Introduction to the Enneagram System

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Introduction to The Enneagram

This explanation covers the basics that you will need to understand how the Enneagram works, and will be especially helpful for beginners. As you will see, only a few simple concepts are needed to begin your journey of self-discovery. The Enneagram, however, is ultimately subtle and complex, as you will appreciate the more you use it in your life. For more guidelines and information visit www.EnneagramInstitute.com
Structure

The Enneagram's structure may look complicated, although it is actually simple. It will help you understand the Enneagram if you sketch it yourself.

Draw a circle and mark nine equidistant points on its circumference. Designate each point by a number from one to nine, with nine at the top, for symmetry and by convention. Each point represents one of the nine basic personality types.

The nine points on the circumference are also connected with each other by the inner lines of the Enneagram. Note that points Three, Six, and Nine form an equilateral triangle. The remaining six points are connected in the following order: One connects with Four, Four with Two, Two with Eight, Eight with Five, Five with Seven, and Seven with One. These six points form an irregular hexagram. The meaning of these inner lines will be discussed shortly.

image of enneagram symbol
The Enneagram

Your Basic Personality Type
From one point of view, the Enneagram can be seen as a set of nine distinct personality types, with each number on the Enneagram denoting one type. It is common to find a little of yourself in all nine of the types, although one of them should stand out as being closest to yourself. This is your basic personality type.

Everyone emerges from childhood with one of the nine types dominating their personality, with inborn temperament and other pre-natal factors being the main determinants of our type. This is one area where most all of the major Enneagram authors agree � we are born with a dominant type. Subsequently, this inborn orientation largely determines the ways in which we learn to adapt to our early childhood environment. It also seems to lead to certain unconscious orientations toward our parental figures, but why this is so, we still do not know. In any case, by the time children are four or five years old, their consciousness has developed sufficiently to have a separate sense of self. Although their identity is still very fluid, at this age children begin to establish themselves and find ways of fitting into the world on their own.
Thus, the overall orientation of our personality reflects the totality of all childhood factors (including genetics) that influenced its development.

Several more points can be made about the basic type itself.

People do not change from one basic personality type to another.
The descriptions of the personality types are universal and apply equally to males and females, since no type is inherently masculine or feminine.
Not everything in the description of your basic type will apply to you all the time because you fluctuate constantly among the healthy, average, and unhealthy traits that make up your personality type.
The Enneagram uses numbers to designate each of the types because numbers are value neutral and they imply the whole range of attitudes and behaviours of each type without specifying anything either positive or negative. Unlike the labels used in psychiatry, numbers provide an unbiased, shorthand way of indicating a lot about a person without being pejorative.
The numerical ranking of the types is not significant. A larger number is no better than a smaller number; it is not better to be a Nine than a Two because nine is a bigger number.
No type is inherently better or worse than any other. While all the personality types have unique assets and liabilities, some types are often more desirable than others in any given culture or group. Furthermore, for one reason or another, you may not be happy being a particular type. You may feel that your type is "handicapped" in some way. As you learn more about all the types, you will see that just as each has unique capacities, each has different limitations. If some types are more esteemed in Western society than others, it is because of the qualities that society rewards, not because of any superior value of those types. The ideal is to become your best self, not to imitate the assets of another type.

Identifying Your Basic Personality Type
As you think about your personality, which of the following nine roles fits you best most of the time? Or, to put it differently, if you were to describe yourself in a few words, which of the following word clusters would come closest?

The Enneagram with Riso-Hudson Type Names

These one-word descriptors can be expanded into four-word sets of traits. Keep in mind that these are merely highlights and do not represent the full spectrum of each type.

Type One is principled, purposeful, self-controlled, and perfectionistic.
Type Two is generous, demonstrative, people-pleasing, and possessive.
Type Three is adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.
Type Four is expressive, dramatic, self-absorbed, and temperamental.
Type Five is perceptive, innovative, secretive, and provocative.
Type Six is engaging, responsible, anxious, and suspicious.
Type Seven is spontaneous, versatile, distractible, and scattered.
Type Eight is self-confident, decisive, wilful, and confrontational.
Type Nine is receptive, reassuring, agreeable, and complacent.

The Triads
The Enneagram is a 3 x 3 arrangement of nine personality types in three Triads. There are three types in the Instinctive Triad, three in the Feeling Triad, and three in the Thinking Triad, as shown below. Each Triad consists of three personality types that have in common the assets and liabilities of that Triad. For example, personality type Four has unique strengths and liabilities involving its feelings, which is why it is in the Feeling Triad. Likewise, the Eight's assets and liabilities involve its relationship to its instinctual drives, which is why it is in the Instinctive Triad, and so forth for all nine personality types.

Enneagram Triads

The Triads of the Enneagram

The inclusion of each type is its Triad is not arbitrary. Each type results from a particular relationship with a cluster of issues that characterize that Triad. Most simply, these issues revolve around a powerful, largely unconscious emotional response to the loss of contact with the core of the self. In the Instinctive Triad, the emotion is Anger or Rage. In the Feeling Triad, the emotion is Shame, and in the Thinking Triad, it is Anxiety or Dread. Of course, all nine types contain all three of these emotions, but in each Triad, the personalities of the types are particularly affected by that Triad's emotional theme.

Enneagram Triads Emotional theme

The Dominant Emotion of each Triad

Thus, each type has a particular way of coping with the dominant emotion of its Triad. We can briefly see what this means by examining each type, Triad by Triad. In the Instinctive Triad, Eights act out their anger and instinctual energies. In other words, when Eights feel anger building in them, they immediately respond to it in some physical way, raising their voices, moving more forcefully. Others can clearly see that Eights are angry because they give themselves permission to express their anger physically.

Nines deny their anger and instinctual energies as if to say, "What anger? I am not a person who gets angry." Nines are the type most out of touch with their anger and instinctual energies, often feeling threatened by them. Of course, Nines get angry like everyone else, but try to stay out of their darker feelings by focusing on idealizations of their relationships and their world.

Ones attempt to control or repress their anger and instinctual energy. They feel that they must stay in control of themselves, especially of their instinctual impulses and angry feelings at all times. They would like to direct these energies according to the dictates of their highly developed inner critic (superego), the source of their strictures on themselves and others.

In the Feeling Triad,
Twos attempt to control their shame by getting other people to like them and to think of them as good people. They also want to convince themselves that they are good, loving people by focusing on their positive feelings for others while repressing their negative feelings (such as anger and resentment at not being appreciated enough). As long as Twos can get positive emotional responses from others, they feel wanted and are able to control feelings of shame.

Threes try to deny their shame, and are potentially the most out of touch with underlying feelings of inadequacy. Threes learn to cope with shame by trying to become what they believe a valuable, successful person is like. Thus, Threes learn to perform well, to be acceptable, even outstanding and are often driven relentlessly in their pursuit of success as a way of staving off feelings of shame and fears of failure.

Fours attempt to control their shame by focusing on how unique and special their particular talents, feelings, and personal characteristics are. Fours highlight their individuality and creativity as a way of dealing with their shameful feelings, although Fours are the type most likely to succumb to feelings of inadequacy. Fours also manage their shame by cultivating a rich, romantic fantasy life in which they do not have to deal with whatever in their life seems drab or uninteresting to them.

In the Thinking Triad,
Fives have anxiety about the outer world and about their capacity to cope with it. Thus, they cope with their fear by withdrawing from the world. Fives become secretive, isolated loners who use their minds to penetrate into the nature of the world. Fives hope that eventually, as they understand reality on their own terms, they will be able to rejoin the world and participate in it, but they never feel they know enough to participate with total confidence. Instead, they involve themselves with increasingly complex inner worlds.

Sixes are the most anxious type, and the most out of touch with their own sense of inner knowing and confidence. Unlike Fives, Sixes have trouble trusting their own minds, so they are constantly looking outside themselves for something to make them feel sure of themselves. They might turn to philosophies, beliefs, relationships, jobs, savings, authorities, or any combination of the above. But no matter how many security structures they create, Sixes still feel doubtful and anxious. They may even begin to doubt the very people and beliefs that they have turned to for reassurance. Sixes may also respond to their anxiety by impulsively confronting it and defying their fear in the effort to be free of it.

Sevens have anxiety about their inner world. There are feelings of pain, loss, deprivation, and general anxiety that Sevens would like to stay clear of as much as possible. To cope with these feelings, Sevens keep their minds occupied with exciting possibilities and options, as long as they have something stimulating to anticipate, Sevens feel that they can distract themselves from their fears. Sevens, in most cases, do not stop merely at thinking about these options, however. As much as possible they attempt to actually do as many of their options as they can. Thus, Sevens can be found staying on the go, pursuing one experience after another, and keeping themselves entertained and engaged with their many ideas and activities.

The Wing
No one is a pure personality type: everyone is a unique mixture of his or her basic type and usually one of the two types adjacent to it on the circumference of the Enneagram. One of the two types adjacent to your basic type is called your wing.

Your basic type dominates your overall personality, while the wing complements it and adds important, sometimes contradictory, elements to your total personality. Your wing is the "second side" of your personality, and it must be taken into consideration to better understand yourself or someone else. For example, if you are a personality type Nine, you will have likely have either a One-wing or an Eight-wing, and your personality as a whole can best be understood by considering the traits of the Nine as they uniquely blend with the traits of either the One or the Eight. In our teaching experience over the years, we have also encountered some individuals who seem to have both wings, while others are strongly influenced by their basic type and show little of either wing.
There is disagreement among the various traditions of the Enneagram about whether individuals have one or two wings. Strictly speaking, everyone has two wings, in the restricted sense that both of the types adjacent to your basic type are operative in your personality since each person possesses the potentials of all nine types. However, this is not what is usually meant by "having two wings," and proponents of the so-called two-wing theory believe that both wings operate more or less equally in everyone's personality. (For example, they believe that a Nine would have roughly equal amounts of his or her Eight and One wings.)
Observation of people leads us to conclude that while the two-wing theory applies to some individuals, most people have a dominant wing. In the vast majority of people, while the so-called second wing always remains operative to some degree, the dominant wing is far more important. (For example, Twos with Three-wings are noticeably different from Twos with One-wings, and while Twos with Three-wings have a One-wing, it is not nearly as important as the Three-wing.) It is therefore clearer to refer simply to a type's "wing" as opposed to its "dominant wing," since the two terms represent the same concept.

One other observation about wings is worth mentioning. In the course of teaching the Enneagram in workshops and Trainings, many people in the latter half of their lives have reported the development of their so-called "second wing." And in individuals who have been pursuing psychological and/or spiritual work, we have seen evidence that this is true. We do not know, however, whether these students were merely seeing all of the positive potentials of the nine types unfolding in them as they matured in their second wing being one of the other seven types or whether this was a specific development of the second wing type. We will continue to investigate this idea in our work with our students and colleagues.

It is, of course, necessary to identify your basic type before you can assess which wing you have. Besides indicating your basic type, the Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator may also indicate your wing. This can be found at www.EnneagramInstitute.com.

Continue learning about the LEVELS OF DEVELOPMENT or THE INSTINCTUAL VARIANTS