Meet Patrick, The Protector

When Patrick Demery calls himself one of “The Improbables,” I wish it were not so. But having spent the last 17 years working inside our jails and prisons, I have to agree with him. The reality is that here in the United States, we’re a culture that sees people as their worst mistakes. We impose unthinkably long sentences upon human beings to prove the contempt in which we hold people who do bad things. In 2023, Patrick finished serving one of those kinds of sentences— forty-four years to life. But honestly, when it comes to probability, the really uncomfortable statistics tell us that Patrick was five times more likely to be incarcerated because he is black. The predictable, systemic elements of incarceration suggest that Patrick has been battling the improbability of freedom even longer than the three decades he spent locked up.

For Patrick, prison began in childhood, with a life of adversity that he did not choose. His brave mother had him when she was just fifteen. When he was five, she was murdered. The people around him didn’t know how to hold such trauma themselves, never mind how to hold Patrick. So, he did what little Type Eights do when life is impossibly hard—denied his vulnerability, took the hand of his baby brother, and became a force to be reckoned with. Personality is a survival strategy, an innocent, intelligent move, and a costly one. By the time he was sixteen, Patrick defied anyone who opposed him. He’d convinced himself that he was so “free” he could do whatever he wanted to do, but inside he felt unworthy of love, afraid, and powerless to belong himself anywhere.

His whole life story is a heartbreaking and triumphant one that is Patrick’s to tell. While his life is unique and gripping, his childhood was practically a recipe for incarceration, as we see time and again in our courses inside. I’m no psychologist, but I am a mom of three grown sons who knows firsthand that when children have adult-sized problems, they need help to figure out how to regulate their emotions. When kids don’t get what they need, we quickly start to see it in their behavior, if someone is paying attention. Kids with unexpressed rage and grief, or fears that have never been acknowledged, become teenagers and then adults, who act out their upset in all kinds of problematic ways. All human behavior is an attempt to find out whether we’re really loved or not.

As Patrick says, “I knew there was goodness in me. I knew the things that I’d done, but what I didn’t know was why.” Why do good people do bad things? It’s the question we need to grapple with—on both sides of the bars. After working with literally thousands of imprisoned people who have entrusted me with their childhood stories, the answer is so clear that I am running out of ways to explain it. HURTING people, that’s who. Hurting people hurt people. It’s a last-ditch display of pain for which we have no words, an attempt to find out if we even matter. When we get the idea that we don’t, we childishly act out our pain like a game of charades gone very, very wrong.

We all project how we feel about ourselves onto the world around us. Nines insist on more peace from the world, Ones that we be better. Twos demand that we be more loving, and Threes that the world see us. Fours insist that people recognize our uniqueness, and Fives that things make sense. Type Sixes insist that the world provide us with certainty, Sevens that life be more fun, and Type Eights demand justice. In Patrick’s case, going to prison contained the behavior, but never helped him to understand it. He was, what many of our in-custody participants say they feel themselves to be, “in a prison within a prison.”

“I knew there was goodness in me. I knew the things that I’d done, but what I didn’t know was why.”

Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. We can’t solve adult-sized problems with the same hearts and minds that were arrested in childhood. Healing starts with remembering what’s right about us, and that’s what the Enneagram is for. Type Eights come to teach the rest of us about aliveness, immediacy, and strength. When Patrick heard it put like that, as a nearly 60-year-old man sitting on the edge of his seat, contemplating his third upcoming Board of Parole Hearing, he recognized himself and relaxed, and then something improbable happened: he opened his heart. Things began to fall into place. There had never been anything wrong with him, just an intelligent set of responses he’d used to protect himself in ways that were no longer serving him.

When we drop beneath the armoring of our hearts, underneath the defenses, we recognize the essential goodness that’s been there all along. It’s then that we can take up the job of reparenting ourselves. Enneagram Prison Project (EPP) has been empowering people to grow themselves up since 2012. The Enneagram is such a precise psychological tool for identifying patterns of all kinds: childhood patterns, defense patterns, patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We use it to pinpoint the predictable ways we learned to survive as children. That’s right, predictable. People are so obvious in their patterning that we can put a number on the whole strategy and name it.

There’s a familiar understanding in families like mine, where some people (not naming names) tell the same story so often that we joke that we can just call out “Number 22!” because we’ve heard it so many times. Personality gets to be just like that. At EPP, we are like a family of sorts, reminding each other to check in with ourselves, see what we’re up to, and to stop running our personalities so we can be who we really are. We understand why our strategies worked; how they became so automatic that they feel like our only option—a prison of sorts.

Helpfully, there’s a key.

The way out is in—it’s called presence. As Patrick says, it’s a way of being with everything without shame or judgment. Our way back to who we truly are is not exactly the same for any of us, but when we absent ourselves from ourselves, we sure suffer. If you are interested in investigating the plausibility of your own goodness, then we’re your people. We do The Work together.

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The Human Potentialists (THP) is a Benefit Corporation, doing business for good. We offer the same compassionate approach to the Enneagram inspired by Enneagram Prison Project’s work in prisons and jails everywhere else. If you are someone who would like to use the Enneagram with compassion and honesty in your own inner work, as a corporate team, or in your family or organization, please check out our suite of offerings at The Human Potentialists.