The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

by Beatrice Chestnut

For instance, a child who feels constant pressure to “be good” may develop coping strategies that help her to be “perfect,” thereby avoiding criticism or punishment.

The main idea is that your personality—all of what you think, feel, and do—is made up of patterns. Even when you try to pay attention more carefully to what is going on inside you, these patterns can be hard to detect because you have been doing what you do for so long that the “patterning” in what you do has become invisible to you, in the same way a fish doesn’t “notice” the water he’s swimming in. The Enneagram helps you see these personality patterns in yourself.

The Enneagram describes personality types in terms of conscious patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving along with their repressed Shadow aspects. As a result, it is an excellent tool for doing the hardest part of consciousness work: realizing, owning, and accepting your blind spots.

The Self-Preservation Nine fuses with physical comforts and activities, the Social Nine fuses with groups, and the Sexual Nine fuses with other individuals.

Feelings are just valid; they aren’t “right or wrong” or “good or bad.”

When we remain unconscious to the emotions that drive our behavior, we tend to “act out” those emotions in order to avoid feeling things that may be hard to feel. This can get us in trouble because we remain unaware of the true motives behind the way we are seeing and handling things.