In this article, I want to talk about Enneagram therapy: how we can use the Enneagram as a tool for self-transformation both by ourselves and with clients, if that applies to you.
What I’ve come to appreciate is that the Enneagram is not just a psychological tool, for working at the level of personality, but a spiritual tool, for working on our transpersonality, our great Self that transcends and includes our little self.
In that sense, it works both as a tool to lead healthier, fuller lives in the present and to slowly tap into our higher potential.
I’ll be quoting extensively from The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson, a book which dives deeply into this subject.
The main filter we use to understand ourselves and the world around us, to express ourselves, to defend ourselves, to deal with our past and anticipate our future, to learn with, to rejoice with, and to fall in love with, is our personality type.
don Riso & russ hudson
Discover Your Type
What I’ve found is that discovering our personality type can make conscious a lot of hitherto unconscious habits, behaviours, beliefs and aspects of our self-image.
Our type tells us:
- how we see the world,
- the choices we make and why,
- our values,
- our motivations,
- our way of reacting to others and to stress.
Most critically, it shows us the various aspects of our psyche that have remained stable throughout our lives.
It can also show us our defenses and the ways we compensate for childhood wounds. Our personality largely formed as a response to the repeated difficulties we encountered in our childhood.
We adopted and automated a small set of behaviours to cope with them. We’re now experts in our particular coping mechanism, which in excess becomes the core dysfunction of our personality.
Thus, from a psychological point of view, Enneagram therapy:
- reveals our coping mechanisms,
- reveals aspects of our psychology that trip us up,
- shows us our limitations “when we identify with the personality, we are settling on being much less than we really are,”
- helps us see our patterns, the parts of our experience that we’re most identified with, and begin to slowly release them.
Identifying oneself as one of the nine personality types can be revolutionary. For the first time in our lives, we may see the pattern and overall rationale for the way we have lived and behaved.
Many times it is as if a three-year-old child were making many crucial life decisions for us. Once we understand the nature of our personality’s mechanisms, we begin to have a choice about about identifying with them or not.
Don Riso & Russ hudson
Spiritual Impact of Enneagram Therapy
Riso and Hudson write beautifully about how the Enneagram therapy is also a spiritual pursuit. Let me share some quotes:
by helping us see how trapped we are in our trances and how estranged we are from our Essential nature, the Enneagram invites us to look deeply into the mystery of our true identity.
The heart of the Enneagram is the universal insight that human beings are spiritual presences incarnated in the material world and yet mysteriously embodying the same Life and Spirit as the Creator.
The core truth that the Enneagram conveys to us is that we are much more than our personality… Beyond the limits of our personalities, each of us exists as a vast, largely unrecognized quality of Being or Presence… although we have forgotten this fundamental truth because we have fallen asleep to our true nature.
“as we learn to bring awareness to our personality, it becomes more transparent, and we are able to experience our Essence more directly.
don riso & russ hudson
Here’s a summary of the significance of Enneagram therapy for our spiritual development:
- the Enneagram shows us what prevents us from realising the profound truth of who we are and gives us a direction to move in,
- our type reveals the ways we forget our true nature,
- the Enneagram helps us realise that we are not our personality; instead, we have a personality,
- we begin to understand we are fundamentally a spiritual being, one of whose facets is the human personality, and we begin to live as our Essential nature,
- our personality doesn’t disappear but becomes less rigid: it helps us live, rather than dominating how we live,
- we can eventually realise that our true Essence can’t be harmed, no matter how strong our personality defences have become.
To that end, we’d do well to discover our basic fear.
Discover Your Basic Fear
According to Enneagram theory, our basic fear is what defines our personality. We have carried this fear since childhood, when it developed due to our parents’ rejection of certain behaviours, which we then repressed and hid away. Due to this fear, we believe something is fundamentally wrong with us.
Though we all have a slew of fears and desires, each personality type has its own dominant fear, and by extension its own corresponding basic desire.
I understand this phenomenon in the following way: as our personality develops as young children, we express it completely and unabashedly, with little concern for what others will think of us. But as we do so, we gain feedback from those around us regarding what is desirable and what is not. Some of it is accepted, some of it is rejected.
Doubting our worthiness, we adapt our behaviour to maximise the acceptance we receive. In this way, we slowly adopt the fears and hang-ups of those around us, as well as their strengths, and begin to resemble those around us. We’re slowly bent, twisted and embellished into the same shape as them, particularly our parents, relatives and close family friends.
This describes the formation of our Basic Fear: it’s the weakest part of our personality. The fear is the result of the rejection from those around us: we stop acting a certain way to guarantee acceptance, thus loathing and repressing the undesirable behaviour.
Since we leave this behaviour undeveloped and unexpressed, it withers away and leaves a hole or weakness in our psyche. This coping mechanism seems to help us avoid or skirt around our basic fear but doesn’t really address it or bring it to light, though it still remains active. We’re now unconsciously driven by our basic fear.
Our personality is like a cast that protects a broken arm or leg. The more extreme the original injuries, the more extensive the cast has to be… if we never take the cast off, it severely limits the use of the limb and makes further growth impossible.
Don riso & russ hudson
Thus, knowing your Enneagram type may help you discover your basic fear. Conversely, we can discover our Enneagram type by identifying our basic fear. Identifying this fear points us to the wounded part of our psyche, the part that needs most work.
That said, working through this fear is deeply therapeutic. It releases all the energy we have used to repress that aspect of our personality and allows us to now express that energy through our personality. It tumbles the wall separating our true personality from our subconscious desires and traits.
Discover Your Basic Desire
Once you know your basic fear, it becomes very obvious what your basic desire is. Your basic desire drives a great percentage of your behaviour. It can often feel insatiable, because in attempting to gratify the desire, you’re not addressing your basic fear. Thus it can lead to excess and dysfunction.
In observing myself and others, I’ve found that our most compulsive behaviours are fairly obvious to others. Those around us can feel distress and alarm, and even begin to define us according to them.
It can be shocking to realise that this dysfunction is fairly predictable given your enneatype. Yet at the same time, you can feel a great sympathy for yourself, knowing that this desire results from a coping mechanism that you developed for reasons beyond your control.
And as you work through that basic fear, the basic desire may lose its grip on you. It won’t disappear, but it’ll stop dominating your life and creating dysfunctional behaviour.
Here’s a short summary of the Enneagram types, their basic fear, their basic desire, and how that desire can become malignant.
| Enneagram Type | Fears being… | Basic Desire | Deteriorates into… |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Reformer | bad, corrupt, evil | to have integrity | critical perfectionism |
| 2. Helper | unworthy of love | to be loved | the need to be needed |
| 3. Achiever | worthless, unimportant | to be valuable | chasing after success |
| 4. Individualist | nobody, insignificant | to be oneself | self-indulgence |
| 5. Investigator | incapable, incompetent | to be competent | useless specialisation |
| 6. Loyalist | unsupported, unguided | to be secure | attachment to beliefs |
| 7. Enthusiast | deprived, in pain | to be happy | frenetic escapism |
| 8. Challenger | harmed and controlled | to protect oneself | constant fighting |
| 9. Peacemaker | alienated, fragmented | to be at peace | stubborn neglectfulness |
Healthy, Moderate, Unhealthy
The Enneagram types, being a system of categories that lack movement or change, constitute a horizontal model of development. This is how they are normally viewed. But all types have a vertical component, comparable to the many stages of growth models found by developmental psychologists.
Under this vertical model, we can express our type in a Healthy, Moderate or Unhealthy way. To the degree our expression is a healthy one, we are free of the downsides of our personality type and our unhealthy egoic mechanisms, we act wisely and spontaneously, and we live in the present.
In fact, the theory tells us that each type degenerates into one type when unhealthy and ascends to another when healthy.
We won’t go into further details on the vertical aspect of the Enneagram for now; just know that enneatypes themselves aren’t static. At any given period in life, you may be a healthy or dysfunctional version of your enneatype, or somewhere in between.
How to Do Enneagram Therapy
Let’s finish this article by summarising how you can use the Enneagram for therapuetic ends, both psychologically and spiritually:
- identify your personality type and watch yourself live it out moment to moment, as though watching from afar, “make subject object”,
- find out whether your dominant type is in the Head triad, Heart triad, Gut triad, or a mixture.
- refrain from questionable type-driven behaviour in the moment it happens,
- notice when we are behaving like a child, defending ourselves,
- when falling into mindless action or reaction, take the sacred pause, allow the wiser part of you to come forth,
- start to deaddict yourself from the dream of personality,
- “observe and let go”,
- create a gap between external stimulus and internal response.
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