The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

by Beatrice Chestnut

In the Enneagram framework, Type Nines are adaptable, likable, and easygoing. They specialize in detecting tension and finding ways to mediate and diffuse conflict. Oriented toward inclusion, consensus, and harmony, they excel at understanding and valuing different perspectives and mediating between them to resolve disputes and maintain peace. They are genuinely caring and unselfish, and their specific “superpower” lies in providing steadfast support to others in a way that makes everyone around them feel honored and included.

Type Nines’ gifts and strengths also represent their “fatal flaw” or “Achilles heel,” as they can over-adjust to others and then have a hard time registering their own desires and asserting their own agendas. They get in their own way by focusing too much attention on what others want and deferring excessively to the people around them. By accommodating others and avoiding conflict in order to achieve comfort, they end up becoming deaf to their own inner voice.

Nines habitually avoid contact with their anger because they focus so much on staying comfortable, and anger can easily bring them into conflict with others. So, even though Nines are anger types, they may not have regular contact with their anger, and it tends to leak out in various forms of passive-aggressive behaviors.

Nines’ focus on order and control takes the form of liking the support that structure provides and the habit of passively resisting being controlled by others (often despite seeming to go along).

As body-centered types, Nines sense their environment kinesthetically and have a primary connection to “gut knowing.” Paradoxically, Nines can be cut off from their gut instincts. The Nine personality is shaped in a fundamental way by the habit of “going to sleep” to the ongoin...

Nines tend to give up on asserting their desires and adopt a coping strategy that involves forgetting themselves (and the pain of not getting what they want) and overadjusting to others as a way of finding peace and avoiding conflict.

The Nine coping strategy is thus an overadjustment to others—an unconscious accommodation of what other people want and a “forgetting” of what they want—and their attention goes to harmonizing with those around them rather than asserting themselves. This over-adjustment reflects their experience that any strong feeling or preference on their part may put them in conflict with others; at an unconscious level, their personality is set up to avoid adversarial interactions at all costs.

Sometimes referred to as “narcotization,” the principal way Nines dissociate from psychological pain or discomfort is through a kind of dimming of awareness, through putting themselves to sleep in various ways.

Nines water down their experience of life, their interactions with others, and their contact with themselves to buffer themselves against the pain of separation, of not being heard, or of not feeling a sense of belonging.

Having an “other-focused” style of attention, Nines pay a great deal of attention to what the people around them want, think, and feel, and much less attention to what they themselves want, think, and feel.

It can be stressful for Nines to act on their own behalf—it can inspire anxiety about performance—and so they distract themselves with less important activities as a way of avoiding the pressure of having to act.

I don’t matter. It’s easier that way.

What I think and feel isn’t that important. And that’s okay. Other people just feel more strongly about things than I do.

It’s not okay to be angry or upset because that puts you a...

It’s more important to be nice or peaceful than to b...

It’s not good to show anger because conflict destroys positive con...

If I’m not present and accessible to oth...

I don’t know what I want, and it’s not that i...

I’m incapable of knowing w...

Knowing what I want and asserting my desires in the world of others takes too much work and will alienate people I n...

It’s easier to go along with what other people want than go to the trouble of...

Merging happens when Nines “take in” the positions, feelings, and desires of another person to the point that they feel like they’re their own. They lose the boundaries between themselves and other people.

Nines orient themselves in relation to other people, so losing connections can make them feel lost and adrift. Because of this—often without even being conscious of why they are doing it—Nines do everything they can to maintain a connection with important others, even to the point of going to sleep to their own inner truth.

At the heart of the Nine’s coping strategy of “going along to get along” is their tendency to resign themselves to not getting what they want.

Nines give up on themselves out of a deep belief that it doesn’t pay to assert yourself.

Nines don’t want to experience their anger, so their aggression represents a big blind spot. They also don’t want to own anything—strong opinions, desires, and emotions—that might somehow pit them against the important people in their lives, so these may all reside in their Shadow.

Nines believe that any kind of tension can lead to separation, so they tend to deny anything inside themselves that might cause an energetic disruption in their personal connections. Much of their inner life, therefore, can be something of a blind spot. Along with this, they can be blind to instances where there is a legitimate need for conflict or an honest discussion.

The presence of anger in the Nine Shadow heightens the possibility that it will leak out in passive-aggressive forms, such as stubbornness, passive resistance, procrastination, and irritability—and they...

Like the other body-based types, Nines don’t like being told what to do; while they will usually say yes to others as a way of avoiding the conflict that might arise if they overtly refuse a request, they can often say yes when they mean no. In this way—by passively resisting what others want them to do—they hold on to a sense of independence and avo...

For Self-Preservation Nines, it feels safer to take refuge in physical comfort, or in a routine that structures their experience in concrete and familiar ways, than to have to show up in the world and risk potential conflict or overstimulation. It’s easier to erase yourself by losing yourself in comfortable activities than to reveal yourself or open yourself up to whatever unpredictable or complex thing might be happening in the outside world.

One Self-Preservation Nine I know focuses her self-care efforts on physical fitness and dieting in specific, routine ways.

Self-Preservation Nines are concrete people, oriented to immediate experience, who don’t relate much to abstractions or metaphysical concepts. With these Nines there is less “psychological mindedness” and introspection and more focus on tangible and immediate “things to do.” They find experience much easier to deal with than theory.

Self-Preservation Nines tend to be active and intuitive, and they express a kind of subtle strength.

Self-Preservation Nines have a stronger presence than the other two Nine subtype personalities, and they can be more irritable and stubborn. It can be very difficult for them to accept that another person is right. This subtype also lives a life of excess more than the other Nines, and while they don’t get angry very often, they can express the “fury of a peacemaker” when they get mad at people who cause problems.

Social Nines express the passion of psychological laziness (or sloth) through merging with the group, working hard in support of group interests, and prioritizing the group’s needs above their own. Social Nines are congenial characters with a need to feel like they’re a part of things—

In contrast to the other two Nine Subtypes, who tend to be more subdued characters, Social Nines are very outgoing and energetic—this is what makes this the counter-type Nine. Social Nines have a special brand of strength because they feel motivated to fight for the needs of the group. Social Nines are extroverted, expressive, and forceful, and so they go against the inertia typical of Type Nine in some ways—

Social Nines like to control things, and they like to talk a lot.

Sexual Nines unconsciously express a need to be through another—to gain a sense of “being” they don’t find inside themselves through fusion with somebody else.

Sexual Nines may experience difficulty in standing on their own two feet, being grounded in themselves, and living out their own sense of purpose, so they look for it in another person.

Sexual Nines tend to be very kind, gentle, tender, and sweet. They are the least assertive of the Nines.

Sexual Nines defend against the pain of early separation (and separations in general) by unconsciously denying the existence of boundaries.

Sexual Nines are primarily other-referencing, and they may take on the feelings of another as opposed to having more immediate awareness of their own emotional ups and downs,

For all of us, waking up to habitual personality patterns involves making ongoing, conscious efforts to observe ourselves, reflect on the meaning and sources of what we observe, and actively work to counter automatic tendencies.

The developmental path from Vice to Virtue is one of the central contributions of the Enneagram map in highlighting a usable “vertical” path of growth to a higher state of awareness for each type.

The theory of growth communicated by this “Vice to Virtue conversion” is that the more we can be aware of how our passion functions and can consciously work toward the embodiment of our higher Virtue, the more we can free ourselves from the unconscious habits and fixated patterns of our type and evolve toward our “higher” side or “oak tree–Self.”

The path from observing your passion to finding its antidote is not exactly the same for each of the subtypes. The path of conscious self-work has been characterized in terms of “grit, grind, and grace:”18 the “grit” of our personality habits, the “grind” of our efforts to grow, and the “grace” that comes to us when we strive to be more aware of ourselves, to develop ourselves, and work toward our virtues in positive and healthy ways. According to Naranjo, each subtype has to grind, or exert effort, against something slightly different.

THE NINE POINT REPRESENTS the way we fall asleep to ourselves in order to cope with a world that seems to require us to erase our own sense of being in order to peacefully coexist with others.

The Nine path of growth shows us how to transform our inner laziness and the universal tendency to fall asleep to our present experience into the energy and sense of purpose required to wake up to who we are and who we can be.

In each of the Type Nine subtypes, we see a specific character who teaches us what is possible when we turn psycho-spiritual inertia into a fully awake ability to further our own evolution through the alchemy o...

TYPE EIGHT REPRESENTS THE ARCHETYPE of the person who denies weakness and vulnerability by taking refuge in fearlessness, power, and strength. This archetype tends to express instinctual drives in a less inhibited way and to push back on whatever might restrict them. A personality with this archetype focuses on asserting control in big ways through an “expansive solution” characterized by domination and intensity. This approach entails identification with a glorified self (rather than a diminished sense of self).