Growing with the Enneagram

In my last post, I talked about the value of the Enneagram and how to go about finding your type and subtype.

In this post, I’m going to talk about the two big ways knowing your Enneagram profile helps you grow. This is where things really get exciting, and it’s why the Enneagram is the perfect beginning to a journey of unfolding.

It provides growth practices tailored to you.

A common response I get to sharing the Enneagram is “Why is it so negative?”

Part of the negativity newcomers perceive has to do with what their brains are drawn to and tend to dwell on. In the rest of your life, do you mull over compliments the way you do critiques?

But the larger answer is that the Enneagram does lean negative and for a very good reason.

Though the Enneagram is (more than) a personality typing system, it could just as easily be called an anti-personality philosophy. That is, the Enneagram can be seen as a way of separating what we are not (our personality) from the core self that is found underneath it. (That core self goes by different names depending on the religious tradition, beliefs, and imagination of the one naming it. I’ve currently settled on “divine spark of infinite love,” but use whatever description speaks to you.)

In order to strip our personalities down and find our cores, we have to be able to see those personalities first. The more harmful thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors the Enneagram draws our attention to, the more power it puts in our hands to change them. Becoming conscious of the things we’ve done unconsciously for a lifetime takes some straight talk.

But the Enneagram also offers extremely practical and hopeful steps forward. If you’ve read the descriptions I’ve linked to in the last post, you’ve already come across growth suggestions for your type and these look very different from the suggestions for another type.

It’s crucial that the prescription is so specifically tailored to the ailment. For years I missed the ways in which obsessively studying, working, organizing, and exercising stunted my spiritual and personal growth because society rewarded those behaviors. In order to grow, I needed to be shown the harmful motivations behind these actions and how they kept me from developing deep relationships, feeling my emotions, caring for myself, and experiencing the present.

We are never going to switch numbers. And that isn’t the goal. The goal is to bring more balance to our lives, more integration. I now know that I don’t ever need to consciously focus on productivity or recognizable achievements. I am wired to care about those things regardless. Instead, I need to direct my conscious mental and emotional energy on what doesn’t come naturally. For me, a big part of that is being still. For you, it will likely be something different. The paths toward moderation are as varied as the types. And the Enneagram helps you imagine what your best self looks like, because our best selves don’t all look the same (thank goodness!).

It creates instant empathy.

My husband and I took turns reading each other’s types out loud and it was as intensely intimate as was reading my own type the first time. We found that though our actions are often dramatically different—we look like very different people on the outside—the feelings, beliefs, fears, and desires fueling those actions are often the same.

And where we didn’t share motivations, we finally understood what the other’s motivations in fact were. At one point, Josh looked up and said “I always thought you took care of birthday parties, lessons, the budget, etc. because you liked doing those things. You have always approached them with such competence and gusto. But now I see that you are actually terrified of not doing them.” And that, friends, is a world of emotional difference. One that I wouldn’t have thought to have even communicated because—wait, not everyone is driven by anxiety like me?

If you can, have your significant other, family members, and close friends find their types. Yes, you may have to be the annoying Enneagram evangelist for a while (a role I have obviously adopted permanently), but I promise it will open up a whole new dimension in your relationships. (And if you’re having trouble keeping other people’s numbers straight, I love Beatrice Chestnut’s quick description of the 9 types at the bottom of this page.)

Suddenly people who I had dismissed as a little crazy or just plain unknowable started making sense to me. Before, I could have sympathy for them, but empathy? That takes the ability to understand and imagine another’s internal reality. The Enneagram gave me that understanding and on the other side was instant empathy. Which also leads to acceptance and humility and love—you know, some pretty great things.