📓 Bare Bones Guide to the Enneagram 🦴 Learn the Enneagram

📓 Bare Bones Guide to the Enneagram 🦴 Learn the Enneagram

by Larissa

The Enneagram is confusing and mistypes are rampant because most people figure out their type based on nebulous traits like “creative,” “intuitive,” or “perfectionistic” instead of being taught the core underlying structure. 😭

🔎 👁️ Pick up your freebie and instantly uplevel your pattern recognition skills. 💋💅 👉 download the full pdf with snazzy images right here

You’ve already figured out that “The Enneagram” is about your personality type, but it quickly becomes a confusing, overwhelmingly contradictory stew of traits that everyone relates to. So I’m going to keep this BOILED THE FVK DOWN to what I personally think is the most potent aspect of The Enneagram.

Every single person experiences fear, shame and anger/boundary issues, regardless of what type they are. Which is also why it can be difficult to type yourself and others. This is a representation of what I think the type is “doing” in its center or what its central fixation is.

Keep in mind that our core patterns are often invisible to us and we’re more likely to notice our wing or tritype influences than the main operating system (but those terms are for another pdf).

👀 The Enneagram locates the LIE each type believes that FEELS TRUE 🐍

Our personality type is (in my opinion), at its core, structured on a LIE our ego tells us that FEELS TRUE.

This LIE creates the behaviors and strategies that operate on AUTOPILOT designed to PROTECT us, but actually keep us stuck in a loop. On an endless hamster wheel chasing something we are WIRED NOT TO GET/BE/DO.

Because IF we GET/BECOME/DO IT our personality type has nothing to “do.” Which can create a shocked autopilot response to slip back into NOT HAVING/BEING/DOING, because when we’re not in our comfort zone pattern, it can feel like we’ll cease to exist (aka life or death stakes!).

This is the personality trap: “If i’m not this way / don’t do this thing then i don’t exist or am not ‘me’ anymore.”

It’s not like we’ll actually die when we reduce the personality fixation or bring presence to our patterns, but it FEELS like we might.

🫀 heart / shame / image / identity 🫣 the lie they tell themselves to cope with / avoid shame

• 2's believe they must nurture, flatter, become absolutely necessary to their loved ones and embedded in their lives so they aren’t abandoned, unlovable, selfish or “bad.”

• 3's believe they must perform and deliver value, impressiveness, excellence and be on top so they aren’t exposed as worthless,  rejectable, valueless losers and nobodies.

• 4's believe they must be significant, irreplaceable and treated as a special exception so they aren’t erasable, replaceable, mediocre or shallow. Squished like a commonplace bug on a windshield (although they’d somehow turn that into a tragic poem tbh).

head / fear /scarcity / safety - the lie these types tell themselves to cope with / avoid fear

• 5’s believe they must become the Masterful Emperor in a lane within a lane within an abstract sub-lane that requires a high IQ lockpick but also if you pick it, they’ll push into another more narrow lane, so they aren’t vulnerable and powerless to the cosmological, emotional, dependency-making, violating horrors of the external world.

• 6's believe they must be humble, non-threatening (unless psycho-mode is activated), supportive, “good,” “right,”  or blameless so they aren’t abandoned, betrayed by those they care about, responsible for harm, bad, blamed or without support.

• 7's believe they must be constantly stimulated, happy, fun-chasing, tasting the rainbow of possibilities so they aren’ttrapped, stifled, bogged down, bored to tears, or held responsible or committed in a way that would be limiting to their options/activities.

gut / anger / control / boundaries - the lie these types tell themselves to cope with/avoid anger, control and boundary issues

• 8’s believe they must be invulnerable, resilient, self-protective super-doms so they’re unfuckwithable and cannot be controlled, dominated, screwed over or powerless.

• 9’s believe they must take a passenger, supporting, going-with-the flow role so they aren’t abandoned, the source of or on the receiving end of extreme negative emotions, disharmony or having too much spotlight on them.

• 1's believe they must live up to their own high standards, rightness, moral perfection, self-control and in control of the external world (righteousness) so they are above judgement, criticism, imperfection and corruption.

the personality type is how we cop and express our beliefs, shadow, experiences, programming, trauma. it also dictates the beliefs we may have or how we interpret specific situations that other types interpret differently.

🔎 👁️ Pick up the rest of the ennea-bones and instantly uplevel your pattern recognition skills. 💋💅 👉 download the full pdf with snazzy images right here