The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

by Ian Morgan Cron

Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world.

our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met. Over

The good news is we have a God who would know our scrawny butt anywhere. He remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.

The purpose of the Enneagram is to develop self-knowledge and learn how to recognize and dis-identify with the parts of our personalities that limit us so we can be reunited with our truest and best selves, that “pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven,” as Thomas Merton said. The point of it is self-understanding and growing beyond the self-defeating dimensions of our personality, as well as improving relationships and growing in compassion for others.

The Enneagram teaches that there are nine different personality styles in the world, one of which we naturally gravitate toward and adopt in childhood to cope and feel safe. Each type or number has a distinct way of seeing the world and an underlying motivation that powerfully influences how that type thinks, feels and behaves.

The point is, it’s always moving up and down on a spectrum ranging from healthy to average to unhealthy depending on where you are and what’s happening.

It’s important for you to know the number that you go to in stress so that when you catch it activating you can make better choices and take care of yourself.

Spiritually speaking, it’s a real advantage to know what happens to your type and the number it naturally goes to in stress. It’s equally valuable to learn the positive qualities of the number you instinctively move toward in security as well. Once you become familiar with this material you can know and catch yourself when you’re heading in the direction of a breakthrough or a breakdown, and make wiser choices than in the past.

Richard Rohr writes, “Sins are fixations that prevent the energy of life, God’s love, from flowing freely. [They are] self-erected blockades that cut us off from God and hence from our own authentic potential.”

The teachers who developed the Enneagram saw that each of the nine numbers had a particular weakness or temptation to commit one of the Seven Deadly Sins, drawn from the list Pope Gregory composed in the sixth century, plus fear and deceit (along the way a wise person added these two, which is nice because now no one needs to feel left out).

As long as we are unaware of our deadly sin and the way it lurks around unchallenged in our lives we will remain in bondage to it.

The true purpose of the Enneagram is to reveal to you your shadow side and offer spiritual counsel on how to open it to the transformative light of grace.

Here’s a list of the Seven Deadly Sins (plus two) and the number to which each correlates, as well as a brief description of them (see figure 3). The descriptions are drawn from Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s The Wisdom of the Enneagram.

The good news is that there are healing messages that we can choose to change the direction of our thoughts, beliefs and behaviors.

Learning a healing message unique to each number is a useful aid to help us along on our journey back to our true selves, to the

wholeness we...

The truth is, people who lack self-knowledge not only suffer spiritually but professionally as well.

“There is one quality that trumps all, evident in virtually every great entrepreneur, manager, and leader. That quality is self-awareness. The best thing leaders can do to improve their effectiveness is to become more aware of what motivates them and their decision-making.”

All of us bring some amount of brokenness to our connections with others, but you should understand that every single number on the Enneagram is capable of healthy and life-giving relationships.

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better,” observed Flannery O’Connor, and she’s right.

“Information is not transformation.” Once

Anyone who says they’re “trying” to be a good Christian right away reveals they have no idea what a Christian is. Christianity is not something you do as much as something that gets done to you. Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.

your number is not determined by what you do so much as by why you do

Instead, read carefully about the underlying motivation that drives the traits or behaviors of each number to see whether it rings true for you.

the source of most of your problems is you.

As Anne Lamott says, “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared,” so there’s no sense wanting to be differently screwed up than you already are.

The Enneagram should only be used to build others up and help them advance on their journey toward wholeness and God. Period.

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed or put in a box.” People express this concern to Suzanne and me all the time. Fear not! The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it. So that’ll be good, right?

At times, you will feel that we’re focusing far too much on the negative rather than the positive

qualities of each number. We are, but only to help you more easily discover your type. In our experience, people identify more readily with what’s not working in their personalities than with what is. As Suzanne likes to say, “We don’t know ourselves by what we get ri...

way, always maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does.

Healthy Eights are great friends, exceptional leaders and champions of those who cannot fight on their own behalf. They have the intelligence, courage and stamina to do what others say can’t be done. They have learned to use power in the right measure at the right times, and they are capable of collaborating and valuing the contributions of others. They understand vulnerability and even embrace it at times.

Average Eights tend to be steamrollers more than diplomats. They are dualistic thinkers, so people are good or bad, opinions are right or wrong, and the future is bright or bleak. They prefer to lead, struggle to follow and use aggression to emotionally protect themselves. Many Eights are leaders, and others follow them with little or no hesitation. They have little patience with people who are indecisive or who don’t pull their weight.

Unhealthy Eights are preoccupied with the idea that they are going to be betrayed. Suspicious and slow to trust others, they resort to revenge when wronged. They believe they can change reality, and they make their own rules and expect others to follow them. Eights in this space destroy as much as they create, believing the world is a place where ...

Eights are called Challengers because they’re aggressive, confrontational, high-voltage people

The deadly sin of the Eight is lust, but not in the sexual sense. Eights lust after intensity—they are high-voltage human dynamos who want to be wherever the action and energy are, and if they can’t find any, they’ll cook it up.

Eights have more energy than any other number on the Enneagram.

When Eights walk into a room you feel their presence before you see them.

Their larger-than-life energy doesn’t fill a space; it owns it.

The defining feature of an Eight is the overabundance of intense energy they radiate wherever they go.

every Eight I’ve ever known oozes confidence, fearlessness and strength.

Spiritually healthy, self-aware Eights love to do what others say can’t be done.

a spiritually undeveloped Eight who tests poorly on the self-knowledge scale is someone you want to keep away from the kids. Think Joseph Stalin.

Anger is the dominant emotion in an Eight’s life.

fiercely independent people

Eights assume others are untrustworthy until they’ve proven t...

And because anger is so easy for them to access, an average Eight can be a little too quick to the draw, firing off a few rounds at people without thinking beforehand about the consequences.

Eights use anger like a palisade to hide behind and defend the softer, more tender feelings of the open-hearted, innocent child they once were, the one they don’t want others to see.

Eights don’t come equipped with dimmers. They are on or off, all in or all out. They “go big or go home.” They want to express their animal drives and satisfy their appetite for life without limitations or constraints being placed on them by anybody. This impulsive, all-or-nothing approach to life leaves Eights prone to being overindulgent and excessive. They can overwork, overparty, overeat, overexercise, overspend, over-anything. For an Eight, too much of a good thing is almost enough.

All this hot-blooded, passionate and combative energy can feel overwhelming and threatening to people who aren’t Eights.