Enneagram continued...

Trained initially as a psychologist, Palmer has been teaching the Enneagram for nearly two decades. More than anyone, she has helped to bring it alive by gathering panels of each personality type and then interviewing them in-depth before large groups of students.

Neither Deborah nor I arrived at the workshop convinced that we'd accurately identified our Enneagram types. Palmer suggested that we'd almost certainly recognize ourselves in the course of listening to panels of the nine types. As it turned out - aided partly by two dreams that focused on primal childhood fears that first night of the seminar - I identified myself fairly quickly as a Six, the same type as Palmer.

Central to the childhood experience of the Enneagram Six is the feeling that one can't trust authorities. My formative years certainly fed this belief. My mother was a powerful presence as I grew up, fiercely protection and supportive on the one hand but controlling, critical, and volatile on the other - almost certainly an Eight. My father was a gentler, sweeter presence, a quintessential Nine, but I never felt that he stood up to my mother on my behalf. Perhaps inevitably, I developed a wary view of the world, an ambivalence toward authority; and a tough exterior to ward off feelings of vulnerability.

Recognizing this pattern of fear and doubt in my life hardly seemed cause for celebration. Still, it felt oddly exhilarating. On one level, I was happy to find others at the workshop who shared my perceptions and preoccupations to realize that I was not alone. At another level, I was relieved to discover that my way of seeing the world - one that had caused me no small amount of pain over the years - wasn't necessarily accurate or complete.

"Once personality is formed, attention becomes immersed in the preoccupations that characterize our type. It can be astounding to realize that we perceive 360 degrees of reality in a very limited way and that most of our decisions and interests are based on highly sophisticated habits rather than real freedom of choice." Helen Palmer

Seeing the narrowness of one's worldview, most teachers believe, is the first step to widening it. For the Enneagram Six, this means beginning to transform chronic doubt into more discriminating trust, rejecting imagined negative scenarios in favor of more balanced, realistic assessments. Beyond that, the central challenge for Sixes, I began to see, is to recover faith in their own authority - to give up constantly and fruitlessly seeking reassurance and confirmation from others and to find it instead within.

At about the same time that I did, Deborah had an epiphany about her own type. She was, she realized, a perfectionist One. In the One's characteristic way, Deborah went to great lengths to do the right thing, to be well liked, and to avoid criticism at all costs. What the Enneagram helped her to see was how the perfect image that she sought to project to the world masked her own underlying fixation - anger and resentment, born of the relentless pressure she felt to be perfect. It was a curious bind. Acknowledging this anger, even to herself, exposed her imperfection and opened the door to more criticism. But keeping up a perfect pose only fueled her resentment and made her feel less authentic.

From the Enneagram perspective, the challenge for the One is not so much to ventilate anger as to become more aware of it and more able to accept such feelings with equanimity. Beyond that, the One's challenge is to give up the internal demand to meet the sort of impossible standards that prompt resentment in the first place. In short, Ones are challenged to feel self-acceptance even though they aren't perfect, much as Sixes aim to experience an inner sense of safety and security even though not everyone merits trust.

Yet another window opened up in the first few days of the workshop as I listened to others describe their fixations. I'd always tended to idealize certain people with sunnier, more easygoing dispositions that my own. In hadn't occurred to me that they might be protecting themselves from pain and conflict in very different and sometimes more veiled ways than I did. Watching the panels made it clear, for example, that several of my oldest friends were Sevens, the Peter Pans - eternal children, full of high spirits, fun, charm, and good humor, often highly self-absorbed and self-satisfied.

For years, I'd been amazed - and not a little jealous - that these friends were so consistently upbeat, free of apparent fear and anxiety, and capable of enjoying themselves even in stressful circumstances. Actually, these experiences were not entirely foreign to me. Most Enneagram teachers believe that any given type is influenced by at least one of its wings - meaning the types directly adjacent to it. A tragic-romantic Four with a strong Five wing, by contrast, might deal with depression by turning more inward and withdrawing. Indeed, Riso refers to types not as a single number but in tandem with a dominant wing. Hillary Clinton, for example, with her strong moral bent AND her inclination to service, is probably a One-Two.

As a Six, I shared with my Seven friends high energy, the capacity for sudden, new enthusiasms, and a belief in the boundless possibilities ahead. The difference was that my attention inevitably turned to all the things that might go wrong along the way. Where I envisioned the worst, they tended to see the best. Where I worried decisions to death, they simply jumped in or guiltlessly set decision making aside. I'd always found it uplifting to be around them. At the same time, I'd long been aware that there was often something limited and one-dimensional about these relationships.

What I had failed to recognize, until the Enneagram made it clear, was how the relentlessly upbeat stance of the Seven is less a choice than a compulsion. Sevens are as addicted to pleasure and high spirits as Sixes are to conjuring negative outcomes. For the Enneagram Sevens, cramming their lives full of new experiences and activities helps keep deeper emotions - including fear and anxiety - at bay. The problem, I realized, is that their insatiable hunger for new experiences makes it difficult for Sevens to stay with anything long enough to become deeply immersed in it. The Seven's aversion is not just to boredom but also to the sort of intimacy that carries with it the risk of pain and loss.

I recognized yet another variation on this theme when I listened to the members of the Three panel. More than any of the other types, the Three embodies the American dream. Driven, hardworking, self-assured, and often high-achieving, Threes tend to be leaders in any given situation. Like Sevens - whom they superficially resemble, - Threes keep themselves intensely busy and active. But unlike Sevens, who focus first on pleasure, Threes are most concerned with power and status. In turn, they become highly image conscious.

The cost is that Threes get disconnected from their underlying emotions. Their fixation is deceit, and indeed Threes tend to be chameleons - quickly adapting themselves to whatever a given situation demands. "There's a profound split," Riso has written, "between who they seem to be and who they are, between the image they project others and the reality behind it."



All of us seek in some measure to fill externally what's felt to be missing internally, but this becomes a full-time job for Threes. Often, it pervades even their closest relationships. "Threes," says Helen Palmer, "can make honest and enduring commitments to their intimates...without being truly connected to the emotions they describe."

An extreme example of a Three is O.J. Simpson. Publicly, he meticulously cultivates an image as a charming, likable, easygoing guy. Privately, the evidence suggests that he viscously abused his wife - denying it to the very end, perhaps even to himself.....

There was at least one other type I'd been drawn to repeatedly in my life. Eights are known as bosses and leaders. Typically powerful, bluntly direct, ceaselessly energetic, and confident to a fault, they're also instinctively protective of those they care about most. My own childhood experience had fueled an eternal search for authorities I might be able to trust. I'd sought out a succession of Eights, I now realized, as mentors and even as protectors - all roles that the Eight takes to easily. My pattern was to begin by idealizing them, accepting too readily that they did indeed have all the answers. So long as I maintained this view, they couldn't have been more generous and friendly. The problems arose when I began to question their authority. I did so in part because of a belated need to assert some independence. The catch was that questioning Eights can bring out their less attractive qualities - the intense need for control, explosive anger, and a tendency to dismiss those who do not share their worldview. The Enneagram helped me to see how I unconsciously set up these friends. By idealizing them at first, I was bound to feel let down and even betrayed later.

At the same time, it was among Eights that I saw most vividly the Enneagram's transformative power. Eights wear the toughest exterior of any type, and perhaps nothing comes harder for them than admitting their own vulnerability and lack of certainty. But beneath this hard shell, the Eight is typically protecting the dear, innocent heart of a child. Two years ago, I introduced my oldest friend - a prototypically swaggering Eight - to the Enneagram. He became fascinated by it, in time, vastly more self-aware. In the process, he began to reveal a depth of sweetness and tenderness that I'd never seen. Indeed, nothing so consistently brings people to tears at Enneagram panels as listening to self-observant Eights talk honestly about themselves.

Palmer has used the panel-interview format to demonstrate vividly the nature of each type. At the same time, her deeper interest is in helping students convert their fixations to their higher opposites - more essential qualities that the personality tends to mask. For the One, the challenge is to transform anger and the tendency to criticize into self-acceptance and serenity; for the Two, pride and people-pleasing into humility and unconditional love; for the Three, workaholism and image-consciousness into integrity and inner conviction; for the Four, envy and self-absorption into equanimity and clarity; for the Five, emotional detachment and abstraction into involvement and compassion; for the Six, fear and doubt into courage and self-possession; for the Seven, gluttony and distractedness into focus and contentment; for the Eight, control and certainty into tenderness and openness; and for the Nine, inertia and complacency into conviction and self-awareness.