Why you knowing your Enneagram type isn’t enough to create change.
Your Enneagram type is your coping mechanism. Yes, we describe it as a personality type, but it’s actually a strategy you learned at a very young age, intricately designed to keep you feeling safe, loved and okay in the holding environment you were raised in. Because of this, your type is less your personality and more the thing your personality does. As Enneagram teacher Tom Condon says, “you aren’t your Enneagram type. You do your Enneagram type.”
This is an important clarification for 3 key reasons:
It helps us show a little more compassion for ourselves for the things we struggle with. Knowing that this was once a very helpful safety mechanism helps us place less blame on ourselves for being the way we are.
It helps us understand why it’s so hard to change. When a strategy has been in place for as long as it has, it is now automatic and habitual. It’s essentially part of our wiring, which is why reading about your type and committing to change, doesn’t usually result in change.
It helps us see why our Enneagram type seems to “dig in” during particularly stressful times. Given its clever design in keeping us safe, it makes sense that when times get tough, we’ll (unconsciously) double down on what worked for us in the past.
For example, an Enneagram type 3 might become even busier, even more impatient and even more shut down to obstacles they perceive to be slowing them down. An Enneagram type 8 might become more abrupt, more pushy and more insensitive.
If you know your Enneagram type and are feeling frustrated you haven’t been able to kick your challenging habits to the curb yet, this is why. Congratulations! You’re no longer required to select all the boxes that contain bridges or fire hydrants or motorcycles.
Fortunately, all is not lost.
Just because change is hard, doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means that the way we go about it needs to differ a little:
What won’t work is extreme measures that push your Enneagram type’s core avoidances way out of their comfort zone and into the fear zone. That’s like suggesting to an Enneagram Type 1 leader they just “let the team make mistakes”. Honestly, if that was going to work, they would have done it long ago. Do you really think they want to be awake at 2am worrying about this stuff?
If you push yourself too far into the stretch domain of your Enneagram type, your trusty old safety tactic is only going to tighten its grip in an attempt to preserve you from danger.
What’s more effective, therefore, is to practice what’s referred to in psychology as “titration”. Essentially what this means is exposing ourselves to a new emotional space in increments, with the aim of not exceeding our nervous system capacity, and thereby making sure to now overwhelm the system.
This looks like taking on smaller, more accessible experiments and slowly building up to bigger, bolder ones. For an Enneagram Type 9 who finds it hard to voice their opinion, especially in a room full of loud and pushy people, they might want to start with something as simple as sharing with a good friend their truly honest and contradictory opinion about a book they’ve just read. Or for an Enneagram Type 2, they might want to practice asserting a boundary with someone willing support them in their endeavours to honour their own needs.
In addition to an incremental approach, another less known method is working at the level of the nervous system. If your entire system is dysregulated, what this means is that your body is constantly in a space of “offness”, which will vary from minor to severe.
And if your system is sensing fear, which happens under conditions of persistent and chronic stress, once again, your Enneagram type is going to do what it’s designed to do. It’s going to step in as the (slightly outdated) superhero, come to save your ass once again.
This is why doing any kind of Enneagram work is unlikely to cause any significant shifts unless you’re working to restore nervous system equilibrium as well. You’ll have insights, you’ll have interesting conversations, and you may even make some seemingly good changes in your life. But if you’re in a state of continued stress and imbalance, chances are you’ll revert to your core type tendencies pretty quickly.
It’s not you, it’s neurobiology at work.