devotion
love » guilt
The Giver has a strong desire to work for his or her community while also helping those closest to him or her.
Seeing the world as winners and losers, the Giver feels a burning inner desire to help both groups be successful.
The Giver excels at love and guilt, the two emotions which best connect a feeler to other people.
They have a kind narrative sense which helps them connect others to each other, too.
Emotions are arguments, each arguing for survival in one of three arenas:
SELF
The self argument argues for the extended self: You, your family, close friends and valued possessions.
WORLD
The world argument argues for survival in the physical environment, making the feeler confront danger.
SOCIETY
The society argument navigates the complexities of human society, arguing for survival in the tribe.
Eristic order describes the usual order of an archetype's emotional arguments. There's always a self, world and society argument, but the order and expression differs between archetypes.
Your eristic order goes like this:
SELF
SOCIETY
The self-society order puts the two human arguments first, allowing the feeler to bridge self and society.
Benefits: A strong sense of self
Drawbacks: A weak sense of space
Emotions are dualities, having one of two forms that can be felt at a time:
SELF
LOVE/DISGUST
Love argues to add to or nurture the extended self, while disgust argues to remove from the self.
WORLD
FEAR/ANGER
Fear argues to model and understand the world, while anger argues to modify or destroy the world.
SOCIETY
GUILT/PRIDE
Guilt argues to do work for society, while pride argues to be a high-quality member of society.
Your first argument is the argument of the self, expressing in the love form.
Love is the most common first argument, serving in the role for four archetypes.
First-slot love archetypes are inherent cooperators who make for good allies, co-workers and community members.
Benefits: Passionate, warm, caring
Drawbacks: Possessive, self-absorbed
Your second argument is the society argument, expressing as guilt.
Guilt as a second argument compels you to second-guess yourself in favor of society. Guilt-second archetypes are good at fitting in with groups.
Benefits: Conscientious, thoughtful
Drawbacks: Pandering, overextending
Emotions are felt in beats, like heartbeats, all three arguments made each beat.
Beats span from one base emotion to another along the LFGDAP scale.
Generally: Farther up and farther to the right are more energy-intensive.
Each beat has a point-of-view shaped by its base emotions.
Devotion makes for a family- and society-conscious feeler.
Devotion cuts out the world argument, fear, allowing two people to bond without real-world demands making it so. Relationships based on devotion are strong and stable, surviving changes in the world.
Devotion spans from love to guilt, abbreviating fear.
Devotion covers all three internalizing emotions: love, fear and guilt. Because it 'skips over' fear, it effectively ignores the world argument. Because of this, devotion tends to be one of the most irrational emotions, ignoring facts and world-realities.
Devotion mirrors the all-externalizing contempt, which also jumps from the self to society argument, skipping the world argument.
Emotions have energy costs:
In a beat, the lower energy emotion is felt first.
Attachment and anxiety, the other all-internalizing emotions involving love, fear and guilt, aren't usually a problem for the Giver. When they are, though, the Giver will have less experience dealing with them. So overwhelming attachment and anxiety may be a problem for the Giver.
Using devotion in a situation where attachment or anxiety are appropriate can be a huge misstep for the Giver. This strategy ignores the world argument, so the Giver may end up making impractical decisions for love/guilt reasons— picking a person or group over the facts or reality of a situation.
Groups, cultures and societies need to satisfy all six base emotions for their members.
They'll typically do this in one of three patterns:
Attachment/envy/zeal cultures are typically family- or individualism-oriented and hardworking.
Devotion/contempt cultures have strict rules, devoted followers and a disdain for outsiders.
Satisfaction works for smaller groups which focus on avoiding fear, guilt, disgust and anger.
All cultures are characterized by one of these three patterns.
The Giver is great at fitting in to the devotion/contempt pattern:
Devotion/contempt cultures have simpler-but-stricter rules.
The Giver will fit in better with devotion/contempt cultures. They may fit in too much, agreeing by default with the values of the culture.
The Giver's coping emotion of contempt covers the other half of the emotional spectrum. This creates some problems for the Giver. When they cope, a devotion/contempt culture will completely endorse it. When the contempt is appropriate, this works out great. When it's not, it may put the Giver in a position where they externalize against an individual or group when they otherwise wouldn't.
The Giver doesn't fit in as well with the attachment/envy/zeal societal pattern:
The Giver pattern doesn't fit in as well with attachment/envy/zeal.
The Giver may have a harder time getting ahead in this type of culture, which focuses more on family involvement and individualism. With conscious practice, the Giver can focus on feeling more attachment and zeal to overcome this. Having friends of the Artist and Observer archetypes can help here.
Beats (combinations of love, fear, guilt, disgust, anger, pride) have opposites:
Since the coping emotion has the same arguments (self/world/society), but in opposite form, it effectively "turns off" the characteristic emotion, giving you a way out of overwhelming feelings.
The coping emotion serves as a sort of shadow archetype, characterizing you in times of extreme emotion.
Contempt, the combination of disgust and pride, serves as the primary coping strategy for Givers overwhelmed by their characteristic emotion of devotion.
Contempt is high-energy and all-externalizing, including both externalizing emotions besides anger. In a lot of ways, contempt accomplishes what anger accomplishes without using anger.
Shunning: Since the Giver is characterized by giving, cutting another person out of their life often serves as a severe punishment.
Escape: Sometimes the Giver himself/herself is the one who feels a need to exit the group.
Image-consciousness: The Giver's self-definition can come to be shaped by how the group sees them.
The Giver may revisit ideas or individuals that trigger disgust and pride in order to cope with overwhelming love and guilt.
Emotions can become addictive, like a drug that's made in your head. The addictions usually involve the emotions that make up your archetype's characteristic emotion:
Addiction to love, or the emotions here, looks like codependency.
Addiction to guilt results in a dramatic personality.
The world-analyzing emotion of fear can be hard for this feeler to face head-on. As a result, they might be bad at any emotions that begin or land on fear.
Emotions model and modify their spheres of influence—the extended self, the physical world or the feeler's tribe/society.
| Self | World | Society | |
| Model | Love | Fear | Guilt |
| Modify | Disgust | Anger | Pride |
It can be useful to think of the three dualities as pairs of opposite emotions.
They're also called the internalizing and externalizing forms of an emotion.
Love & Disgust
model/modify
Your extended self
Fear & Anger
model/modify
Your physical world
Guilt & Pride
model/modify
Your tribe/society
Virtues help you avoid the negative effects of an emotion by consciously producing the results of its opposite emotion. It's like coping but conscious and intentional. Here are your archetype's virtues:
Keeping secrets and revealing information only at the correct time. Using love to function as disgust.
Doing the work and making sure it's good work. The use of pride when guilt is felt.
Read all the other archetype descriptions here:
The people most similar to you will be your own archetype:
These archetypes share your eristic order:
These archetypes have the same first argument:
These archetypes share your second argument:
Archetypes with the same missing/third argument:
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