The Enneagram is a psychological (some would add spiritual) tool which I first encountered in the 1990s when beginning my seminary and ministry training. It was part of a required weekend of psychological testing and feedback. Back then I found it to be the most truthful tool I'd gone through, one that mirrored myself in all its strengths and shadows. This was so true that I again pulled back from the truth, from following up on its windows into what I would probably face if I stayed in denial and tried to use my will to overcome my will.
I concentrated instead on how it pinpointed my natural energy focuses and strengths, what would help me to achieve my goals. (Of course, achievement alone became my goal instead, and that makes all the difference.) Once more, I was addicted to the positive without the fuller reality that those positive traits could only become positive if I kept them in healthy balance with a dose of the reality of how much I could be drawn into the negative traits. That required a deep appreciation and action on my shadow self traits. The Enneagram pointed the way, and I went the other way.
Looking back now, it was like a guide at a crossroads showing me where one road would go and where another would go, one healthy and one not, and I took the unhealthy one, because of course it was more enticing to me and I felt I was stronger than anything I would face. I ignored that road's unhealthy potholes I carried within me along it. The Enneagram’s look into the shadow side of my life's default orientations is a key to what in SAA I use for my middle circle weaknesses or character defects or warning signs. Just as its pointers of my "type"strengths led to my outer circle healthy practices.
I am by the way a strong Enneagram 7 type, out of nine different ones referred to by numbers. The book on this tool that I most studied and journaled through on my own in prison and shared with Grace by mail was the large text called The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Don Riso and Russ Hudson. Using its descriptors for my “7” I am the Joyful, Adventurer, Visionary, Enthusiastic, Energizer Bunny, Multi-tasker personality to the extreme, a Generalist who takes on anything and everything.
I am also in the lingo a “Six Wing Entertainer” subtype gravitating to fast-paced creative and productive environments, with a dominant instinct labeled sexual, instead of "instinctual variants" labeled as self-preservation or social instincts. My type’s associated “characteristic vice” (of the seven cardinal vices) is gluttony.
Many Enneagram books or online sites can go into more depths on this tool, and will use
different descriptors. (I also journaled through Christopher Heuertz’s “The Sacred
Enneagram,” and The Enneagram Made Easy by Baron and Wagele.
Bottom line for me is that the Enneagram teaches that my type is specifically the most prone to addictions. I heard this first when I was tested thirty years ago, but was then focused forward into what I saw as the new life emerging for me. I didn't want to dwell on anything in my past, like the truth I had been living in my shadow side and excesses, that might cause me to push the pause button for deeper reflection and changes.
I didn’t want or couldn’t attain the kind of altering of my life that was necessary for the deeper newer life I told myself I wanted, and which I could have had as a new professional and moreso as a parent. But I heard it again in prison when I was looking back over the wreck of so much of that previous life and its relationships.
The Enneagram has also helped me with my communications and relationship skills. This is vital in recovery as I use it to help keep some of the middle circle triggers from being pulled and adding to the stress that led to self-medicating in the past. And the skills I learned in Enneagram were also needed in prison, especially learning to deal with those on the outside when we had so little time on the phone or the rare visit. Knowing or surmising from my study the types of others (and all types have their own pathways to unhealthy lives) helped me to monitor my reactivity by better understanding the motivations and perspectives of others. It still does.
It has become a part of my self-inventory in recovery. It has become as basic to my recovery path and relationship with Grace (a 9) as any of the specific recovery texts and lens. In particular, The Wisdom of the Enneagram book distills not only the default responses of my personality, but also provides helpful tools on how to tap into the healthy side, as it does for all the types.
I am just providing a glancing overview of the Enneagram here and how it has helped my Self-Understanding work on-going. For example, Riso and Hudson point out how Type 7 is part of the “Thinking Triad” along with two other types; how I get stuck in my head from fear and anxiety even though my type expresses itself as fearless risk-takers and adventurers. What we are afraid of though is not the outside world but our own inner world. Keeping our minds occupied keeps our fears, we think, at bay. (The other two of the triads are Feeling and Instinctive, with their own characteristics.) As a 7 in this triad, I am also one who goes after, in a very assertive and obsessive compulsive way, what I feel I need in order to be safe and secure (which in an addict mind can easily backfire).
Finally, there are the three “instinctual variants” attached to each type. These indicate what has been most distorted in childhood which affects our adult preoccupations and behaviors: the self-preservation, the social, the sexual. The sexual, according to Riso and Hudson, categorizes those of us who constantly seek connection and are fearful of intimacy and go to great lengths to avoid it. We have trouble taking care of ourselves because we are always looking outside ourselves for our own completion.
In their unhealthy mode, the sexual instinctual variants are like unhealthy Sevens anyway when we are in our self-destructive mode, so perhaps it is doubly disruptive for us: we become distant, unfocused, act out sexually impulsively and from a dysfunctional
attitude on sex and intimacy.
I have also been helped by Myers-Briggs personality type study. I am ENFP. And I am drawn to models of therapy that also trace lineage to origins in the Carl Jung universe (the Enneagram also employs guides from the work of Karen Horney, a neo-Freudian who took his insights into some new territory of the time). I will explore more in the future about the use of types or roles in family systems therapy models I have studied and on the relatively newer Internal Family Systems approach used also in addiction treatment. The more the merrier. (But then, that’s exactly what a Seven would be drawn to!).
If you are interested in learning more about the Enneagram, but haven’t explored this tool yet, check out these books above, ask counselors and therapists, explore respected online sites such as www.enneagraminstitute.com