New! - Profiling - The picture of the unhealthy SX 3w2 "The Star"

The Picture of the Unhealthy Sexual (variant) 3w2 "The Star"

The Desire to be Desirable
Sexual Threes are characterized by a powerful desire to be desired, an overall drive to be valued and wanted. They work at developing an appealing, alluring image, striving to become the ideal of their gender and cultural milieu, and they often enjoy helping others maximize their attractiveness as well. Whether male or female, they tend to cultivate whatever personal qualities they feel will get others interested in them. Sexual threes desire to impress by dazzling. Threes seduce by drawing attention their exceptional qualities. They often devote much time and energy to working out, careful grooming, or finding the right look.

Fear of Rejection and Promiscuity
As sexual types, they posses a strong desire for intimacy, but as Threes, they fear deep emotional connection. Subconsciously, they constantly fear that they will not be able to live up to the image they are projecting. In the lower levels, fears of their own undesirability will cause them to reject even people they deeply care about. They may even use sexual conquests to dispel fears of being unattractive. Less healthy sexual threes tend to be exhibitionists--wanting to display themselves to seduce or to reassure themselves they are attractive and valuable. In the unhealthy levels, threes can become caught up in promiscuity. Underneath the surface, they are extremely vulnerable but tend to strike out at others who question their value in any way. Slights to their narcissism, real or imagined, can lead to vindictiveness, sexual rage, and jealousy, often out of all proportion to their actual disappointment.

The most important thing to a sexual Three is their valuableness, so if someone implies that any part of them isn't good/appreciated/valued, unhealthy threes tend to strike out with out of proportion aggressiveness. They are always pressuring themselves to be the most valuable one, to put masks on to hide themselves where they're being the most valuable, so to challenge their value in any area is to open the flood gates of their built-up self-imposed pressure.

Deceit to Self and Others,Vanity, and Validation

The three's passion is deceit, a term that refers to a number of interrelated behaviors. One aspect of the three's deceit is the tendency to present themselves in a way that does not reflect their authentic self. An even more important aspect is their self-deception: in order to maintain their external performance, threes must convince themselves that they actually are the idealized image that they project to the world. At the same time, they must also repress their feelings of inadequacy to keep the self-deception going. They fear that if they were to drop their image, other people would see their deficiencies and reject them--confirming their worthlessness.

Underlying the unhealthy three's tension is an unrelenting feeling of worthlessness.

The, deceit leads threes to look to others for validation of their excellence and is the reason why they must constantly give themselves internal pep talks. In a sense, threes must lie to themselves to keep up their self-esteem and to motivate themselves toward greater achievement ("You're great! A genius! Nobody has ever written a better writing!")

Average threes put their energy into perfecting their ego self, their self-image, rather than into discovering their true self, because they believe that the ego is the real self. It is much more difficult to develop the authentic qualities of who we really are when we are encouraged and rewarded at every turn to adapt and become what others expect us to be.

"Suffering"
(The Two Wing disintegrating)

Real (as well as exaggerated) suffering allows them to feel like martyrs who are overbrudened by their sacrifices for others, although they may well overrate their efforts on other's behalf. they may talk about little else than their own problems. Past operations, scars, traumatic experiences, and health scares of all sorts are paraded before others in an attempt to elicit signs of concern and love. Hypochondria can become a part of the picture as a further ploy for gratitude and sympathy. They may be subject to stress-related disesases.

The may complain about not being given an expected term of endearment or sufficient appreciation. They can be surprisingly aggressive and argumentative, insisting quite strongly that they have been wronged in some way. Needless to say, these kinds of complaints can come as quite a surprise to others. under sever stress, they become aggressive. The acting out of rage and betrayal that, under ordinary circumstances, they might otherwise feel unable to face.

~ Edited from Wisdom of the Enneagram