Note: This post originally appeared on the Contemplative Learning website. I utilize the Enneagram personality typing system extensively in my teaching and (via CLS) in leadership development and teamwork training sessions offered to schools, organizations, and individuals.
The Enneagram personality system is a powerful tool for self-discovery and personal and professional growth. But many people go through a difficult period right after they first encounter the Enneagram during which they obsess over the “dark side” of their personality type. This is a natural phase of Enneagram study, and it requires some patience and self-compassion.
We were reminded of this phenomenon just last week when we met someone who had recently typed herself as a Two (the Acceptance Seeker). She had discovered that, while the Two’s gift was for loving and serving others, this love was also usually tinged by a secret desire to be loved and appreciated in return. She immediately recognized this pattern in herself, but had suddenly become paralyzed, fearful to do anything nice for anyone else for fear that she was simply acting out of self-serving motives.
There’s a parallel pattern typical to every personality type when an individual first begins serious self-study using the Enneagram.
What makes the Enneagram so powerful is that it uncovers our deep, subconscious motivational structure. Each type is distinguished by a specific, underlying desire (and its corollary fear) that subtly shapes our behaviors. The Type One, for example, is driven by a desire to do the right things and to achieve her innate sense of idealistic perfection (for herself, her work, her relationships, and the world). This is actually the One’s gift to the world, this capacity to imagine a better way to do things and how to realize that vision. But in practice, for average or unhealthy Ones, this leads to a constant tendency to harshly criticize oneself and others for not living up to the One’s unrealistically high expectations.
Like our new Type Two friend with her secret desire for acceptance and love, the self-aware One begins to catch himself at every turn behaving based on this deep desire to be right and do right (or alternately, to avoid being wrong, flawed, and broken). Unfortunately, just having awareness of this pattern isn’t enough to stop the pattern from reoccurring, or even from acting on this “dark side” of one’s personality. So initially at least, the individual feels as if every single thing he does is coming from an interior place of need and unfulfillment.
It’s at this point that many people flee from the messy reality of their interior world and either write off the Enneagram altogether or distract themselves with other, less troubling activities. But we recommend just the opposite: it’s at this point that a newfound awareness of one’s inner motivations can begin to open us to our true selves, and if we hang in there with the dark underbelly of our personalities, we can also begin to discover the luminous, life-giving dimensions of our types as well.
Part of this is accomplished with some simple perspective taking. There’s nothing inherently wrong
with longing for a more perfect world/self (One), for love (Two), for esteem (Three), etc. All of us, even the healthy, have these needs and aspirations (and it’s the intensity and direction of the longing that defines each type). But it’s important to be ever-vigilant about how these desires so quickly get out of control and take charge of our behaviors, causing subtle to catastrophic damage
in our work, our relationships, and the world. And the more vigilant we allow ourselves to be, the
greater are our chances of primarily residing in “healthier” levels of our type.
By staying with these type-specific energies, we slowly discover that they are neither good nor bad.
These are simply judgments based on how we let the energies manifest in our outward life. The healthier we get, the greater our capacity for using our core energy for affirming others, giving
life, and bringing light and joy to ourselves and those around us. We find that the very energy that tends to get us in trouble is the same energy by which we thrive and make our unique contribution to the world. Thus, the One’s idealism brings social reform and personal improvement, the Two brings selfless love, the Three brings a task-orientation and sense of mutual support and accomplishment, the Four brings beauty and depth, etc.
This discovery is slow to take realization in the individual, of course, and so again we counsel persistence, patience, a healthy dose of self-compassion, and above all a community of loving, accepting, and mutually-supportive companions who are also committed to the journey of
self-discovery (even if that “community” is only one other person).
capacity to bring something unique and special to the world.
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