The Hidden Enneagram
Formative Developmental Imprints
The Enneagram is a map of how each individual's core motivations are unconsciously formulated into a recurring psychological fixation.
It explains the exact triggers that create psychological fixations, going back to essential formative events that set the narrative for the creation of one's identity.
What is interesting is that we can see in infants/small children, predispositions to personality reactions, prior to any development of sense of self. This has been studied and discussed in research such as Attachment Theory, wherein we can see different attitudes to the world appear depending on the child’s biological predispositions.
These predispositions lay a groundwork for what sort of triggers will create a psychological split in the child that will then begin the process of personality structures. For example, what destabilizes a “secure” attached child will be different from what triggers fear in an “avoidant” child.
To summarize, we are born attached to our caregiver, then as we explore, our biological predispositions form a primary stance toward the world. And lastly, some form of trigger or wound deepens the sense of separation of identity that the personality is crafted upon.
These attachment styles roughly correlate to the Object Relations triad of the enneagram
In a strange way, one can say humans were born to be wounded, so that they can develop a sense of self, with a unique motivational imprint. And in our sensitive formative years, our purest drives and instincts lead us to the exact series of triggers that will create a deeper split, and a “problem” to resolve. A sort of problem that may only pose as serious to you and not to another individual.
This explains the various ways in which people talk past each other and misunderstand core intentions. Because our limited scope can only see what is serious to our own self.
The enneagram reveals the story you framed your life around to re-establish a sense of wholeness — and how that reaction shaped the way you relate, protect, desire, and disconnect.
With proper analysis, your enneagram type can be a guide to understanding your deeper motivations and utilized to refine one’s relationship with it.
To re-establish that feeling of wholeness and understand new ways to relate to one another, we need to learn to break existing thought patterns and view the world more objectively.
Centers of Energy
Human awareness organizes itself around three primary areas of awareness known as the Centers of Energy: The Gut, the Heart, and the Head. Each of these scan the world through the senses and form images and associations that build our frame of reference.
These can simply be understood as:
Body: The observation of concrete and literal experiences as they are taken in through the senses; the actions and judgements that relate to matters of self-defense, food, and reproduction. (limbic brain)
Image: Monitoring of internal experiences and imagery that has value-laden reactions to the impressions of the external and the inner world — self-image, preferences, likes/dislikes, assessments of inner nature of others through gestures, affect, etc. (mammalian brain)
Mind: Driven by increasing capabilities and curiosity, it is the most individually separated aspect of our psychology that can discern, reformulate, or create perspectives at will; and by nature, has a way of severing itself from direct contact with the immediate reality of the external and inner worlds as it prioritizes the state of how things move in time.
All humans simultaneously process the world with these three centers. You may look at the state of your room and see all the items in it (body), get a feeling of remorse from a memory of a passed loved one from a framed photograph on the wall (image), and think about how moving the couch may clear space for foot traffic (mind).
One of the many aims of the enneagram is to teach you how to separate these impressions from each other, so that all three aspects can be processed individually and in depth — allowing you to peer more deeply into the world without prejudgments (removing the image center from body impressions), to let the inner world formulate its most honest and authentic reactions without over-processing (connecting the image center to the body), and to give the mind the sufficient grounding it needs in the body/image dyad to give itself meaningful tasks to process, instead of questioning and devising ad nauseam, which leads to nihilistic body disconnection.
Most individuals have one of these centers working overtime. Each core Enneagram type emerges from a unique sensitivity — a predisposition to process the world in a specific way. One can say it is the source of the development of individual talents - as well as “curses” so to speak.
The Gut, the Heart, and the Head.
Human beings were born to first Fully Experience reality - from the mystery of the vast world of experiences to the curiosities and desires of your own individual mind. This is the crux of the development of meaningful thoughts and meaningful actions. There is no need for external resources when there is sufficient grounding in the full experience of the body and image centers - which will provide a feedback loop that presents to you feelings like purpose, meaning, direction, etc.
And from this full awareness of one’s experience, the desire to Create comes forth.
To align things. To make things more beautiful.
To Create something meaningful.
The Hitch…
“awareness before realization”
Creations that aren’t born from full experience create impossible scenarios. We may create projects, works of art, relationships, etc. that we believe give us the meaning we need - but a recurring pattern of failure, dissatisfaction, loss of force, apathy, or some other disappointing result get in the way.
This is due to an improper relationship between the three centers of intelligence.
Your enneagram fixation is over-processing and over-identifying with certain kinds of needs and experiences, blocking your vision and creating dissatisfied cycles that alienate you from the Full Experience required to make the correct forms of efforts, based on objective perception.
Many individuals, when finding their enneagram type, may react intensely and provide reasons over reasons why they behave the way they do, or that they are not actually like this… This is exactly the way the fixation defends itself — with the belief that without its emphasis on its needs, nothing would work. Or that the reason anything works in their life is due to that fixation.
This isn’t completely wrong, because in our limited way of relating to the world through our core fixation, we find ingenious and sometimes beautiful solutions and advice - and it may prove to be successful given the context.
But the real possibilities of a fully liberated human are stored behind the crystallized ego-defense of our core enneagram. And the sense of friction can be a gateway to a deeper connection to objective reality and the self.
There are three core enneagram types in each center of energy. Each Enneagram type follows a distinct internal sequence — a three-part script made up of The Hidden Triads. This defines the exact relationship that the individual forms with their center of energy.