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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Join over 1 million other readers worldwide on a journey of spiritual growth and self-awareness. What you don't know about yourself can hurt you and your relationships—and even keep you in the shallows with God. Do you want help figuring out who you are and why you're stuck in the same ruts? The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with an uncanny accuracy in describing how human beings are wired, both positively and negatively. In The Road Back to You Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile forge a unique approach—a practical, comprehensive way of accessing Enneagram wisdom and exploring its connections with Christian spirituality for a deeper knowledge of ourselves, compassion for others, and love for God. Witty and filled with stories, this book allows you to peek inside each of the nine Enneagram types, keeping you turning the pages long after you have read the chapter about your own number. Not only will you learn more about yourself, but you will also start to see the world through other people's eyes, understanding how and why people think, feel, and act the way they do. To guide your first steps into your self-awareness journey, The Road Back to You offers: - Introductions to each Enneagram type - Questions to help you identify your number - Changes you can make today to pursue deeper self-awareness - Digestible windows into the other types, helping you see others with more compassion and empathyThe wisdom of the Enneagram can help take you further along into who you really are—leading you into places of spiritual discovery you would never have found on your own, and paving the way to the wiser, more compassionate person you want to become.
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THE ROAD BACKTOYOU
AN ENNEAGRAM JOURNEYTO SELF-DISCOVERY
Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know thee.
AUGUSTINE
Ian
To Anne, Cailey, Aidan, Maddie and Paul, with love
And to Wendell and Ella, my beloved companions
Suzanne
To Giuseppe, my love
And to Joey, Jenny, Joel and BJ, our hope
Contents
1
A CURIOUS THEORY OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
One Saturday morning, my cell phone rang at 7:00 a.m. Only one person in the world dares call me at that hour.
“Is this my youngest son, Ian?” my mother said, pretending to be unsure she’d called the right number.
“Yes, it’s me,” I said, playing along.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
At that moment I wasn’t working on anything. I was standing in the kitchen in my boxers wondering why my Nespresso was making end-of-life noises and imagining all the sad ways an early morning conversation with my mother could end if my coffeemaker broke and I was deprived of my day’s first cup.
“I’m thinking about writing a primer on the Enneagram,” I said, gratefully watching a black stream of coffee love fill my mug.
“The sonogram?” she shot back.
“No, I said the—”
“The anagram?” she said, firing a second round before I could stop her.
“Enneagram. Enneagram!” I repeated.
“What’s the any-a-gram?” she said.
My mother is eighty-two years old. For sixty-seven of those years she has smoked Pall Malls, successfully avoided exercise and eaten bacon with impunity. She has never needed glasses or a hearing aid and is so spry and mentally acute you’d think nicotine and inactivity were the keys to a long and happy life. She’d heard what I said the first time.
I smiled and continued with one of my Enneagram elevator speeches. “The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system. It helps people understand who they are and what makes them tick,” I said.
There was a long, utterly airless silence on the other end of the phone. I felt like I had been suddenly flung wildly into a black hole in a far-off galaxy.
“Forget the angiogram. Write a book about going to heaven and coming back,” she said. “Those authors make money.”
I winced. “They also have to die first.”
“Details,” she purred, and we laughed.
My mother’s tepid response to the idea of my writing a book about the Enneagram gave me pause. I had my own reservations about the project as well.
When my grandmother didn’t know what to make of something she would say it was “novel.” I suspect that’s how she’d describe the Enneagram. No one knows for certain when, where or who first came up with the idea for this map of the human personality. What is clear is that it’s been a work in progress for a long time. Some trace its origins back to a Christian monk named Evagrius, whose teachings formed the basis for what later became the Seven Deadly Sins, and to the desert mothers and fathers of the fourth century, who used it for spiritual counseling. Some say that elements of the Enneagram also appear in other world religions, including Sufism (the mystical tradition within Islam) and Judaism. In the early 1900s an undeniably strange teacher named George Gurdjieff used the ancient nine-pointed geometric figure, or enneagram, to teach esoteric subjects unrelated to personality types. (I know, I know: if I end the story here I could add Harrison Ford and a monkey and have the backstory for an Indiana Jones movie. But wait, the plot thins!)
In the early 1970s a Chilean named Oscar Ichazo happened upon the Enneagram and made significant contributions, as did one of his pupils, an American-trained psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo, who developed it further by weaving insights drawn from modern psychology into it. Naranjo brought the Enneagram back to the United States and presented it to a small group of students in California, including a Catholic Jesuit priest and educator on sabbatical from Loyola Seminary named Father Robert Ochs.
Impressed with the Enneagram, Ochs returned to Loyola, where he taught it to seminarians and priests. It soon became known among clergy, spiritual directors, retreat leaders and laypeople as a helpful aid to Christian spiritual formation.
If its sketchy origins weren’t enough to spook the mules, there is no scientific evidence that proves the Enneagram is a reliable measurement of personality. Who cares that millions of people claim it’s accurate? Grizzly Man thought he could make friends with bears, and we know how that turned out.
So what led me to believe that writing a book about an archaic, historically questionable, scientifically unsupported personality typing system was a good idea?
To answer this question I need to introduce you to a tall, bespectacled monk with knowing eyes and a tenderhearted smile named Brother Dave.
For ten years I served as the founding pastor of a church in Connecticut. I loved the people, but by year seven our average Sunday attendance was running five hundred people, and I was running out of gas. It was clear the church needed a pastor with different gifts, someone who was more a steady-at-the-helm type than an entrepreneurial spirit like me. For three years I tried everything short of surgery to transform myself into the kind of leader I thought the church needed and wanted me to be, but the project was doomed from the start. The harder I tried, the worse things became. I made more missteps than a guy running through a minefield wearing clown shoes. There was no shortage of confusion, hurt feelings and misunderstandings by the time I left. For me, the end was heartbreaking.
Following my departure I felt disillusioned and confused. Eventually a concerned friend encouraged me to see Br. Dave, a seventy-year-old Benedictine monk and spiritual director.
I first laid eyes on Br. Dave, in his black habit and sandals, standing on the grass-covered roundabout at the end of the monastery driveway waiting to greet me. Everything from the way he used both his hands to grasp mine to the way he smiled and said, “Welcome, traveler, can I make you coffee?” told me I’d come to the right place.
There are monks who pass their days in their monastery’s gift shop selling votive candles and giant wheels of homemade cheese, but Br. Dave isn’t one of them. He is a wise spiritual director who knows when to console and when to confront.
During our first few sessions Br. Dave listened patiently as I rehearsed the litany of miscalculations and mistakes I’d made in my ministry that in hindsight baffled me. Why had I said and done so many things that seemed right at the time but, looking back, were clearly senseless and at times hurtful to myself and others? How could someone have that many blind spots and still be allowed to drive a car? I felt like a stranger to myself.
By our fourth session I had begun to sound like a lost, half-crazed hiker looking for the path out of a forest while loudly debating with himself how the heck he came to be lost in the first place.
“Ian,” Br. Dave said, interrupting my meander, “why are you here?”
“I’m sorry?” I said, as if someone had just tapped me on the shoulder and awakened me from a daydream.
He smiled and leaned forward in his chair. “Why are you here?”
Br. Dave had a knack for posing questions that on the surface seemed almost insultingly simple until you tried to answer them. I looked out the leaded windows lining the wall behind him. Through them I saw a giant elm, the tips of its branches bending toward the earth under the weight of the wind. I struggled to find words to express what I wanted to say but couldn’t. The words that came to me weren’t my own, but they perfectly captured what I wanted to express.
“I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate,” I said, surprised a guy who regularly had trouble remembering his cell number could pull Paul’s words from Romans 7 out of his hat.
“I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway,” Br. Dave responded, quoting a verse from the same chapter.
For a moment we sat in silence, considering Paul’s words as they spun and glimmered in the air between us like motes in a shaft of sunlight.
“Br. Dave, I don’t know who I am or how I got into this mess,” I confessed, finally breaking the reverie. “But I’d be grateful if you could help me figure it out.”
Br. Dave smiled and sat back in his chair. “Good,” he said. “Now we can begin.”
At our next meeting Br. Dave asked, “Are you familiar with the Enneagram?”
“A little,” I said, shifting in my seat. “But it’s kind of a crazy story.”
Br. Dave winced and laughed as I told him about my first encounter with it in the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student at a conservative seminary. While on a weekend retreat I came across a copy of Fr. Richard Rohr’s book Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey. In it Rohr describes the traits and underlying motivations that drive each of the Enneagram’s nine basic personality types. Based on my life experience and what I’d learned in my training to become a counselor, Rohr’s descriptions of the types were uncannily accurate. I felt sure I had stumbled on an amazing resource for Christians.
On Monday morning I asked one of my professors whether he’d ever heard of it. From the look on his face you’d have thought I’d said pentagram. The Bible condemns incantations, sorcery, horoscopes and witches, he said—none of which I recalled being mentioned in the book—and I should throw it away immediately.
At the time I was a young, impressionable evangelical, and though my gut told me my professor’s reaction bordered on paranoid, I followed his advice—except the bit about throwing the book in the garbage. For bibliophiles, this is the unpardonable sin that grieves the Holy Spirit. I knew exactly which shelf held my dog-eared copy of Rohr’s book in the bookcase in my study.
“It’s too bad your professor discouraged you from learning the Enneagram,” Br. Dave told me. “It’s full of wisdom for people who want to get out of their own way and become who they were created to be.”
“What does ‘getting out of your own way’ entail?” I asked, knowing how many times I’d wanted to do just that in my life but didn’t know how.
“It has to do with self-knowledge. Most folks assume they understand who they are when they don’t,” Br. Dave explained. “They don’t question the lens through which they see the world—where it came from, how it’s shaped their lives, or even if the vision of reality it gives them is distorted or true. Even more troubling, most people aren’t aware of how things that helped them survive as kids are now holding them back as adults. They’re asleep.”
“Asleep?” I echoed, my face registering confusion.
Br. Dave briefly gazed at the ceiling and frowned. Now he was the one searching for the right combination of words that would unlock the answer to a seemingly simple question.
“What we don’t know about ourselves can and will hurt us, not to mention others,” he said, pointing his finger at me and then at himself. “As long as we stay in the dark about how we see the world and the wounds and beliefs that have shaped who we are, we’re prisoners of our history. We’ll continue going through life on autopilot doing things that hurt and confuse ourselves and everyone around us. Eventually we become so accustomed to making the same mistakes over and over in our lives that they lull us to sleep. We need to wake up.”
Waking up. There wasn’t anything I wanted more.
“Working with the Enneagram helps people develop the kind of self-knowledge they need to understand who they are and why they see and relate to the world the way they do,” Br. Dave continued. “When that happens you can start to get out of your own way and become more of the person God created you to be.”
After learning his afternoon appointment had canceled, Br. Dave spent extra time with me to talk about the importance of self-knowledge on the spiritual path. How, as John Calvin put it, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.”
“For centuries great Christian teachers have said knowing yourself is just as important as knowing God. Some people will say that’s feel-good psychology when actually it’s just good theology,” he said.
For a moment I thought about all the Bible teachers and pastors I knew who had done things that had blown up their lives and their ministries, often on an epic scale, because they didn’t know themselves or the human capacity for self-deceit. They studied and knew the Bible inside and out, but not themselves. I thought of how many Christian marriages I’d seen fall apart largely because neither spouse understood the inner splendor and brokenness of their own souls.
Then I thought about myself. I had always believed I was more self-aware than the average person, but if the last three years had taught me anything it was that I had plenty of growing to do in the self-knowledge department.
Br. Dave looked at his watch and slowly stood up. “I’m away leading retreats for the next month,” he announced, stretching to get the blood flowing again after our nearly two-hour seated conversation. “In the meantime, dust off your copy of Rohr’s book and reread it. You’ll appreciate how he looks at the Enneagram more through the lens of Christian spirituality than psychology. I’ll email you the names of a few other books you can read as well.”
“I really can’t thank you enough,” I said, rising from my chair and slinging my backpack over my shoulder.
“We’ll have plenty to discuss the next time we meet,” Br. Dave promised, embracing me before opening his office door to let me out. “God’s peace!” I heard him call down the hallway after me.
Since I was on a long-overdue three-month sabbatical with more time than I knew what to do with, I took Br. Dave’s advice to heart and threw myself into learning the Enneagram. For weeks, nearly every morning I walked to the coffee bar at the end of our block and pored over the books he had recommended, taking notes in my journal. At night, I gave a report of everything I was learning from the Enneagram to my wife, Anne. Intrigued, she began to read up on it as well. In that season of our lives together, we had some of the richest, most meaningful conversations in all of our marriage.
Do we really know ourselves? How much does our past interfere with our present? Do we see the world through our eyes or through those of the children we were? What are the hidden wounds and misguided beliefs we pick up as kids that continue to secretly govern our lives from the shadows? And how exactly would wrestling with questions like these help us better know God?
These were some of the questions I eagerly lobbed at Br. Dave when he returned from his travels. Sitting in his office, I described for him a handful of the many “aha” moments I had experienced while studying the Enneagram.
“How did you feel when you discovered your type?” Br. Dave asked.
“Well, it wasn’t all ‘hats and horns,’” I said. “I learned some painful things about myself.”
Brother Dave turned around and grabbed a book off his desk and flipped to a page marked by a red sticky flag. “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” he said.
“That sums it up pretty well,” I said, chuckling.
“It’s Flannery O’Connor,” Br. Dave said, closing the book and placing it back on his desk. “There’s not a lot she doesn’t sum up well.”
“And Anne?” he continued. “What’s it been like for her?”
“One night she read a description of her type to me in bed and she cried,” I said. “She’s always struggled to find words to describe what it’s like to live inside her skin. The Enneagram’s been a gift to her.”
“Sounds like you’re both off to a good start,” Br. Dave said.
“It’s been incredible. What we’ve learned from the Enneagram so far has already begun changing the way we think about marriage, friendships and parenting,” I said.
“Just remember, it’s only one tool to help you deepen your love for God and others,” Br. Dave cautioned. “There are plenty of others. What’s important is the more you and Anne grow in self-knowledge, the more you’ll become aware of your need for God’s grace. Not to mention, you’ll have more compassion for yourselves and other people.”
“I want to read you this Thomas Merton quote I found,” I said, leafing through the pages of my journal.
Br. Dave rubbed his hands together and nodded. “Ah, Merton, now you’re swimming in deep waters,” he smiled.
“Here it is,” I said, finding the page where I had written down the quote. I cleared my throat. “Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is . . .” I slowed, surprised by the knot in my throat that was making it hard for me to continue.
“Go on,” Br. Dave said quietly.
I took a deep breath. “We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be the child of God, and capable of loving with something of God’s own sincerity and his unselfishness.”
I closed my journal and looked up, flushing from embarrassment at how emotional I had become.
Br. Dave tilted his head to one side. “What was it Merton said that moved you?”
I sat quietly, uncertain how to answer. The monastery’s church bells rang outside, calling the monks to prayer.
“I feel like I’ve been asleep for a long time, but maybe now I’m beginning to wake up,” I said. “At least I hope so.”
Whenever I said something Br. Dave thought was significant he’d pause to close his eyes and reflect on it. This was one of those times.
Br. Dave opened his eyes. “Before you go, can I pray a blessing for you?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied, sliding forward in my chair to get close enough for Br. Dave to wrap both his hands around mine.
May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul.
May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe.
May you have respect for your individuality and difference.
May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the façade of your life there is something beautiful and eternal happening.
May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.
“Amen,” Br. Dave said, squeezing my hands.
“Let it be so,” I whispered, squeezing his hands in return.
Br. Dave’s blessing made a difference in my life. Over the years my work with the Enneagram has helped me to see myself “with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees me in every moment.” Learning and now teaching the Enneagram has shown me something of the “crooked timber” from which my and others people’s hearts are made. The self-understanding I have gained from it has helped me put an end to a few childish ways and become a more spiritual adult. I’m certainly not there yet, but now and again I sense the immediacy of God’s grace and for an instant catch a glimpse of the person I was created to be. In the spiritual life that’s no small thing.
A few years after my encounter with Br. Dave I accepted an invitation from a woman named Suzanne Stabile to speak at a conference she was hosting at Brite Divinity School. We instantly connected and knew that if left unsupervised by responsible adults, we could get into all kinds of trouble if we became friends.
So we became friends.
When Suzanne told me our mutual friend Richard Rohr had been her spiritual mentor for years and had personally trained her in the Enneagram, I became curious and decided to attend one of her workshops. After an hour of listening to her lecture, I knew Suzanne wasn’t just an Enneagram teacher—she was a ninja-level Mr. Miyagi-from-The Karate-Kid kind of Enneagram teacher. To my good fortune Suzanne picked up where Br. Dave had left off in my life years earlier, kindly taking me on the next leg of my journey toward understanding and applying the wisdom of the Enneagram to my life as a Christian.
Many of the insights and anecdotes on these pages were taken from Suzanne’s lectures, while others come from my own life and from what I have learned over the years by attending workshops and studying countless books by renowned Enneagram teachers and pioneers such as Russ Hudson, Richard Rohr, Helen Palmer, Beatrice Chestnut, Roxanne Howe-Murphy and Lynette Sheppard, to name a few. More than anything, however, this book is the product of my and Suzanne’s deep affection and respect for one another. It’s the only way we know how to throw our two cents of experience and knowledge toward the effort to create a kinder, more compassionate world. We hope it succeeds. If it doesn’t, well, we still had a blast doing it.
To be clear, I am not a foamy-mouthed Enneagram zealot. I do not stand uncomfortably close to people at cocktail parties and tell them I was able to guess their Enneagram number based on their choice of footwear. People who do that are an evil begging to be overcome.
But even if I’m not a fanatic, I am a grateful student. To borrow a quote from the British mathematician George Box, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” That’s how I see the Enneagram. It is not infallible or inerrant. It is not the be-all and end-all of Christian spirituality. At best, it is an imprecise model of personality . . . but it’s very useful.
That said, here’s my advice. If you find that this book supports you on your spiritual path, great. If not, don’t throw it away. Put it on your bookshelf instead. It might come in handy one day. Life hands us a challenging syllabus. We need all the help we can get.
2
FINDING YOUR TYPE
Neuroscientists have determined the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with decision making and cost-benefit assessments. If MRI brain scans had been performed on my friends and me one summer’s night when we were fifteen, they would have revealed a dark spot indicating a complete absence of activity in this region of our brains.
That particular Saturday night a group of us got the brilliant idea that streaking a golf banquet at an exclusive country club in my hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut, was a wise decision. Other than certain arrest for indecent exposure, there was only one problem: Greenwich isn’t a big town, and it was likely someone we knew would recognize us. After several minutes of deliberation we decided our friend Mike should run home and return with ski masks for each of us.
And so at roughly 9:00 p.m. on a warm August night, six naked boys in ski masks, several of which were adorned with pom-poms, sprinted like startled gazelles through a beautiful oak-paneled room full of bankers and heiresses. The men clapped and cheered for us while the bejeweled women sat frozen in shock. We had hoped for the opposite reaction, but there was not ample time to stop and express our disappointment.
And that would have been the end of it if it weren’t for my mother. “What did you and the guys do last night?” she asked the next morning as I walked into the kitchen and rummaged through the fridge.
“Not much. We hung out at Mike’s, then crashed around midnight.”
My mother is normally chatty, so I was puzzled when she didn’t ask how my friends were doing or what my plans were for the rest of the day. I instantly had an uneasy feeling.
“What did you and Dad do last night?” I said brightly.
“We went as guests of the Dorfmanns to their club’s golf banquet,” she replied in a tone that was one part sugar, one part steel.
Most people don’t ever anticipate that a sudden change in cabin pressure might occur in their home, triggering the hope that an oxygen mask would fall from somewhere overhead to replace the air that shock has just sucked out of their lungs.
“A ski mask?” she demanded, her voice rising as she strolled toward me like an angry Irish cop patting his truncheon in the palm of his hand. “A ski mask?”
The tip of her nose was no more than an inch from my own. “I could pick your scrawny butt out of a lineup in the dark,” she whispered menacingly.
I tensed, wondering what was coming next, but the storm passed as abruptly as it rolled in. My mother’s face relaxed into a sly grin. She turned on her heels and said over her shoulder as she walked out of the kitchen, “You’re lucky your father thought it was funny.”
This was not the first time I wore a mask to protect myself—far from it.
Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world. Made up of innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms, among lots of other things, our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met. Over time our adaptive strategies become increasingly complex. They get triggered so predictably, so often and so automatically that we can’t tell where they end and our true natures begin. Ironically, the term personality is derived from the Greek word for mask (persona), reflecting our tendency to confuse the masks we wear with our true selves, even long after the threats of early childhood have passed. Now we no longer have a personality; our personality has us! Now, rather than protect our defenseless hearts against the inevitable wounds and losses of childhood, our personalities—which we and others experience as the ways we predictably think, feel, act, react, process information and see the world—limit or imprison us.
Worst of all, by overidentifying who we are with our personality we forget or lose touch with our authentic self—the beautiful essence of who we are. As Frederick Buechner so poignantly describes it, “The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”
Though I’m a trained counselor, I don’t know exactly how, when or why this occurs, only that this idea of having lost connection with my true self rings true with my experience. How many times while spying my children play or while gazing up at the moon in a reflective moment have I felt a strange nostalgia for something or someone I lost touch with long ago? Buried in the deepest precincts of being I sense there’s a truer, more luminous expression of myself, and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole. Maybe you have felt the same.
The good news is we have a God who would know our scrawny butt anywhere. He remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.
Is this the language of the therapeutic under the guise of theology? No. Great Christian thinkers from Augustine to Thomas Merton would agree this is one of the vital spiritual journeys apart from which no Christian can enjoy the wholeness that is their birthright. As Merton put it, “Before we can become who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person who we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.” Becoming conscious is where the Enneagram comes in.
The goal of understanding your Enneagram “type” or “number”—the terms are used interchangeably in this book—is not to delete and replace your personality with a new one. Not only is this not possible, it would be a bad idea. You need a personality or you won’t get asked to prom. The purpose of the Enneagram is to develop self-knowledge and learn how to recognize and dis-identify with the parts of our personalities that limit us so we can be reunited with our truest and best selves, that “pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven,” as Thomas Merton said. The point of it is self-understanding and growing beyond the self-defeating dimensions of our personality, as well as improving relationships and growing in compassion for others.
THE NINE PERSONALITY TYPES
The Enneagram teaches that there are nine different personality styles in the world, one of which we naturally gravitate toward and adopt in childhood to cope and feel safe. Each type or number has a distinct way of seeing the world and an underlying motivation that powerfully influences how that type thinks, feels and behaves.
If you’re like I was, you will immediately object to the suggestion that there are only nine basic personality types on a planet of more than seven billion people. A single visit to the paint aisle at Home Depot to help an indecisive spouse find “that perfect red” for the bathroom walls might quell your remonstrations. As I recently learned, there are literally an infinite number of variations of the color red from which you can select to brighten your bathroom and wreck your marriage at the same time. In the same way, though we all adopt one (and only one) of these types in childhood, there are an infinite number of expressions of each number, some of which might present in a similar way to yours and many of which will look nothing like you on the exterior—but you are all still variations of the same primary color. So don’t worry, Mom didn’t lie. You are still her special little snowflake.
Figure 1. The Enneagram diagram
An Enneagram diagram shows the numbers 1 through 9 moving in a clockwise direction along the perimeter of a circle; the number 9 is in the twelve o'clock position. Within the circle, each of the nine numbers has an arrow pointing to it from another number on the circle, as well as an arrow that begins at each number and points toward another number. The arrows demonstrate that each number is in some way connected to another number.
The Enneagram takes its name from the Greek words for nine (ennea) and for a drawing or figure (gram). It is a nine-pointed geometric figure that illustrates nine different but interconnected personality types. Each numbered point on the circumference is connected to two others by arrows across the circle, indicating their dynamic interaction with one another.
If you haven’t already jumped ahead in this book to begin figuring out which number you are, figure 1 is a snapshot of the diagram. I’ve also listed the names and a quick description of each Enneagram number. For the record, no personality type is better or worse than another, each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and none is gender-biased.
TYPE ONE: The Perfectionist. Ethical, dedicated and reliable, they are motivated by a desire to live the right way, improve the world, and avoid fault and blame.
TYPE TWO: The Helper. Warm, caring and giving, they are motivated by a need to be loved and needed, and to avoid acknowledging their own needs.
TYPE THREE: The Performer. Success-oriented, image-conscious and wired for productivity, they are motivated by a need to be (or appear to be) successful and to avoid failure.
TYPE FOUR: The Romantic. Creative, sensitive and moody, they are motivated by a need to be understood, experience their oversized feelings and avoid being ordinary.
TYPE FIVE: The Investigator. Analytical, detached and private, they are motivated by a need to gain knowledge, conserve energy and avoid relying on others.
TYPE SIX: The Loyalist. Committed, practical and witty, they are worst-case-scenario thinkers who are motivated by fear and the need for security.
TYPE SEVEN: The Enthusiast. Fun, spontaneous and adventurous, they are motivated by a need to be happy, to plan stimulating experiences and to avoid pain.
TYPE EIGHT: The Challenger. Commanding, intense and confrontational, they are motivated by a need to be strong and avoid feeling weak or vulnerable.
TYPE NINE: The Peacemaker. Pleasant, laid back and accommodating, they are motivated by a need to keep the peace, merge with others and avoid conflict.
“A humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning.”
Maybe now you’re starting to get an idea of which of the nine types you belong to (or which one explains your seventy-year-old uncle who still dresses up like Yoda and attends Star Wars conventions). But the Enneagram is more than a piddling list of clever type names, so that’s just the beginning. In the following chapters we’ll learn not only about each number in turn but also about how those numbers relate to others. Don’t be discouraged if the terminology or the diagram, with its lines and arrows ricocheting around, looks confusing. I promise it will make sense to you in short order.
TRIADS
The nine numbers on the Enneagram are divided into three triads—three in the Heart or Feeling Triad, three in the Head or Fear Triad, and three in the Gut or Anger Triad. Each of the three numbers in each triad is driven in different ways by an emotion related to a part of the body known as a center of intelligence. Basically, your triad is another way of describing how you habitually take in, process and respond to life.
The Anger or Gut Triad (8, 9, 1). These numbers are driven by anger—Eight externalizes it, Nine forgets it, and One internalizes it. They take in and respond to life instinctually or “at the gut level.” They tend to express themselves honestly and directly.
The Feeling or Heart Triad (2, 3, 4). These numbers are driven by feelings—Twos focus outwardly on the feelings of others, Threes have trouble recognizing their own or other people’s feelings, and Fours concentrate their attention inwardly on their own feelings. They each take in and relate to life from their heart and are more image-conscious than other numbers.
The Fear or Head Triad (5, 6, 7). These numbers are driven by fear—Five externalizes it, Six internalizes it, and Seven forgets it. They take in and relate to the world through the mind. They tend to think and plan carefully before they act.
Chapter order. Speaking of triads, if you look at the table of contents you will notice we have chosen not to describe the types in numerical order but to group and discuss them in the context of their respective triads: Eight, Nine and One are together; then Two, Three and Four; and finally Five, Six and Seven. The reason we chose to order the chapters like this is to help you see the important ways in which each number compares to its fellow “triadic roommates.” If anything, this will not only make the Enneagram easier to understand but also aid you in your search for your number.
WING, STRESS AND SECURITY NUMBERS
One of the things I love about the Enneagram is that it recognizes and takes into account the fluid nature of the personality, which is constantly adapting as circumstances change. There are times when it’s in a healthy space, times when it’s in an okay space, or times when it’s downright nuts. The point is, it’s always moving up and down on a spectrum ranging from healthy to average to unhealthy depending on where you are and what’s happening. At the beginning of each chapter I’ll briefly describe in broad terms how each number typically thinks, feels and acts when they’re camped out in a healthy, average and unhealthy space within their type.
Look at the Enneagram diagram and you’ll see that each number has a dynamic relationship with four other numbers. Each number touches the two on either side, as well as the two at the other end of the arrows. These four other numbers can be seen as resources that give you access to their traits or “juice” or “flavor,” as I like to say. While your motivation and number never change, your behavior can be influenced by these other numbers, so much so that you can even look like one of them from time to time. As you’ll see in each chapter, you can learn to move deliberately around the circle, using these for extra support as needed.
Wing numbers. These are the numbers on either side of your number. You may lean toward one of these two wing numbers and pick up some of its characteristic energy and traits. For example, my friend Doran is a Four (the Romantic) with a Three wing (the Performer). He is more outgoing and more inclined to perform for recognition than a Four with a Five wing (the Investigator), who is more introverted and withdrawing.
Stress and security numbers. Your stress number is the number your personality moves toward when you are overtaxed, under fire, or in the paint aisle at Home Depot with an equivocating friend or partner. It’s indicated by the arrow pointing away from your number on the Enneagram diagram in figure 2.
Figure 2. Stress and security arrows
The same number and alignment of arrows is shown here as was shown in the previous diagram. Each number has an arrow pointing away from it, the stress arrow, and one pointing toward it, the security arrow.
For example, normally happy-go-lucky Sevens move toward and take on the negative qualities of the One (the Perfectionist) in stress. They can become less easygoing and adopt more black-and-white thinking. It’s important for you to know the number that you go to in stress so that when you catch it activating you can make better choices and take care of yourself.
Your security number indicates the type your personality moves toward and draws energy and resources from when you’re feeling secure. It is indicated by the arrow pointing toward your number on the Enneagram. For example, Sevens take on the positive qualities of Five when they’re feeling secure. That means they can let go of their need for excess and embrace the notion that less is more.
Spiritually speaking, it’s a real advantage to know what happens to your type and the number it naturally goes to in stress. It’s equally valuable to learn the positive qualities of the number you instinctively move toward in security as well. Once you become familiar with this material you can know and catch yourself when you’re heading in the direction of a breakthrough or a breakdown, and make wiser choices than in the past. There’s a lot to this topic of security and stress, but because this book is a primer we’ll only cover the basics. Just know there is much more to learn about it.
DISCOVER YOUR DEADLY SIN
“It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”
It may sound like something from a medieval morality play, but each number has a deadly sin associated with it, and in each chapter Suzanne and I will be diving deeper into what that looks like. For some, the word sin evokes terrible memories and feelings. Sin as a theological term has been weaponized and used against so many people that it’s hard to address the subject without knowing you’re possibly hurting someone who has “stood on the wrong end of the preacher’s barrel,” so to speak. But as a weathered sinner and recovering alcoholic with twenty-eight years of sobriety, I know that not facing the reality of our darkness and its sources is a really, really bad idea. Trust me, if you don’t, it will eventually come out of your paycheck at the end of the month.
Bearing sensitivities in mind, allow me to offer a definition of sin I have found helpful and one we might use together in our conversation. Richard Rohr writes, “Sins are fixations that prevent the energy of life, God’s love, from flowing freely. [They are] self-erected blockades that cut us off from God and hence from our own authentic potential.” As someone who goes to a church basement several mornings a week to meet with others who need support to stay away from just one of my many fixations, this definition rings true. We all have our preferred ways of circumventing God to get what we want, and unless we own and face them head-on they will one day turn our lives into nettled messes.
Every Enneagram number has a unique “passion” or deadly sin that drives that number’s behavior. The teachers who developed the Enneagram saw that each of the nine numbers had a particular weakness or temptation to commit one of the Seven Deadly Sins, drawn from the list Pope Gregory composed in the sixth century, plus fear and deceit (along the way a wise person added these two, which is nice because now no one needs to feel left out). Each personality’s deadly sin is like an addictive, involuntarily repeated behavior that we can only be free of when we recognize how often we give it the keys to drive our personality. Again, don’t think the term deadly sin sounds too early Middle Ages to still be relevant. It’s timeless and important wisdom! As long as we are unaware of our deadly sin and the way it lurks around unchallenged in our lives we will remain in bondage to it. Learning to manage your deadly sin rather than allowing it to manage you is one of the goals of the Enneagram.
