The Paradoxical Enneagram

28 years ago, when I first encountered the Enneagram, conscious parenting still felt just out of my grasp. Knowing that I had a personality that was driven by something more innocent than condemnable, though, was the beginning of a dawn in me. My introduction to this psychological tool would impact my everything.

The hardest thing to get my head around was how we come by a personality in the first place. At first, I just wanted to know my kids’ personality types, so I took a parenting class. But the instructor kept inviting the other parents and me to look at what drove our own behavior. This annoyed me because I had never looked at myself like that before. I didn’t get it. I was familiar with self-criticism but not self-observation. I didn’t know what it meant to “witness” my thoughts, or how to “observe“ my feelings. I barely knew what I felt most of the time, and that was her point. My thoughts, feelings, and behaviors were just me, weren’t they? Well, yes, and no. They were parts of me, but maybe not all of me. What is she talking about? The first of many paradoxes left me perplexed, but intrigued.

The system described nine different “types,” aka personalities. “Ennea” means nine in Greek, the instructor said. Just nine types for all of humanity? The answer was “Yes.” The types came with short names: the Idealist, the Helper, the Achiever, the Individualist, the Investigator, the Loyalist, the Enthusiast, the Protector, and the Peacemaker.

When I couldn’t figure out which pattern best described me, I got frustrated. I’d always been a people person and somehow felt like I should know. The instructor was patient. She suggested I consider Type One, which she called the “Perfectionist.” I immediately rejected that word, feeling very far from perfect. The Wisdom of the Enneagram book calls Type One the “Idealist.” I disliked that one a little less. Then the book pointed out the trappings of unhealthy idealism: having high standards and chronic frustration, compulsively correcting things, and suppressing emotions. I was uncomfortable with where things were going, but it was unputdownable.

I kept exploring, despite myself.

The more I looked at the Idealist, the more tension I felt inside myself. I was passionate, but hardly ever impulsive. I wanted the world to be more accepting, but I was quick to judge. I liked to think of myself as good-hearted, but I was extremely hard on myself. I felt my innards revolting against the Type One characteristics that fit just a little too well, but I couldn’t argue with any of them. I started getting even more down on myself for being the way I was, and then was ashamed to learn that a harsh “inner critic” is the hallmark of Type One.

Gawd.

As I kept learning, I began to notice a voice in my head leveling a constant stream of criticism. At the same time, another part of me mounted my own defense. There was so much mental chatter, it was almost more than I could bear. The book piled on, informing me that Type Ones are considered one of the controlling “anger types.” Come on, who wants to be an angry, judgy, controlling Perfectionist? Not me. The last thing I wanted to be was angry. Angry people scared me. I’m not angry. Am I? Shit.

The truth hurt.

The anger thing was not exactly new to me, but I had always managed to keep it under wraps, or so I thought. I started to notice my anger during my first pregnancy. When I was several months along, I got dangerously cut off at an exit ramp by a guy on the freeway. We ended up waiting at the stoplight, side by side. I turned to maneuver my big belly around the steering wheel and gestured to the driver: “Put your window down!” When he did, I gave him a piece of my mind. Honestly, it felt good to tell the guy off, but in the middle of my righteous rant, an appalled part of me watched and wondered, Who is she?

When I was done, the guy apologized. I was sorry, too. My shame was thick because my outburst had nothing to do with him, and I knew it. Come to think of it, I had been riding shotgun with a nasty inner critic for as long as I could remember. She hardly ever came out in public. When the light changed, the guy waved a sheepish “mea culpa,” and then he was gone.

I was stuck with myself.

After my son was born, I buckled him into his car seat carrier in the back seat for our first drive. Looking out at the world through my new maternal eyes, I stared down the oncoming traffic, warning them not to mess with my precious cargo. I had never cared that way about anyone else in my whole life or felt my fury with such frequency.

Begrudgingly, I accepted that if I had to be something, Type One was probably it. The Enneagram framework gave me an objective way to begin looking at the paradox of anger in myself for the first time in my life. It was oddly comforting to realize that the things on my list of what was “wrong” with me were the same things other Type Ones struggled with about themselves. I felt reassured by this, not quite better, but less bad.

I wondered about my kids, whether personality is nature or nurture. I wanted to know how much influence I had. As it turns out, it’s both; parents have plenty of influence and no control whatsoever—more paradox. The basic building blocks of personality begin in childhood. We all arrive in the world as innocents, each with a “divine spark.” Children are love. We come in with a purity that renders us connected, and precious, unique, wise, awake, joyous, and alive with wonder. This explanation gave me goosebumps.

I knew it was true.

I have three children. When they were just a few hours old, I gingerly laid them on the bed. As they slept, they breathed erratically with their little arms above their heads, exposing their tiny, brand-new hearts to the world. I curled up beside them, mesmerized by these little beings. They were so innocent, yet knowing; so full of faith. They were perfection. As they lay there doing nothing but waiting to be loved, they evoked an awareness of these self-same qualities in me.

The essence of Type One is goodness, the books said. Goodness is inherent, not earned. I did and didn’t feel this about myself. If there was a difference between being good and striving to be, I didn’t get it. I groped around for several years, trying to figure out which was which. I yearned to be a force for good and do the right thing. But it was in moments when I wasn’t trying to do anything that my husband would catch me by surprise and appreciate this quality in me.

The essential qualities were so much easier to see in my babies. My world slowed down around these little messengers from beyond. They seemed to remind me of something just beyond my grasp. When my last son was born, I clung to those early moments as long as I could. By then, I knew that even I, his mom who loved him as no one else could, would fail him. I couldn’t preserve his purity or meet his every need. Despite my good intentions, I knew that the world would hurt him, people would disappoint him, and that I couldn’t protect him from any of it. Parents say and do the wrong things, siblings bully, friends move away, and people die. Life just happens to us. George Gurdjieff called these “shock points.”

As we are jolted by life in little ways, or big ones, we can get the idea that it’s not safe, that we’re not really in control, that we aren’t even loved, or worse, that we may actually be unlovable. The bigger the shock, the more it hurts to keep our hearts open, so we do something intelligent—close them. Something in us knows to seal off our true nature, as if we could preserve it.

It didn’t take much to pinpoint the big shock points in my life. When I was five years old, my three siblings and I left our dinner on the table and followed the sound of my father’s scream from his basement workshop. We ran downstairs and piled into each other just short of the scene of our mother’s suicide. My brothers and sister blocked the doorway. No one moved. In an instant, our childhoods were arrested by the unthinkable scenario in the basement of that house. My father screamed at us to go upstairs to our rooms, and we ran.

Personality is a survival strategy.

When it was too much for our little psyches, our brains saved us—me and my siblings. Defense mechanisms kicked right in. My trick was to act like I was okay when I was not okay. Being disconnected from our heart of hearts keeps us from our hurt. It also sets up a fear that we won’t be enough of something—ourselves. This is the crazy making part.

Unconsciously, we start to imitate our own essence. The imitation, what we call the “ego,” is not the real us; it’s the closest thing we can come up with in our minds. It’s not conscious; the ego develops without our even realizing it, and mostly goes unnoticed. The heart is the one true part of us that knows who we really are, but we can’t quite recall it without doing the unthinkable—dropping our guard, and just being. Little by little, mimicry becomes a habit. Life goes on until we can’t tell the difference between who we are and who we take ourselves to be.

Slowly, I began to feel the dilemma I had been grappling with my whole life; the solution was almost too abstract for me to “grok,” Robert Heinlein’s name for the unnamable. I was not alone. In nine different ways, we become attached to our imitation, convinced that’s who we are. Psychologists call this identification. It takes a while to see how we’ve been duped; how we continue to dupe ourselves.

I once had a client lean through the Zoom screen, take me by the collar, and practically gasp, “Are you telling me I’m not my f’ing personality?!”

That’s precisely what I’m saying.

Personality is a construct. At the same time that I was deconstructing my personality, I was raising children who were just assembling theirs. I started to ease up on my boys when I realized this. Kids need a personality to function. I found more compassion for the times when their behavior was so exasperating. At around two years old, they seemed possessed by something, and I wondered where my sweet little boys had gone. It helped to realize that developmentally, they couldn’t help it; that’s what they were supposed to be doing. I started to give myself a little more grace, knowing that when I was a child, I couldn’t help it either.

As a newly aware Enneagram Type One, I could see that I’d been stifling any impulse to color outside the lines for most of my life. Throughout my formative years, control offered a thin cover for the anxiety that ran me. I made daily deals with myself, just like a child might negotiate with a real parent. If you do this, then you can do that. No TV until your math is done. My six-year-old voice of “reason” was strict and severe. Those self-imposed contracts blunted my deep insecurities.

I didn’t know that the inner critic is the internalized voice of our parents. I felt like my dad was constantly telling me to do something productive. When he wasn’t, a real you-know-what in my head took over. It was much harsher than he had ever been with me. Even as a grown woman, God forbid if someone walked into the room while I was doing something frivolous like reading, or, worse, nothing!

That inner critic fed me all kinds of harsh thoughts, mostly about myself. Almost in self-defense, I’d come up with criticism about others, too. As I listened to them over and over, they gradually became beliefs, self-fulfilling prophecies. Instead of letting life unfold and trusting that I would instinctively know what a situation required, I wanted to know everything before it happened; to make sure I could handle it. In her poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver once wrote, “You do not have to be good... You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” I never did that. My instincts were in a holding tank, only to be let out when I wanted to preempt chaos, my sense of injustice, or being abandoned, which was at the bottom of everything.

True to type, once I realized this pattern, I was in a hurry to fix it. More than anything, I wanted to spare my kids the same struggle. I wanted them to be free to be more themselves and less of their personality. I knew it was my job to guide them, but I was far from being able to do this myself. Somehow, the Enneagram seemed to be offering me a way to realign with the real me and grow her up. I saw a practical way to ease my stress with my partner, my adult relationships, and ultimately myself.

For nearly 30 years, I have felt for a way to balance things with my kids and my husband in the family equation, which I so badly wanted to get “right.” The Enneagram has helped me to navigate egoic pitfalls by reminding me of the goodness I always was and always will be. As I’ve dared to stay with anger, not once but many times over, I’ve begun to appreciate the intelligent place from which it comes. What do you know, the gifts of my type have appeared to me, as much self-awareness does, like a slow thaw, revealing the ultimate paradox of Type One: the perfection in all of life’s imperfections, including me.