The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth

by Christopher L. Heuertz

Keating explains that as children we all need an appropriate amount of power and control, affection and esteem, and security and survival for healthy psychological grounding. But as we mature, our tendency is to overidentify with one of these programs for happiness, keeping us developmentally and spiritually stuck.

“Without adequate fulfillment of these biological needs, we probably would not survive infancy. Since the experience of the presence of God is not there at the age we start to develop self-consciousness, these three instinctual needs are all we have with which to build a program for happiness. Without the help of reason to modify them, we build a universe with ourselves at the center, around which all human faculties revolve like planets around the sun.”

The contemporary Enneagram of Personality* illustrates the nine ways we get lost, but also the nine ways we can come home to our True Self. Put another way, it exposes nine ways we lie to ourselves about who we think we are, nine ways we can come clean about those illusions, and nine ways we can find our way back to God.

The movement from basic knowledge to principled understanding to embodied integration is the idealized essence of mastery in any growth process—including

I prefer to refer to the nine types by their numbers, specifically suggesting that someone is “dominant in type Two” instead of calling Twos “Givers” or “Helpers,” or referring to those “dominant in type Nine” rather than calling Nines “Peacemakers” or “Mediators.” Sometimes I’m concerned that the names assigned to each of the types describe their social functions or roles without getting to the reasons behind type.

Perhaps the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound might be better framed as the way we absorb the burden of our caregiver(s) transferring their shadow.

As children, we internalized the pain of imperfect upbringings because we didn’t have the psychological capacity to process the impression of our caregiver’s shadow which develops when we let our pain go unprocessed and unresolved. Our shadow—and we all have one—is the part of our ego we are unable to consciously recognize. Though it is neither good nor bad, it is where we unconsciously “park” some of the worst of ourselves—destructive patterns, addictions, or other seemingly unpresentable parts. This internalization of pain isn’t a real wound per se but a result of transmitting and absorbing our human inability to love perfectly as well as receive love perfectly.

the Enneagram’s Childhood Wound idea is better understood as an attack on our original innocence or our original Virtue, not necessarily a physical or emotional trauma (though both could be true).

This theory suggests then that the Childhood Wound doesn’t actually form type in people but is absorbed as a form of confirmation bias, or used to validate the affinity toward a dominant type that is gifted to us at birth.

One way to illustrate this is to view our temperament (often categorized as one of sixteen combinations of basic preferences that can be determined through the MBTI® inventory—a typology developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Briggs based on Carl Jung’s typology theory) as the specific room we stay in; our StrengthsFinder® results (based on Gallup University’s list of thirty-four talent themes, a weighted list of innate strengths that carry potential to increase a person’s performance success) as the way we decorate our room; but our Enneagram type as the kind of home we build

our type is ours to bring forward. Because the shaping of our type is partially confirmed to us though the experience of our Original or Childhood Wound, learning about our type can be painful to our memories and humiliating to our ego.

One of the more surprising examples of types in disintegration is that of type Five. Normally clearheaded and cerebral, people who are dominant in type Five may lose their way and fall hard into the addictive tendencies of type Seven as a way of manipulating their own inability to find answers to the problems for which they desperately need solutions.

Those dominant in type Five analyze everything to predict the future based on research and a proper understanding of history.

Head people may be the most afraid of their own pain. They think they are unable to emotionally engage their pain through their feelings, so they minimize it. Fives attempt to reduce it as illogical.

Father Richard explains that in an attempt to cope with their anxiety, “Fives try to master it by gaining more and correct knowledge.