ISTP 5w6 Characters

Mina is extremely logical and detached, able to perform complex surgeries without her feelings get in the way; she is increasingly out of touch with her emotions, because she gives them no real weight in her conscious decisions. She understands how her surgical machine works and has honed her skills to perfection; then easily goes into surgeries and learns how to do complex things with her own fingers. It does not bother her to operate on “lost causes,” and she is excited for a new challenge. Mina tries to detach herself from most things, including sex; she tells her boyfriend that this was just a sex thing, not a relationship, and there are no feelings involved. Because she’s out of touch with her feelings, she doesn’t know how much people matter to her, or whether she is in love, or if she wants to get married, and she tries to figure it out logically. Mina is a hands-on surgeon, who also loves to do things in real life. She designs and sews her own clothes, spending hours adding beading to her designs and is a harsh judge of anything that looks too basic, boring, or shabby. She cares about appearances and stocks her apartment full of nice things (expensive carpets). For Halloween, she goes all out and has “the party of the year,” but won’t let in people who dime-stored their costumes. Mina sometimes shows intuition about what’s going on with a patient, but prefers to focus on what she can do about their problems instead. And she shows a lot of inferior Fe “issues” – under stress, she becomes uncharacteristically emotional. She fights with and insults AJ in the OR, she has panic attacks, she fails to read the room and says things that upset the people she most cares about. Her inability to sense what matters to more emotional people causes her to refuse to be a godmother to a child, because she looks at it from a practical perspective (what it could do to her career and life) rather than seeing it as an ‘honor’ given to her by a friend who cares about her.

Enneagram: 5w6

Mina is certainly a head type, for whom fear is predominant, but she does a good job of hiding it most of the time. She is confident in herself and her skills, because she has practiced as a surgeon so many times that she can slice a peach in her sleep. She is eager to learn everything she can from AJ in surgery, and to try to do things for herself. But she is also secretive and unemotional, even detached; her friends call her “Spock” behind her back, because she so rarely shows any emotions even when leaving them all to go back to Nigeria. Mina is out of touch with her feelings and has no desire to get into them, seeing them as getting in the way of her objectivity; she often denies she is having an emotional reaction, and is unaware of what is driving her (such as insisting she can operate on her ex, without feelings compromising her judgment). It insults her to think that others do not think she is competent at her job, since she places so much emphasis on being skilled. Mina easily turns other people down, refuses to work with them, and doesn’t share her life with them (she won’t let a friend into her Halloween party unless he comes up with a “good costume”). But under stress, her 6 wing gets loud. She freaks out about her friend who recovered from cancer getting pregnant and rather than celebrate with her, talks about all the things that could go wrong and wind up killing her. She starts hyperventilating in the OR in one episode, when she’s feeling stressed. AJ has to tell her to calm down and close the patient; another time, she doesn’t want to do a complex surgery without him, since she has become reliant on his judgment and skill directing hers. But Mina always rises to the occasion and returns to self-confidence. She takes so long to try and make up her mind about whether to accept a marriage proposal, though, that her fiancé calls the engagement off.