Enneagram Part 1: A guide to expanding your view with the Enneagram symbol
What’s the real reason you spend so much time doing the things you do, feeling the things you feel, and thinking the things you think? The answers to these questions can be found in your underlying—and possibly unconscious—motivations for everything you do.
The Enneagram is a powerful personality system that identifies nine different core motivations that drive your patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. As a very young child, you developed certain processes, techniques, and defense mechanisms—related to your Enneagram type—as the primary ways to get your needs met. As you grew up and matured, you were better able to develop new ways of meeting your own needs, but your initial techniques were so automatic and habitual that they persisted. The very patterns that developed as a way to survive when you were young became quite limiting, creating disconnection and suffering as you grew older. The Enneagram shows us that this is true for everyone.
The Enneagram offers you a path to more purposeful, intentional, and conscious living by helping you identify and interrupt these automatic patterns that result in suffering. This path offers guidance about growing and developing beyond the rote patterns everyone has for getting their needs met. By doing this development work related to your Enneagram type, you can more fully align yourself and your life with your true identity—not the identity constructed from your unconscious patterns.
The Enneagram Symbol
The Enneagram symbol helps you understand different ways of working with this system. From a structural standpoint, the symbol is composed of a circle, points, and lines.
The circle encompasses the entire Enneagram system.
The nine points represent the core Enneagram types.
The inner lines of the circle connect each type to two other Enneagram types. The lines represent both positive (helpful) and unconscious (not-so-helpful) movements each type can make to two other Enneagram numbers. These line movements can help explain additional behaviors you may experience. They also provide options for healthier behaviors that work better to meet your needs than the automatic patterns of your core Enneagram type.
Let’s take a look at a few more aspects of the Enneagram that can provide more opportunities for healthy behaviors.
Expanding your view
The Enneagram explains how the core patterns of each type limit a person’s view of the world, but it also gives you options for how to expand your perception and interrupt some of your type’s overused patterns.
Wings
The symbol shows us that each Enneagram type has a point on either side. Type 9, for example, is shouldered by Type 8 and Type 1. These are your type’s wings. Leaning into the “high side” (or positive aspects) of your wing numbers can help bring greater balance to your automatic ways of being. Consciously accessing aspects of both wings, depending on the situation, is considered a gentler growth stretch than accessing the numbers your type is connected to by lines (more on that later). For example, a Type 9 could lean into its Type 8 wing by being more direct and assertive and being willing to experience some conflict.
A note about wings…
You may see people identify a preferred wing in their Enneagram type. For example, an Enneagram Type 3 may identify their type as Type 3w4. This means their core Enneagram type is Type 3, but they rely more heavily on their 4 wing than their 2 wing. Some believe this is a way to add nuance to their type or explain how they might be different from Enneagram Type 3s who rely more heavily on their 2 wing (3w2). While it’s true that most people use one wing more than the other, it’s not the best way to distinguish different people of the same type.
A better way to explain differences between people of the same Enneagram type is to use instincts. In the animal kingdom, there are three basic instincts for survival: self-preservation, social, and sexual/one-to-one bonding). These same instincts exist in humans, but we tend to have one instinct that operates much more than needed, one instinct that doesn’t show up as much as it’s needed, and one that falls somewhere between these two extremes. We’ll explain the concept of instincts more in Part 3.
Identifying which of these three basic instincts is the dominant driving factor for survival is a much more descriptive way of illustrating the differences between people of the same type. This is where you might see people describe themselves as a Self-Preservation Type 3, for example. There’s more on this in Part 3 of this series.
Centers
There are three different centers on the Enneagram that each offer a different kind of wisdom: the head, heart, or body. Each Enneagram type is located in one of these three centers.
Types 8, 9, and 1 are found in the body center.
Types 2, 3, and 4 are found in the heart center.
Types 5, 6, and 7 are found in the head center.
As you can probably imagine, everyone needs access to the wisdom of all three centers to be their most balanced and integrated self. The center in which your Enneagram type is located brings you special access to the wisdom of that center. However, this special access also means that you’ll favor this center over the other two centers. This can lead to problems that stem from an over-reliance on your preferred center.
Generally speaking, most people have easier access to one of the other two centers and may be rather disconnected from the third. Identifying how much focus you give to each center—through self-reflection and self-observation—can empower you to consciously access the wisdom provided by all three centers.
Lines
The lines found within the circle give you yet another way to expand your view and bring greater balance. By connecting your core type to two other Enneagram types, the lines provide paths that travel to other parts of the Enneagram that can help break recurrent behavioral patterns. The pathways created by these lines provide more advanced growth.
While there are schools of thought that teach that your type travels to one line number in unhealthy ways when under stress and to the other line number in healthy ways during growth, the more recent understanding of line movements illustrates the possibility of traveling to both numbers in both positive and unhelpful ways.
This article is meant to give you an overview of the Enneagram system and some opportunities for growth offered by understanding the main aspects of Enneagram symbol. Next, we’ll look at the three main aspects of each Enneagram type. Read Part 2 »