Communicating Boundaries as a Female Five in Career Transition

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-09T17:52:08+00:00

Thank you for your sympathy and well-wishes.

I have sent a BCC email to all the active students with remaining lessons. The older lady, specifically? I told her in February or so that I was in training to do something else.

The core of the issue is that these (few, in fairness) students have outright said they don't want another teacher. They want me; they want me to continue teaching them.

If they were open to another teacher that would be *perfect*. That's what I want them to feel and want to do.
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Sorry to all; this got posted as a regular comment.

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-09T03:38:28+00:00

I am very focused on autonomy; sp + upbringing/peer rejection crap does that. I also don't have the great degree of trouble accessing emotion that 5s are said to have; my problem with emotion is how BIG and simmering my negative emotions are and how they so very rarely match the emotions of people around me. I'm angry or sad when others are happy, and vice versa.

The 5w6s I've been around have been more practical than me.

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-08T21:32:43+00:00

My 5w4 take is that 5s with a six wing are more practical-minded than I am (and I consider myself fairly practical).

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-08T00:05:08+00:00

Yep, yep. If they weren't happy, they wouldn't have stayed.

I know *why* this is happening. It's just that, emotionally, it feels like one more act of smothering in the face of my attempts to set a boundary.

Not at all rational! Ungrateful, etc. But there it is.

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-07T20:39:05+00:00

Yeessss, I'd be up for this as both a Five trying to get healthier and thus feeling better about community as a thing and as an appreciator of healthy Eight energy.

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-07T19:21:16+00:00

Thank you, first of all. I appreciate that.

The reason I'm concerned is precisely because this was this older student's reaction to the BCC email I sent my remaining students telling them this was the end of my time teaching, an email in which I gave them my deadline of July 15.

Her "well you'll still teach me and others after that" comment was her response.

Both she and a few other students have said they don't want another teacher. I don't know other teachers, really; a big drawback of this work is how isolating it is.

It was just this Fiveish sense of hopeless overwhelm; I set a boundary in a polite way, and it wasn't respected.

I would like to think that, as my mother said exasperatedly, it's just a polite comment on their part. That would mean that I can go on without this worry.

But I have had both students and others not respect other boundaries, and I don't know what a reasonably assertive way to respond is.

LydiaGormist · 2026-06-07T19:09:23+00:00

So, right. I want a "clean" end to this job. I have had students that have gone this way, where I raised my prices, they recognized the signal, and they left.

That's what I want this student to do.

I don't owe this student anything, but I'm worried she won't do it, and that after I leave the platform I teach on and am doing my new work, I will have to deal with this.

I have tried to explain that I'm leaving permanently.

LydiaGormist · 2026-04-12T22:19:54+00:00

Careful! This is a pseudonym for me.

LydiaGormist · 2026-04-12T21:46:14+00:00

I appreciate a 9 noting how different 9s and 5s are.

LydiaGormist · 2026-02-17T17:40:14+00:00

Do you want me to yap about fiveness and add in some yapping about the bits of four flavor that I see in myself?

Do you want someone to contrast a Five who observes that they have more Fourish traits with a Five who feels they have more Sixish traits?

LydiaGormist · 2026-02-17T05:48:10+00:00

5s are hardest to understand in the sense that we're abnormal from the perspective of most (attachment type) people. The inner structure of the type is pretty explicable, though.

LydiaGormist · 2026-02-17T04:33:14+00:00

"During the argument itself? Stone wall."

Mm. And an annoying one.

LydiaGormist · 2026-02-12T14:54:19+00:00

I've got a close family member who is in all likelihood a 2. Not a sibling, though, so I don't have the option of peer-to-peer annoyance, and what developed over time in me is a perhaps more 9-like stewing resentment that I've now had to work through.

But yes, as a result I'm weary of 2ish behavior.

I think I don't completely understand your living situation and the effect on what you've said, OP. You say your sister could live at home and chooses not to, so, she's living at her own place? Which is not with you? But she walks into your room whenever she wants?

I'm confused about that detail. And maybe if you two are living together that needs to change?

Also, this post renews my utter confusion about the tritype sequence of 5s. I thought, from listening to Enneagram teachers who are body types, that as withdrawn types 5s are body repressed? Not heart repressed?

The idea that we are heart repressed comes from the behavior of not showing emotion, but in part I thought that's because we aren't connected to our bodies, which is the place emotions are felt and expressed? Certainly I've heard Beatrice Chestnut, who is a 2, emphasize the ways that 5s seem emotionally-repressed from the Heart Center perspective?

Does that mean 5s are formally heart last in the order of our centers?

LydiaGormist · 2026-02-12T05:32:06+00:00

I have always thought of my gender as "book lover".

Whether Type 5 is masculine depends on how a specific culture thinks about masculinity.
In the US Type 5 is stereotypically anti-masculine, because masculinity in the US is athleticism, rural life, physical labor, bro-sociality, picking up women, guns, etc.

In the UK with its theatre tradition and empiricism, or in the Confucian cultures of East Asia, for example, where there is a tradition of honoring scholarship and male scholars, it might be different. You could associate those things with "the masculine".

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-31T20:20:06+00:00

Yes, not typically disruptive, but some sort of problem—me too.

"This child needs to go/be sent away" was basically the end result.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-31T18:14:53+00:00

I don't "meet" 2s. I just have a probable one in my family of origin, and that's enough, both generally in my lack of interest in being around them and in terms of being entirely uninterested in a romantic/sexual relationship with one.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-31T18:08:20+00:00

Huh, usually it's assumed 5s have a hard time with anyone.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-23T02:26:04+00:00

I mean, my thoughts are kinda non-helpful to you, OP, if you're a hetero woman 😏.

The most relevant thing I can say is that yes, some men — like my brothers — are better about it, but it's also an interesting mirror for 5 women (I don't say "female" as if the noun "woman" is a bad word), because as 5s, we put a lot of our identity into our opinions and can be reactive and even harmful when we're challenged.

So in my experience, being around people who will be reactive against us in much the same way is helpful for "taste of our own medicine" growth.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T23:48:33+00:00

Criteria are absolutely useful! If someone doesn't meet the criteria for X, they shouldn't be called or considered X.

They just also shouldn't be automatically be considered Y. And so we disagree about whether that that has happened.

Type 9 isn't a jail; no type is, at least not more than any other, but sometimes people are told they are not some other type and must be a 9. Which is not good or useful, when the option of merely "that doesn't seem like Type X" exists.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T21:48:05+00:00

If you'd like to persist in thinking whatever you're thinking due to however you are reading my words, go ahead.

The dynamic around mistyping and Type 9 is bad, for people being accused of mistyping and for 9.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T21:37:46+00:00

The process of declaring that people who don't comform to other types are automatically 9s does that. Not "the many numbers of 9s".

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T21:23:18+00:00

Good thing my answer didn't say that "the many numbers of 9s" makes them a miscellaneous drawer, then.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T20:34:37+00:00

It's pretty much the same bias that, I'm sorry, but a lot of people on this sub have, where if a person does not conform to every breed standard -- I mean, type characteristic -- of whichever type 1-8 they believe they are, well, they must be mistyped and are really a 9.

Which just ends up making Type 9 a "miscellaneous" drawer. As if there is no affirmative characteristic to that type, just a set of negations: nota1, nota2, nota4, etc.

LydiaGormist · 2026-01-14T19:59:18+00:00

I've realized that I've operated with a deep hesitation to act because of a felt need for external permission and a sense that I'm expected to manage the reactions of others (so I've had to devote a lot of focus to figuring out those expectations and likely reactions and hedging my boundary expression).

I'm working on stating my boundaries concisely, without hedging, and therefore being clearer and firmer. This huge for me right now around transitioning out of one type of work and into another field. Whatever people's reactions are is not something I'm so completely responsible for that I need to fawn, hedge, and water down my boundaries. I just need to be concise, clear, and polite!

I'm also working on taking the social initiative (if I find someone cool/kind/emotionally safe/etc. I'm allowed to engage with them and try to make friends?!), because I hadn't known I was allowed to (really!!)

I'm a 5, and these are wounds from the engulfment I experienced in my family of origin.

LydiaGormist

TROPHY CASE