The Enneagram

“The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.” 

— Ian Morgan Cron

Doing this inner work can be overwhelming at times. It can be an unsettling experience of feeling lost, of feeling rudderless in the middle of the ocean during a storm. That’s why it can be useful to use certain frameworks for guidance - for something to hold onto, and to help make sense of what may otherwise seem impossible to understand. However, it is worth being careful and thoughtful with which models you use and how you apply them. Without wishing to upset people by discrediting something that they have found meaningful and has worked for them - I’ll just highlight and suggest my personal favourite model for personality typing, with an emphasis on healing and growth, the Enneagram. 

“The Enneagram teaches that there are nine different personality styles in the world,” says Donald Miller, “one of which we naturally gravitate toward and adopt in childhood to cope and feel safe.” While other models are purely psychological in nature and focus more on description (such as Myers-Briggs), and some models are based on when we were born rather than our life experiences (such as astrology), the Enneagram is essentially a map of the archetypical ways that we respond and adapt to traumatic and stressful childhood experiences - which then go on to influence the way our personality develops throughout our lives. The best description for the Enneagram that I’ve been able to come up with is simply - the Enneagram shows us which suit of armour we put on as a child in order to keep ourselves safe and worthy of love. It is very analogous to inner-child work, as well as the parts-based work in Internal Family Systems (IFS). Children all have fundamental needs, such as the need for love and connection, and they also try their hardest to avoid punishment or rejection. Even if we had a relatively ‘normal’ or loving childhood, I’m sorry to say, no one goes through childhood scar free. We all learn ways of adapting in order to receive love, and protect ourselves from harm. The Enneagram shows that whilst we are all unique individuals with our own personalities - we all broadly fall into one of the nine types. Afterall, there are only so many ways of responding to stressful situations or trying to earn love from our parents. For example, type One’s learn to adopt strict standards for themselves and become perfectionists, thinking that if they “look perfect, live perfect, and work perfect”, to quote Brené Brown speaking on perfectionism, that they will avoid criticism and earn love. Type Eights, on the other hand, learn to be strong and never show weakness, thinking that they must never be vulnerable or let anyone hurt them again. 

Because we donned one of these suits of armour as children, it influences how we develop and psychologically mature as we get older. And because we have no awareness of this process, the suit of armour, our Enneagram type, simply becomes ‘who we are’. We don’t realise that much of our personality is, in truth, a calcified way that we responded to trauma and stress in the past. In essence, we put on these suits of armour out of necessity, we forget to take them off, and then we forget that we’re even wearing them altogether - long after they don’t fit any more. People will often say things like “I’m such a perfectionist” (type One), “I’m really competitive” (type Three), or “I just have an addictive personality” (type Seven), thinking these traits are completely innate and ‘just who they are’ - without realising how influential our childhood experiences are for our psychological development. And this is one of the many gifts of the Enneagram. It lets us become aware of the narrow way that we view the world, the lens through which we filter everything - and it also lets us see how other people (the other eight types) see the world too, helping us become kinder to and more accepting of everyone.

When we begin learning about the Enneagram, we naturally figure out our own type, and then we begin typing our close friends and family. Again, this is not to put people in rigidly defined boxes to pseudo-diagnose them - it’s to gain insight into how they see the world, and to get an understanding of the core motivations driving their behaviour. “The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are,” says Ian Morgan Cron, “not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier.” Each type has a basic fear and a basic desire, which leads to the type's core motivations. There’s a lot more depth to the Enneagram than I can go into here, so I encourage you to do some further reading, but the point I want to get across is that each type has a unique perspective and their own way of seeing and experiencing their lives and the world around them. This alone can open up a lot more understanding and compassion for those around us - not to mention for ourselves. The Enneagram, in essence, is less about the ‘what’ (behaviours and descriptions) and more about the ‘why’ (underlying motivations).  

The Enneagram also differs from many other personality typing systems as it is so much more than just a surface level descriptive model. It is all about growth and spiritual development, and it is all about the light and the dark present within all of us. “Learning to see ourselves for who we truly are -” says Christopher L. Heuertz, “the good, the bad, the ugly - is a gift of grace. The Enneagram helps us do just that.” It is often said that you’ll know you’ve found your Enneagram type when you find reading the description deeply uncomfortable. We all like reading about our good traits, and there’s plenty of that in the Enneagram, but we recoil and cringe when we read scarily accurate descriptions of us at our worst. But therein lies the magic of the Enneagram. Instead of ignoring or hiding from our darkness, the Enneagram acts as a way of mapping out this otherwise terrifying space - which allows us to do the crucial work of integrating all of ourselves. Facing our shadow, as Jung would put it, or our exiled parts in IFS language, is hard work - but it’s probably the most valuable inner work you’ll ever do. “If we observe ourselves truthfully and non-judgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action,” says seminal Enneagram author Don Richard Riso, “we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.” As with many other avenues of healing and growth, crucial to Enneagram work is awareness - the neutral self-witnessing that becomes the foundation upon which we begin to truly grow. The more we observe and integrate all of ourselves, no longer identifying with our every emotion or impulse, we move ever closer to a state of wholeness, a state of equanimity and peace. 

As the author of ‘The Complete Enneagram’ Beatrice Chestnut puts it, we must begin “disidentifying from our personality by watching it in action.” From this place, we’re able to expand our awareness and presence outwards to those around us and even the world around us. “There is nothing more important than self-awareness and self-understanding” says David Daniels, “to bringing peace and compassion to our relationships and to our world.” Similar to models like IFS, and really any model of therapy or healing that deeply resonates with us, the Enneagram eventually integrates into our perception and becomes a life practice - not just a therapeutic one. There is a lot of wisdom and a lot of depth within the Enneagram, so I encourage you to explore the model for yourself, just remember to stay open and curious - it should be used as a way of deepening our connection to ourselves, and of enhancing our compassion and understanding of those around us. Not as a way of further distancing ourselves from taking responsibility for our actions - “I’m such a type Four” etc., or from others by putting up yet another intellectualized wall of diagnosis between yourself and the world. Embrace the wisdom and insight the Enneagram has to offer, and consciously interact with the model as a means for growth - then you move towards your highest self, your essence.