Passionate and easily injured, you’re one complicated puppy. Willful, intense, and occasionally self-destructive, your emotions — to quote the novelist and poet Herman Melville — rush like “herds of walruses and whales” beneath the surface of your personality.
Hesitant to reveal the depth of your emotions, you try to keep them hidden, a task that may require a certain degree of dissembling and manipulation. Not that you mean to be controlling — you just can’t help it. Covering up your feelings is something you learned in childhood. Even if your childhood looked enviable from afar, you were afraid of abandonment or rejection and were well aware of the suppressed needs and subterranean conflicts within your family. You learned to keep quiet about your own concerns. Your silence is a form of protection — and hiding. Although some people with this placement nurse fantasies of retaliation for long-ago wrongs, most simply continue to hide their feelings. Those walruses and whales may still be down there, but the surface looks smooth.
