The Dynamic Enneagram 1,
Chapter One, Continued

Umbrellas and Igloos

French writer Andre Malraux once asked an old priest what he had learned about human nature after having spent a lifetime hearing people's confessions. The priest replied: "Fundamentally, there are no grown-ups." While this is a bleak view of humanity there is some truth in it.

Sigmund Freud once defined ego as "the reality principle," meaning that it keeps track of who we are and what is real. The irony is that our ego's worldview was formed in childhood and most of us have carried our early understandings of life forward in time. The part of us that once defined reality sometimes now distorts it, practicing a kind of "unreality principle."

Our ego is younger than the rest of us. Some of our adult perceptions are filtered through eyes that see the world as it once was. Years after people raised in small towns relocate to cities, they still tense nervously at the sound of ambulance sirens; in a small town, the ambulance only ever comes for someone you know. In our Enneagram trance, we do something similiar, reacting to a past world while living in the present.

Walk through a city on a rainy afternoon and you'll see people holding up umbrellas an hour after the rain has actually stopped falling. It's as though the umbrellas are protection against the memory of rain or the belief that it's still raining.

It's important to understand that the overdone, compulsive part of your Enneagram style is a defense, a protective umbrella against the memory of past circumstance. The distortions of your style persist now because you're still unconsciously reacting to an earlier time.

As we grow older we don't necessarily grow up. Until we work on ourselves, we tend to repeat what's unfinished in our history, often in deep and subtle ways. Early themes, binds, conflicts and relationships are still being played out now, smeared across the present like lacquer on a lens.

Most models of childhood development subscribe to the "bonzai theory" - that children grow up straight like a tree until they hit a ceiling of trauma or opposition. Then like bonzai trees they "grow sideways" carrying with them the imprints of unfinished situations. Growing sideways is still an unconscious attempt to "grow straight" in a world that won't let them.

Some Eights, for instance, had drastic childhoods in which they were regularly beaten, verbally abused or overtly neglected. Typically the child reached a threshold where it became unbearable to stay open and vulnerable. Something in her shut down and vowed that no one would ever hurt her that way again.

A small child can't control her larger environment, only her internal experience. To that end, a threatened young Eight will over-mobilize her will and create a protective shell of strength. Feeling weak is dangerous so she learns to supress it, seeing weakness in others but not in herself. Controlling her vulnerabilities becomes something she practices like a skill until it becomes as unconscious as closing doors.

A childhood vow of self-protection is as absolute as a religious vow and is meant to last a lifetime. While originally a necessary choice, the decision to close down part of the psyche is based on limited information; children just don't know enough about what they're deciding to do. A vow to "never be hurt by anyone" is overgeneralized and crudely formed, but may be carried forward into adult life with great determination.

In less drastic ways, all of us took early vows of protection and closed down some part of our experience. Maybe we became what others wanted us to be, hiding away unacceptable parts of ourselves, sacrificed our true needs, adapting to what we shouldn't have, or somehow put our truest dreams to sleep.

Some Nines learned in childhood to make do with very little, Sevens invent cheerful futures to get away from unsolvable family pains, Fives walled themselves off from needy, confusing parents. However unconsciously, all such vows freeze into a set of defenses that later take on a life of their own.

Paddington, one of the Antarctic's early explorers, was one day crossing a sea of ice when a sudden blizzard struck. He was forced to build an igloo and take refuge from a storm that proceeded to blow hard for a couple of weeks.

After a few days of safety in the igloo, Paddington began to notice that its inner walls seemed closer. At first, he dismissed this perception as a hallucination but gradually he realized it was true - the walls of his igloo were swelling and the igloo's structure was gradually closing down around him.

Paddington finally realized that the moisture from his breath was forming into thin accumulating layers of ice on the walls. Each time he exhaled, the icy cold caused his breath to freeze, making the igloo's walls a little thicker. The walls would eventually expand until there wasn't room for his body. Paddington's desire for survival and safety led to building a defensive shelter - which was slowly turning into a coffin.

The Enneagram describes nine kinds of "inner igloos," psychic shelters that we built to survive the storms of childhood. The irony is that what once saved us is now the problem. The defenses that at first sheltered us are now exactly what get in our way. Defended against the past, we're overdefended against the present.

While it originally made perfect sense to build our defenses, now we protect ourselves from the storms of our memory, often by reproducing them in the present. In our personality trance we create both the problem and the defense, the storm and the igloo. Paradoxically, our chief means of preventing pain is to recreate it.

Once at a spiritual retreat, an eccentric man named David wore a T-shirt that read, "Don't call me Bob!" Apparently "Bob" was David's hated childhood nickname although no one would have known this without the T-shirt's message. Predictably, someone was unable to resist calling him "Bob." Just as predictably, David exploded in anger and stormed away.

While David's behavior was unusually self-fulfilling, we all do something like it when we enter new circumstances and distort them with our stories and trances. We create familiar storms to engage and justify our defenses; we set ourselves up and make the present seem like the past, partly to have a rationale for doing what we do best.

Observing the more rigid workings of her Enneagram style, one woman joked, "If my present job doesn't work out, it looks like I can still find work making cages." Sometimes our ego's defenses can seem like an elaborate, self-defeating cage built to keep out the mystery of living. But we acquired our defenses for good reasons and may feel like we have good reasons to keep them.

The big question now is: what do your defenses give you versus what do they cost you? Change can seem expensive, but often staying the same costs even more.

Easy in Your Harness

Swiss therapist Marie Louise Von Franz was once lecturing about applications of Jungian psychology. She was saying that all women have an imaginary little devil that sits on their right shoulder and talks to them all day long in a negative way. Whenever the woman tries to take action, assert herself, or do something new, the little devil says, "You can't do that, you're only a woman. You'll never make it, you're only a woman."

When Von Franz told this story, an agitated young woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "It's absolutely true! I have a little devil that always says this; I hate it! Is there a therapeutic technique you can give me that will kill it?"

Von Franz replied, "No, no, no, you misunderstand! It's impossible to kill it; this is a part of you. None of us can kill our little devils - all we can ever do is educate them."

In many ways the Enneagram challenges us to educate our "little storytellers." It asks the question, "How do we update our version of the world and begin to live a new story?" This may mean learning to become less defended, to open more fully to the present, to let reality narrate its larger story within which our own true story is still unfolding.

People new to the Enneagram often wonder if it's possible to completely change from one Enneagram style to another. They ask, "I know I'm a Seven; can I someday change into a Two?"

Just as you can't change your birth nationality, your core Enneagram style stays the same. You never stop perceiving the world through the same basic filter; your physiology and body chemistry will always express one Enneagram style and not another. Your thoughts will always incline in a certain direction and your strengths will continue to arise from that fact.

When the poet Robert Frost was asked why he still rhymed his poetry when rhyming had gone out of fashion, he replied that writing unstructured poetry felt "like playing tennis without a net." Frost added that "freedom means being easy in your harness." Within the constraint of rhyming, Frost said that he found great freedom.

Even as you successfully work on the excesses of your Enneagram style, there's no escaping your personality entirely. There's little point in my trying to get over being an American or "curing" my friend Werner of being Swiss, but we both can become much more than our nationalities.

Though you can't permanently transcend your Enneagram style, there is surprisingly little you cannot change within it. If you work at it, you can transform your personality style from a limiting cage into a loose-fitting harness; the gifts and resources locked inside your most neurotic behavior can be unraveled, transformed and freed.

As you loosen your personality defenses, you'll find flexibility and freedom from your basic tendency to make the world seem only one way. You'll develop a wider range of behavior and become less compulsive, defensive and "nationalistic" in your responses. You'll also expand your ability to absorb different kinds of information and find many new options for handling life.

You'll also waken from the bad - or even good - dream of being only your self-image, defusing defensive roles and old identities that have little to do with who you are now. As you more loosely inhabit your personality harness, the essential "you" has more room to come through; what emerges is your deep individuality and sense of your own soul.

There are even resources you'll develop because of your defenses, capacities that naturally arise from working on the neurotic tendencies of your Enneagram style. Threes who are prone to deceit come to especially value honesty. Frightened Sixes learn more than others about the value of courage. Dissatisfied Fours discover the most about contentment. Warrior Eights come to love making peace.

The Enneagram is a terrific diagnostic tool for both general and specific problems. Study of our personality style shows us our defenses and limits in penetrating detail, suggesting many reasons why we might not always get what we want. In a broad way, of course, daily life is a fine source of diagnosis. When our actions create pain, when there's a difference between our intentions and the result, then we may have to face the need to change.

Some people are already on a path of change and the purpose of working on themselves is self-evident. Others with no previous interest in psychology find that the Enneagram invites them to examine their lives and get to know themselves better. They may be outwardly successful and well-adjusted, but intuitively know that they closed down parts of themselves as they adaped to childhood storms.

Not everyone needs to completely revise their map of the world. How much you change generally depends on how much you're suffering, how much your igloo has become a coffin. Some of your defenses may be mildly inconvenient while others will more plainly get in your way.

Your personality defenses might interfere with only one part of your life. Your career could typically go well but maybe your relationships are troubled, or it could be the other way around. Or maybe work goes so well because you're never home. Or maybe your happy family life still reveals defenses that you maintain against those you love.

At first glance, some Enneagram scripts seem to produce less motivation to change. Ones, Fours and Sixes have comparatively uncomfortable trances, while Sevens and Nines have defenses that specifically deny or minimize pain. Threes can make potfulls of money with their success-driven focus; easygoing Nines often live a long time. Some Eights pronounce themselves happy about their style's natural access to power.

If you find, though, that you mainly like your Enneagram style you may be missing the point. The questions remain: How defended are you? What does it cost you? How much does it matter?

When raising cattle became unprofitable, a rancher in the American West decided on a new use for his vast tract of land. First he dug a huge hole next to a nearby river and created a lake. Then he stocked the lake with trout and built a comfortable sleeping lodge. With very little advertising he was able to attract customers for private fishing vacations and the new enterprise was a big success.

About the same time, something unexpected happened. Small planes began to fly in circles daily over the ranch. At first the rancher was annoyed at the intrusion; then he realised what was happening. Pilots were flying in circles over the ranch because they believed they were lost. The rancher's new lake wasn't on any of their old maps.

Often the initial cost of change is confusion. When following our ego's map we think we know where we're going. But change is a process of discovery; it asks us to navigate new waters past unfamiliar landmarks, to live, at times, without firm answers. Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that "confusion is the doorway to new learning," and we're often at our best when our assumptions are in question and we don't know where we're going.

Enneagram author Suzanne Zuercher says, "We need to experience genuinely, to put our story together again for ourselves, only this time with the feelings and sensations we could not bear in our lives. We must let in the whole of our experience, now from a vantage point where we can bear its full impact."

Keeping a part of our psyche closed off isn't a natural act or a good permanent solution to having been wounded. Though we're defended against our inner realms something in us seeks to reunite with them, to recover our deeper integrity and live a more complete life.

As you reopen to the whole of your experience, you may find that some feelings you've defensively avoided start to come back to you. There could be moments when it feels again like early childhood and you might be reminded of your original vow to close down. Though subjectively compelling these feelings are just memories in disguise.

The difference between then and now is that you've had decades of life experience that can be applied to the resolution of early dilemmas. As a person you are much more than your ego and the many resources you've developed since childhood will help greatly you educate your storyteller.

Though the source of your defenses is in the past the solution isn't to wallow in your history-the Enneagram shows you how you recreate the past in the present. The challenge is to create a broader world now, to let the present teach the past, to learn from your history so that you stop repeating it.

I'm tall and tall people habitually duck their heads in places with low overhangs or tree branches. Many times I've found myself walking down a rainy street, unconsciously straining my neck, ducking under the low ceiling of an umbrella that I myself am holding.

Part of what I hope to convince you of is that you have an active hand in creating and maintaining your Enneagram story. The way you practice your defenses is a busy ongoing process that you play out many times each day. You are the author, director and principal actor of your script. You continue to maintain your defenses with persistence, dedication and unconscious intent. While you can't change who you are, you have considerable power over what you do.

Suppressing, silencing or killing your storyteller is probably a lost cause. You can, however, develop different narratives of your life, rewriting your story to stress your strengths, finding the loopholes and forgotten resources, claiming your story's power rather than being its victim or live less story altogether.

You can also discover a point of power within your own unconscious reactions, locating the place in yourself from which you generate your Enneagram trance and gain a direct sense of how you actively practice the skill of your style. to discover what your ego needs from the rest of you to begin changing your defenses.

Life offers us many gifts that we may not be able to receive within the closed trance of our defenses. While our childhood vows are still in place we are closed to grace, providence and positive surprise. Waking from your personality trance requires a willingness to be open and to take responsibility for any obstacles you put in your own way. Beyond that, the journey of change welcomes everyone - you begin to arrive the moment you depart.

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