The Enneagram: A very good place to start
The Enneagram knows you better than you know yourself.
I found the Enneagram [EN-ee-a-grahm] a year into therapy, and it felt like I had stumbled upon Rachel for Dummies. All the patterns, coping mechanisms, fears, and beliefs that I had been painstakingly piecing together for the previous 12 months were there, laid out systematically, along with some I hadn’t even discovered yet but that immediately rang true.
The Enneagram is a personality typing system, but with roots in 4th-century Christian mysticism, stopping at that label undersells its complexity and transformative power. As helpful as Myers-Briggs and other systems can be, they’re not in the same ballpark as the Enneagram. In fact, the Enneagram’s ballpark is on another planet altogether. A planet where aliens have somehow seen through your soul.
Reading the description of my type was one of the most intimate experiences of my life. I felt fully seen and known in a way that was intense and beautiful. It was also comforting to realize I wasn’t alone. For all my faults and mistakes, there are enough people out there like me that a map could be published of our most private internal landscape.
Find your number.
To do this, simply google some variant of “free enneagram quiz.” This one works just fine (I slightly prefer the Enneagram test 2 on that page). Don’t worry about your instinctual variants or wings. You’re just after your number (1 through 9) for now. You might find that your results are pretty evenly split between a couple of numbers. If so, reading descriptions of the types are your best bet. Most people can pretty quickly tell which one they relate to most. But before you delve into descriptions, prepare yourself.
Your type is not the worst of all.
I have described the hallelujah! moment of reading about my Enneagram type and finding myself so clearly described there. After all, I was already elbow deep in my internal muck, so a spotlight into the darkness just made my work easier. Even so, reading my type description (especially my subtype, which I’ll get to) was hugely cringe-worthy. It was like when you see a video of yourself you didn’t know was being filmed—that unexpected glimpse of what you look like when you think no one is looking.
Many of the people I have shared the Enneagram with finish reading their number description, stand up, and confidently declare that their type must be the worst of the nine.
That, folks, is just seeing yourself slouching while yelling at your kids and rolling your eyes on the video your 6-year-old secretly filmed before you had washed last night’s mascara-turned-zombie makeup off your eyes. In other words, it’s the pain of self-recognition. Reading about your number feels worse than reading about any of the others because yours lays bare all of your vulnerabilities and weaknesses, not someone else’s. Other people’s fears and insecurities aren’t nearly as off-putting as our own. Especially if we weren’t particularly looking or prepared for a concentrated jolt of clear-eyed self-knowledge.
Know this going in and prepare yourself accordingly:
Read your description alone, when you have time to reflect, and when you’re not already feeling vulnerable for some other reason.
Try to cultivate a compassionate attitude toward yourself before and while you read. Remember, at our cores, we’re all just trying to get by the best way we know how.
Consciously focus on the strengths of your personality. These can be hard to see because they come so naturally that we assume that we’re only good at the things we’re good at because they’re easy. But they’re by no means easy for everyone, and if you take time to read about the other types, you’ll quickly see that’s the case.
The bottom line is that according to the Enneagram system, no number is better than any other. In fact, one of the really beautiful things about the system is that in order to become healthier versions of ourselves, we actually move toward opposing number types. It’s a model of integration, where we have what others lack and vice versa.
Okay, I’m ready. Hit me.
For general type descriptions (and a bunch of other helpful info), I love the Enneagram Institute. Once you’ve confirmed your type there or decided between a close call and read the profile, it’s time to find your subtype.
There are three subtypes for each of the nine personality types. This is starting to sound like math. Stick with me. Because my subtype description was where I really got goosebumps and started declaring my surprise outloud (“How do they know this?!”). There might be long sections of the your type profile you don’t relate to, but I’m willing to bet you relate to nearly every sentence of your subtype. In a nutshell the subtypes are:
Self-Preservation: focused on matters related to physical and practical stability and security.
Social: focused on social networks
One-to-one (or sexual): focused on individual relationships
Beatrice Chestnut has recently released what is in my opinion the definitive guide to the Enneagram, where she lays out (based on the work of Enneagram pioneers) the subtypes in great detail. Her book, The Complete Enneagram, is worth buying but you can also quickly find your subtype by googling “Beatrice Chestnut type [your number] subtypes”—you’ll find descriptions online that way. Read through all three until you find one that makes you smile while breaking out into a cold sweat. Ding, ding, ding!
At the end of this process, you should have a label and a number. For example, I am a Self-pres 3. And, yes, telling you that means that you now know more about me than most of my lifelong friends.