Threeish image-consciousness. Could act competitive or superior towards others.
• Often less auditory and more visual; have a faster tempo.
• Manipulative; can create instant intimacy with people and then drop them.
• May be hypocritical; a gap between their private behavior and their public face.
• Can be hard-hearted and emotionally controlling.
• May be deluded, preferring glamorous, self-important fantasies over reality.
• Extraverted; might dramatize their feelings through histrionic tantrums.

Two’s Connection to Four

• This connection helps Twos get in touch with their true emotions and inner life.
• Develop an independent, possibly artistic point of view.
• Search within for themselves; express themselves creatively.

• Become emotionally honest; more readily in touch with the authentic emotions in their own body, boundary of self emerges, and own personal feelings.
• Recognize their own tangled motives for giving so much to others. They admit to their personal needs and take better care of themselves.

• Melancholy is a portal feeling for Twos as well. Through the door of sadness they find their other emotions.
• Brings tendencies towards self-pity and depression.
• Can haunted by melancholy. They can have a trapped prince or princess quality.

• Fear abandonment and may disown their capacity to be alone.
• Can act out unrequited love scenarios or develop romantic obsessions; yearn for Mr. or Ms. Right but seek unlikely, unavailable choices instead. • May have a morbid streak.
• Some Fourish Twos have medical scripts or can be interested in the illnesses of others because it makes the Two feel needed.
• Can be “walking guilt trips,” acting like martyrs or looking at you with an aura of sad disappointment, sighing heavily from time to time.
• Like Fours, Twos can internalize ones and feel connected to people who are not present or, say, talk constantly about a spouse who died years ago.

Two’s Connection to Eight

• Strengthens a Two’s personal boundaries and helps them assert their own needs.
• Get in touch with an appropriate, honest selfishness. Say “no” and take care of their own needs.

• Brings self-confidence and a direct, occasionally blunt communication style.
• Drive for getting things done, especially to fulfill their inner sense of mission.

• Decisive, care less about other people’s opinions; do well in leadership positions.

• Strongly protective towards friends and family.
• Get in touch with their power to initiate as well as be forceful.
• Can forcefully cleave their way through obstacles to achieving their goals.
• If a Two’s pride is insulted or they feel under-appreciated they can act out vengefully like an unhealthy Eight.
• The pride of a Two and the narcissism of an Eight can fuse into a sense of angry entitlement. Can also be rebellious.
• Since Twos are acutely sensitive to other people’s feelings and inner workings, they know just how to hurt them, which soft spot to stab to inflict the most pain.
• Block out the evidence of their own hostility or have amnesia for what they just said while angry.
• Can be sharp-tongued, domineering and pushy.
• Go from being victim to oppressor. Could hold grudges.
• Give themselves to you and then demand themselves back.
• Can throw tantrums, be aggressive or violent when they are not given what their pride says they are due.
• Feel like they have to be strong for others but unconsciously resent the burden.