“Modern Man lives his life in sleep… and in sleep he dies.”
– George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.
Maps
Experiencing a walk through Brighton is so much richer than looking at Brighton on a map, even via Google street view. The diversity of sounds, tastes, temperatures and connections with others can’t be replicated on a map. And, this doesn’t negate the usefulness of maps. Maps are not experience, but they do help us navigate. If I want to go to a sandwich shop for lunch, as I did today, I’ll look up how to get there on a map before going. Without the map, I’d be lost, and I’d be hungry. But of course I can’t eat the sandwich without actually going there. No-one would confuse the map with Brighton itself. There are also many types of map, each with its own use. I can use Google Street View to check out directions to the sandwich shop, but I’ll have to use a separate navigation map/app to walk up to Cissbury Ring because Google Maps isn’t great for countryside walks.
For the last year I’ve been attending a development group for counsellors based around the enneagram, which is a system of understanding personality. I’ve found it to be a really insightful ‘map’ to help me understand myself and others. The enneagram can be thought of as a map of nine different personality ‘types’, or nine ways people learn to walk their own path. The idea behind it is that we have all fallen asleep to our true selves, and the enneagram offers a map both of how we’ve fallen asleep and (thankfully) how to wake up.
As an existential phenomenological therapist I am often ambivalent about labels. Which is why what I love about the enneagram as a model is that it shows us who we are not. It shows us who we’ve chosen to become based on the wounding we experienced in childhood, but it also shows us the path back ‘home’ to our forgotten expansive self. Aside from map metaphors I also like the image of light hitting a prism and being refracted into different colours. When we’re born we learn to refract ourselves in a certain way. The enneagram is one way of identifying how we refract, and reminding us that that white light is still there.
Pathways
- Type 1: Focus on rules, avoiding imperfection
- Type 2: Focus on helping, avoiding being needy
- Type 3: Focus on success, avoiding failure
- Type 4: Focus on deep emotion, avoiding ordinariness
- Type 5: Focus on gaining knowledge, avoiding emptiness
- Type 6: Focus on being reliable, avoiding rejection
- Type 7: Focus on happiness, avoiding pain
- Type 8: Focus on control, avoiding feeling weak
- Type 9: Focus on going with the flow, avoiding conflict
These are the nine ways we fall asleep to ourselves. The language I use (“falling asleep”) will reflect my type too, as people who identify with type 9 process like me are often the sleepiest types – not always literally, but in my case it often is! While enneagram teaching says that people’s types don’t change, there’s a lot of nuance the more you investigate the enneagram. The idea that the types can’t change sounds rigid, but that’s because this map tells us who we think we are, not who we really are. The full self is expansive and multifaceted, and we contain within us the potential to experience the full range of human experiences. One aspect of this particular map is that it shows us the path back towards ourselves. This pathway is a ‘going in’, a turning to acknowledge and face the truths about ourselves. It’s not about rejecting your ‘type’ but about acknowledging it and traversing through.
I’m reminded of when I was training to be a counsellor. At the start of the course the tutor asked us to write down how we will sabotage our own learning (for my example, leaving things to the last minute). This exercise made me think that by the time we got to the end we would have transcended our limitations and become efficient learning machines! But of course this did not happen. Instead I came to understand why I learnt my specific way of self-sabotaging and the ways in which this upholds my view of myself. With this awareness came a lighter feeling when approaching essay writing. In accepting my limitations those limitations had less of a grip on me. But to go in with the aim of conquering or destroying my limitations led to them holding me tighter. Running away from my shadow just gets me out of breath, there is no way to escape it. I might as well acknowledge it and learn to love it, seeing as wherever I go, there it is (and there I am).
I understand the resistance to embracing personality systems like the enneagram, although I think this is based on the misconception that it puts us in a box. I’ve found the contrary to be true, that it tells us how we put ourselves in boxes. Understanding that ‘the map is not the territory’ is a more nuanced way of saying that the enneagram is not ‘true’, in the same way that no other labelling of humans can be wholly ‘true’. Our broad understanding of categories are subject to change based on the socioeconomic and political background they exist in. This is not to erase the diversity of human experience, but the opposite, to expand our ever-changing understanding of difference and diversity. Perhaps the human experience is too diverse to be put into any boxes, and eventually we will find a way to break free of any label. At the same time, we yearn for the safety of boxes. To be contained is also to be held, to feel safe and grounded. Labelling turns uncertainty and chaos into some kind of certainty and order, even if the labels can never be fully accurate. This is why I love the metaphor of maps. Maps are undeniably useful, and are not the territory.
The enneagram most likely emerged from Sufism, and Gurdjieff is often credited as bringing it to the West. He understood that the West tends to privilege intellect, and sought to bring balance by also paying attention to the intelligence of the heart and gut. The enneagram suggests that each of us resides mostly in one of these intelligence centres. Each centre has a different emotional response to forgetting the self, although these emotions are often out of awareness. For those in the gut centre (types 9-8-1) the emotion is rage, for the heart centre (types 2-3-4) it’s shame, and the head centre (5-6-7) is terror. Of course we all experience all of these emotions, just as we all have hearts, heads and guts. The enneagram just says that for someone in the gut centre for example, rage will be the main emotion connected with falling asleep to themselves. Understanding how we fall asleep to ourselves is a theme psychotherapy has always been interested in; from working with the unconscious, to self-actualisation, self-awareness and acceptance.
Travelling
I mentioned earlier that enneagram types do not change, which sounds very fixed. I’ve been thinking about how this fits into Humanistic therapy. My background in Humanistic theory tells me two things which may on the surface seem to contradict the enneagram – that change is not only possible but an inevitable part of ‘being’ (becoming) a human being; and that we exist first before any essence is created. Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo notes in reference to the character structure of the enneagram that “A derivative from the Greek charaxo, meaning to engrave, ‘character,’ makes reference to what is constant in a person, because it has been engraved upon one.” To me this engraving is another useful metaphor. We think we are the ‘characters’ engraved into the rock, forgetting that we are the rock. This doesn’t change the fact of what has been engraved, but we can start to wake up to the bigger picture; to see that there was a time before the engraving, to investigate why this engraving took place, the words themselves, the texture of the words, and the larger rock itself. First we are simply rock (we exist) then in contact with the world a character is engraved (our ‘essence’). As Sartre says, existence precedes essence. The enneagram also views personality types as the ‘false self’; an adjustment of our ‘true self’ so we can survive in the world of others.
So the purpose of the enneagram is to identify the false self (the carving in the rock, who I think I am, how I have adjusted myself). Once you come to really know your type you can then make more conscious choices. As someone who adjusted myself in a ‘type 9’ way, I know I have a tendency to avoid conflict by going along with others opinions and needs. So when under stress I notice myself putting my own needs aside for the sake of ‘peace’. Noticing this is incredibly valuable as a therapist, so I can recognise when ‘seeing all sides’ and not taking a stand might be helpful or not, rather than doing that out of awareness. ‘Peace’ is not always the best outcome (see: the use of forest fires, protest, challenging others’ behaviour, boundary setting etc). Beatrice Chestnut writes that the path to growth that the enneagram encourages starts with self-observation, then self-inquiry and reflection, through to self-development.
The different types on the enneagram do not just stand for different personalities we fall into. There are also connecting lines between 3 – 6 – 9, which offer a ‘pathway’ to growth that Chestnut mentions above.
- Step 1: ‘Self-observation to dis-identify with the false self’ – maps onto Type 3, who tend to be the most image conscious. All ‘types’ suffer (in our own way) with identification of our false self. The first step to growth is noticing how, and loosening our association of our personality with our true self.
- Step 2: ‘Surrendering to the fear and emotional suffering associated with loosening ego defences’ – maps onto Type 6, the most fearful type. Once you notice and stop totally associating yourself with the mask/defence of the false self, you inevitably feel fear and doubt as you become more open (“if I’m not X, then who am I??”). We don’t like to admit it, but transformation involves fear and pain.
- Step 3: ‘Actively working towards transcendence and union’ – maps onto Type 9, who seek union/harmony. Once we have dis-identified with our false personality, moved through the pain and suffering, we can embrace and seek union with our true self, other people and the natural world.
These steps really resonate with my experience of therapy, both when wearing my ‘client’ hat or my ‘therapist’ hat. They’re also echoed by other healing ‘maps.’ Through a Gestalt therapy lens we identify how we have adjusted our shape to the world, experience the pain (often somatic) of this adjustment, before re-shaping into our whole self. So the enneagram is not the only map to healing or self-development, but I’ve found it a surprisingly useful one, with many different levels. As I’m ambivalent about labels and systems that claim to explain everything, I like that the enneagram offers more complexity and nuance than other maps I’ve found. It’s useful to think about how the enneagram overlays with other maps (e.g. attachment theory or neurodiversity). Chestnut’s ‘steps to growth’ above, for example, really remind me of the ‘unmasking’ process described by those with ASD. This adds another layer of understanding for me – the ‘transcendence and union’ phase of growth does not mean abandoning the ‘mask’, but integrating it alongside what is ‘behind’ the mask.