Copyright © 1997, 1999 The Changeworks.
The Dynamic Enneagram 1,
Free Chapter One
"First Perspectives"

Chapter One:
First Perspectives

"Waking life is a dream controlled." - George Santayana.

"The desire for order is the only order in the world." - Georges Duhamel

"God created man because He loves stories." - Elie Wiesel

"The excess of a virtue is a vice." - Greek proverb

"It is incredible to think that a man's fate in all its nobility and degradation is decided by a child no more than six years old." - Eric Berne

"Some people see a glass of water as half-full, others see it as half-empty. I just see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be." - George Carlin

"Fate sells what we think she gives." - Montenegrin proverb

"What activity is expressed by the verb 'to be'?" - R. H. Blyth

Just to get things rolling, I'd like to offer several perspectives on what an Enneagram style does and the dilemma it presents. This means looking at the same thing from different angles: your personality style is a trance, a skill, a story, a host of talents, a set of defenses and an array of potentials.

In a Deep Trance

A man once had a dream within a dream. Realizing he was dreaming, he began asking everyone he met the question, "Do you realize this is only a dream?" No one did; the dream people would shrug their shoulders or ignore the dreamer/man and go on about their business.

Growing desperate from having his sense of reality denied, the man finally encountered an archetypal, wizened old woman, who said, "Oh, of course!" when he asked his question. The dreamer immediately felt a strong surge of relief. The man and old woman stood together for a time, chatting in a warm unguarded way, as though they were close friends.

At a certain point, the old woman looked steadily at the man and said, "In a moment you will awaken from physical sleep. When you do, you will be inside another dream, this one of earthly life. Except for a few people like me, no one you meet in earthly life will know that it's only a dream either. Good luck and have a nice day."

Many philosophers, theologians and mystics have claimed that our daily life is a kind of waking dream or trance. Experts on clinical hypnosis say that there is no sharply defined boundary between waking reality and the experience people have when hypnotized. Hypnotic trance is usually characterized by a narrowing, shrinking, or fixating of attention and a preoccupation with subjective reality. By that definition, we're in little trances all the time.

Think of how people act in supermarket checkout lines looking off into the distance with blank expressions. Or how we stand in elevators avoiding eye contact, staring vacantly at either the floor or the lighted numbers above the door. We call these experiences "spacing out," daydreaming or being "lost in thought." But they are identical to hypnotic trances.

Reading is a trance in that while you read you are oblivious to everything else. As a book increasingly interests you there is often a comfortable absorption of attention that later deepens into full fascination. Meanwhile the rest of the world drops away. Other examples of natural hypnosis include staring into a fire and forgetting about your surroundings, relaxing in a hot bath or "autohypnosis," the experience of unconsciously driving down a long highway with little recall of what you've been thinking.

We're in deeper trances. The Great Hypnotists of our childhood - principally our parents and culture - cast numerous long-range spells, mainly in the service of socializing us. Some of these are still operative and guide our lives now.

Therapist Sydney Jourard describes how it happens: "We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone - our parents, teachers, friends, society and culture - hypnotizes us to 'see' the world and construe it in the 'right' way. Thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us."

Family life is especially trance-inducing. Our parents give us what hypnotists call "post-hypnotic suggestions," phrases that once had a special impact and continue to guide our behavior now. Some, such as, "watch out for cars when you cross the street" are quite useful. Others are more painful or limiting - "you'll never amount to anything!" - and can linger in our minds like curses.

Families are group trances in that they share beliefs, values, identities and behavior. When you first moved away from home you quickly discovered that people in the larger world didn't share your family's habits or eccentricities. If, in the group trance of your family, everyone believed it was important to wash their hands fourteen times a day, you might have had some strange reactions or fights over sink space with your first roommate. But the hand washing was unquestioned and assumed in your family.

There are everyday, cultural, and family trances but the deepest trance of all is personality. Our map of reality, our flat earth, our sense of identity all contribute to a state of open-eyed hypnosis, our dream of daily life. Whatever the world is really like, we only perceive a fraction of it - the rest is our interpretation. Though we think we live in the objective world we often inhabit a subjective "trance zone" that we put between ourselves and the world. In this zone we create our own reality but it's a reality so compelling that we forget that we're dreaming it up.

Each Enneagram style functions like a trance and has subjective qualities that are characteristic of actual hypnotic states. Although mystics would describe it as a fall from grace, the trance of your personality is natural, inevitable and useful; the problem is its depth.

You can waken from your ego's spell, but first it's necessary to appreciate its purpose and recognize your part in creating it. Each of us is a hypnotist and all hypnosis is self-hypnosis.

Learned Behavior
People often ask whether Enneagram styles are genetic or environmental; are we born with our personality style or is it learned in childhood?

The right answer is "yes." Our personality style seems to be determined by some combination of genetic inheritance and environmental influence. It's clear from being around babies that each is born with a different temperament, and geneticists estimate that about 50% of our psychology is innate. However, there are remarkably consistent childhood scenarios for each Enneagram style, which suggests that a key part of it is shaped early in life.

It could be that we're born with our Enneagram style and then interpret everything that happens to us through that filter. It's also possible that some of us inherit a predisposition for several styles. Then our early life experiences and family of origin drive us to choose one and not another.

For our purposes the "nature or nurture" question doesn't matter. What people most want to change is dysfunctional behavior and that's always acquired. As a woman familiar with the Enneagram said, "I may have been born a Nine but I definitely learned how to be unhealthy." You can go surprisingly far by simply assuming that your limits were created in childhood and can be therefore worked on and overcome.

If you learned part of your Enneagram style you learned it like other things early in life. You may not remember working hard to master reading, walking or bicycle riding, but once you did. You practiced these behaviors with great effort and concentration until they became integrated as skills. Now they are "second nature," part of your system of reflexes, woven through your habitual response to daily events.

Habits are wonderful things. It's been said that our conscious minds are preoccupied with what we don't know how to do very well. Once we master a new skill, we are free to forget it, something that has tremendous biological efficiency.

Take doorknobs. Every one you encounter is handled for you by your unconscious mind. Each time you approach a door a sensory habit automatically springs to your aid. You don't have to think: "Hmmm, shiny round thing; yup, this must be a door knob. I think I'll extend my hand to it. Do doorknobs twist to the left or right? Do I then push or do I pull? Let's see."

If you had to think about opening doors and the hundreds of tasks you automatically perform each day, you'd go crazy. Instead you can automatically deal with each door as you enter new or familiar places. A part of you handles that task beautifully, leaving you free to attend to what interests you or requires your conscious attention.

The only time you might question or be conscious of your doorknob strategy is when you push on a door that says "Pull." or pull on a door that says "Push." Recently I approached a federal building and saw a sign on a door that said, "Push or Pull." While this seemed very enlightened for the government, most of the time the world doesn't adapt itself to our limits. It asks us to get over them.

A Master Skill

We learn by consciously mastering small pieces of behavior which we then combine and integrate into larger chunks. Opening a door isn't a solitary act; it's a streamlined assembly of small practiced gestures. "Going to work" is something we generally regard as a single activity and call by one name, but it's an umbrella term for the practice of a dozen skills, from getting dressed to opening doors to driving a car.

Our Enneagram style is like this - a strategic, unconscious master skill that we practice on a daily basis; a learned set of habits and procedures that serve many functions and purposes. Though we may experience our Enneagram style as involuntary, it's not a cosmic condition so much as something we do.

We do it for good reasons, too. There are many healthy functions of a personality style, things we would miss if we didn't have one. Some of the most important are:

Containment. Your ego helps you make order out of chaos by narrowing your attention and filtering out the vast panorama of sensory stimuli. Experiencing "nine-ninths" of reality would be too overwhelming so you collapse your experience into a pattern that makes the world intelligible and reduce your choices to a manageable few.

A next important function is prediction. Your Enneagram strategy gives a sequence to your experience, a way to anticipate events and prevent everything from happening at once. Though you may not be able to predict earthquakes, when you push through a door and walk to your next destination, you will usefully anticipate what will happen every step of the way. It's very important for human beings to know what's going to happen next; unconscious minds are opposed to surprise.

Another useful function is creating familiarity. Your ego's job is to make the unknown seem like the known, to help you find main street in every new town. When you step into a new situation you instantly makes unconscious assumptions that make the situation more familiar. This helps you meet present challenges with time-tested tools, to make your next act seem like the only thing to do.

A fourth important use of an Enneagram style is to provide identity. Your ego reminds you of who you are, especially as you've known yourself in the past.

In childhood, your need to acquire a social identity was biologically inevitable, like growing a second set of teeth. Regardless of your family background - even if you were raised by wolves - you were hard-wired to develop a self-image. It helped you know who you were in a world where other people seemed to know who they were. Your self-image also provides you with a sense of boundary, so that you know where you end and other people begin.

Your ego also makes possible your capacity for self-reflection. Unlike other animals, human beings can think about their actions and identify an "I" who is responsible for them. It's your "I" who harbors personal values and ethics, who makes a unique, individual meaning of your experience. Without an ego there would be no learning and no teaching of what you've learned to others. You also wouldn't need a driver's licence, address or a name.

The last important function of your ego is to maintain a sense of inner balance or homeostasis. Just as your body is a coordinated system of organs and functions-liver heart, circulatory, and endrocrine glands-you have an inner psychological system, a coordinated family of inner "parts," within your psyche. You are many selves - different with a store cashier than with your spouse - yet these selves are organized around a central one. Your ego helps you cope with and integrate the new while maintaining a dynamic inner balance.

Once the world is contained, predictable and familiar and your identity is stablized, your mind is free to pay attention to other things. The 'skill' of your Enneagram style works as unconsciously as reading, riding a bicycle or opening doors. Each of these ego's functions are deeply useful and reflect biological imperatives that would be foolish to try to defeat.

Living Metaphor

Strange as it sounds our personality trance is held together by a story we tell ourselves and the main skill we practice through our Enneagram style is storytelling. In popular psychology, these stories are known as "scripts," although the Enneagram describes them in a deeper way.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks introduces the idea while discussing one of his patients: "Each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us - through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. A man needs a continuous inner narrative to maintain his identity, his self."

"That's the story of my life," we say when we miss a plane - or whatever is typical for us. Most of us talk to ourselves each day about what's going to happen next, what's important to us and who we are. We create a running narrative from our good and bad experiences, to make meaning of them and to have a self that makes sense to us.

We live stories. Our biography is reflected in our body, the way we see ourselves, how we move through daily life. Our muscles respond to our story, as does our nervous system. Physically, we're like a walking metaphor, living out a story that our whole body believes.

Our autobiographies are chosen stories, however unconscious the choosing. If someone asks you about a scar on your body, you'll likely tell them the story of how you got it. Maybe you've noticed that the tale has changed over the years.

The truth of our stories is not only in what we originally experienced but in what becomes our experience in the retelling. We make a kind of myth for ourselves, reinventing the past each day in the present, creating our reality through what we choose to remember and retell.

The realest things in the world are symbols and metaphors. The money in your purse or pocket is decorated with symbols but money itself is symbolic - it has no value of its own, only one that's agreed upon. Tomorrow, vast amounts of this symbol will be won and lost in the world's stock markets, mainly because of rumors and investors' fantasies about the future.

In the same way, the metaphor we live by has an amazingly potent influence on our quality of life. As Dr. Eric Berne said, "Childhood decisions, rather than grown-up planning, seem to determine the individual's ultimate destiny. No matter what people thought they were doing with their lives, they seemed driven by some inner compulsion to strive for a final payoff."

The Enneagram describes nine master stories and shows us how we cast our experience into narrative form. Sometimes this narration is in words but it can also be in feelings, visual images or a combination of senses.

As you tune into your Enneagram story, you may identify an unconscious part of you that is your narrator, your storyteller, your hypnotist - the same as your ego. To the extent that it tells its story in an accurate, up-to-date way, your storyteller serves a number of highly useful functions. But sometimes it does its job too well.

The Dilemma

The dilemma the Enneagram spotlights is this: we are in a trance, living out of a script. The plot was formed early in childhood. Our story is now 20, 40, 60 years old. Major chunks of it are based on who we used to be and our early conclusions about life. Some of our present responses are obsolete or driven by motives we don't understand. To varying degrees, we do what used to work.

Evidence of this is everywhere. There may be persistent conflicts that we struggle with, ways that we make the present uncomfortably like the past. We impose old themes on new relationships, transform neutral incident into dramas, entangle our script with others, cast our friends into various roles.

Sometimes there's an "inevitable" feeling, like a sense of déjà vu, as if a secret plotline is determining how events in our life must proceed. There could be big omissions in our story, choices that are routinely excluded from our self-description. Maybe our inner narrator always says the same old things, repeating only the clichés from the story of our life.

Not everyone had a tormented, unhappy childhood that they pathologically repeat in the present. No one, however, had an ideal childhood and even very healthy people who study the Enneagram see how they are caught in an overall pattern which can include repeating themes, blind spots and habitual defenses. The expression of this can be obvious and outright, like when we "marry our mother" or "marry our father;" or subtle and implicit, like when we marry someone who doesn't seem anything like our mother or father but later turns out to be.

In Enneagram literature this drive to recreate past premises is called a "compulsion." What's crucial to discover about your Enneagram script is the extent to which it preoccupies you, the degree to which you are living a story of your life instead of your actual life. When you allow your script to overrun reality, then your self-created story will be experienced as something happening to you without your choice, driving you automatically - like a compulsion.

Most versions of the Enneagram portray your personality style as a "false self" as opposed to the "true self" of your deep essential nature. As we shall see, this belief sets you up to fight with your own defenses, which actually makes real change more difficult.

It's more accurate to say that your ego is a one-dimensional self, a small department of your total being. It's definitely part of you, as integral as your left arm, but when you overfavor its version of events, the benefits of your Enneagram style turn into liabilities. Our strength is also our limit and our gift is sometimes our curse.

When solving problems or coping with challenges, we naturally turn to what we do best, to try to play from strength. But the Enneagram says that when we overuse a strength, it becomes a weakness, a rigid, preprogrammed response.

The great thing about habits is the bad thing about habits. Caught in our ego's story, our world becomes overcontained, our choices artificially simple. We make life too predictable, seeing and hearing what "should" exist instead of what does. No longer allowing things to happen, we make them happen - the one way they're supposed to. Our story creates our behavior while our behavior creates our story.

Deep in our ego's trance, we approach life with a shrunken set of responses. Secure in the familiar and known, we think we're coping well but we actually have few options. We lock ourselves into inflexible positions, grow out of control about being in control, sometimes doing more of what got us stuck in the first place.

At our most compulsive, we may feel entitled to do things in a faulty way, simply because we always have, almost as a form of personal tradition. We may "go wrong with confidence," sticking to our limited strategy at all costs; embracing a distorted certainty, like a fundamentalist who applies an absolute principle to everything.

Our sense of identity gets warped, too. In our ego's trance, we overidentify with a self-image and play a role that is less than who we truly are, reacting as though we have no more choice than a character in a play or a novel.

Attached to one way of seeing ourselves, we defend our image from the world's feedback and contradiction. "That's just the way I am," we say, and work hard to prove the statement true, acting like someone who climbed into a treehouse, kicked away the ladder and now insists they were born in a tree.

In his terrific book, The Enneagram Spectrum Of Personality Styles, author Jerome Wagner presents a list of each Enneagram style's strengths paired with its neurotic, distorted counterpart, as if they are versions of each other.

Threes, for instance, possess a "natural organizational ability" but when distorted they can become "overly efficient, machine-like and ultra programmed." Fours are "highly individual and value originality" but when neurotic they can become "an eccentric caricature of originality." Fives have the ability to "objectively and dispassionately observe." When unhealthy they "may stay on the sidelines and not participate in life."

The difference between personality functioning and malfunctioning is completely one of degree. The higher potentials of our Enneagram style include ideals, skills, sensitivities, and strengths that we deeply value and which serve us well. But when we overdo it, our best qualities warp into our worst, mutating into bastardized, lower-case imitations of themselves.

There's a story that describes this poetically. In Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, an old man is writing something called "The Book of the Grotesque." The old man's book has one central thesis: "That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. People made the truths themselves and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world there were the truths and they were all beautiful."

"The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful."

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snached up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them."

It was the truths that made people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

When you overidentify with the truth of your Enneagram style, when you call it your truth, that's when your trance deepens, your story takes over and you start living in a parallel and somewhat counterfeit universe.

Continue First Perspectives

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