The enneagram is a personality typology system. According to this system, there are nine main types of personailities. However, its different from other personality typologies. The enneagram explains why your personality has formed the way it has – it says that we each develop our distinct personality to compensate for an aspect of reality that we have overlooked.
So it exposes a basic delusion that we’ve based our personalities around. It is a great tool for self-awareness and self-discovery. Personally, it has given me a lot of insight into my moment-to-moment experience and spiritual struggle as a human being and illuminated for me how my particular struggle is different from others and what the deeper unconscious beliefs were that keep my personality and tendencies in place.
Let’s talk a little about personality development in general – How do you understand personality?
When we’re young we are whole and complete. But then because of major and minor traumas (ranging from "daddy doesn’t show much" affection to being sexually abused) and an innate or karmic predisposition we are born with, we develop “personalities”. Personalities are always formed as a “coping mechanism” – that means there is something to “cope with”, some wounding because of those major or minor traumas.
Every human being goes through this wounding and then the formation of a personality to cope… That wounding entails a break from reality – a break from wholeness, spiritual oneness which is the REAL nature of existence. Many people believe their “personality” or “armor” is who they are. It’s not. It’s just the way that a wounded four or five year old learned to navigate the world. And personalities are very adaptive when we are children, because we really are dependent then. So we need to find ways to get love and attention and food and shelter. Our survival depends on it. But then we grow up and we continue to think and act from that wounded four-year-old position, and we assume that who we are being is a choice. But it’s not really a true choice because we don’t know any better. This is how we’ve always navigated the world. It feels safe, it feels known, it’s familiar and we can guarantee ourselves whatever we deem is important. For some people that could be money, for others it’s security or people’s approval or perfection. Everyone operates from an ego/personality and very few people ever question it or try to find who they are aside from it. Over time, it gets increasingly painful to stay trapped in one’s personality.
Now that wounding that I talked about – where there is a break from reality. It creates a perceptual filter, with an associated driving emotional energy, which determines what you pay attention to and how you direct energy and behavior. Every type has an underlying belief about the nature of reality. Every type has lost sight of an aspect of reality, which is why it tries to compensate for by being that particular way. So the purpose of this discovery is huge – makes you so aware of your own subjectivity, improves relationships, communication, helps you understand yourself and the world and gives you the freedom to really for the first time to realize that you’ve been reacting out of a pattern and then you actually have the CHOICE to be your authentic self. What is authentic self?