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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Enneagram Daily Reflections
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
What is it like to be an Enneagram Three? Pastor Sean Palmer reflects on this question in a spirit of honest self-assessment. He draws wisdom from the deep wells of both counseling and spirituality using illustrations from Scripture and life. Each of the forty daily readings concludes with an opportunity for further engagement such as a journaling prompt, a written prayer, or a spiritual practice. Any of us can find aspects of ourselves in any of the numbers. The Enneagram is a profound tool for empathy, so whether or not you are a Three, you will grow from your reading about Threes and enhance your relationships across the Enneagram spectrum.
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To Rochelle
thank you for loving me.
Contents
WELCOME TO ENNEAGRAM DAILY REFLECTIONS
Suzanne Stabile
The Enneagram is about nine ways of seeing. The reflections in this series are written from each of those nine ways of seeing. You have a rare opportunity, while reading and thinking about the experiences shared by each author, to expand your understanding of how they see themselves and how they experience others.
I’ve committed to teaching the Enneagram, in part, because I believe every person wants at least these two things: to belong, and to live a life that has meaning. And I’m sure that learning and working with the Enneagram has the potential to help all of us with both.
Belonging is complicated. We all want it, but few of us really understand it. The Enneagram identifies—with more accuracy than any other wisdom tool I know—why we can achieve belonging more easily with some people than with others. And it teaches us to find our place in situations and groups without having to displace someone else. (I’m actually convinced that it’s the answer to world peace, but some have suggested that I could be exaggerating just a bit.)
If our lives are to have meaning beyond ourselves, we will have to develop the capacity to understand, value, and respect people who see the world differently than we do. We will have to learn to name our own gifts and identify our weaknesses, and the Enneagram reveals both at the same time.
The idea that we are all pretty much alike is shattered by the end of an introductory Enneagram workshop or after reading the last page of a good primer. But for those who are teachable and open to receiving Enneagram wisdom about each of the nine personality types, the shock is accompanied by a beautiful and unexpected gift: they find that they have more compassion for themselves and more grace for others and it’s a guarantee.
The authors in this series, representing the nine Enneagram types, have used that compassion to move toward a greater understanding of themselves and others whose lives intersect with theirs in big and small ways. They write from experiences that reflect racial and cultural difference, and they have been influenced by different faith beliefs. In working with spiritual directors, therapists, and pastors they identified many of their own habits and fears, behaviors and motivations, gifts and challenges. And they courageously talked with those who are close to them about how they are seen and experienced in relationship.
As you begin reading, I think it will be helpful for you to be generous with yourself. Reflect on your own life—where you’ve been and where you’re going. And I hope you will consider the difference between change and transformation. Change is when we take on something new. Transformation occurs when something old falls away, usually beyond our control. When we see a movie, read a book, or perhaps hear a sermon that we believe “changed our lives,” it will seldom, if ever, become transformative. It’s a good thing and we may have learned a valuable life lesson, but that’s not transformation. Transformation occurs when you have an experience that changes the way you understand life and its mysteries.
When my Dad died, I immediately looked for the leather journal I had given to him years before with the request that he fill it with stories and things he wanted me to know. He had only written on one page:
Anything I have achieved or accomplished in my life is because of the gift of your mother as my wife. You should get to know her.
I thought I knew her, but I followed his advice, and it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life.
From a place of vulnerability and generosity, each author in this series invites us to walk with them for forty days on their journeys toward transformation. I hope you will not limit your reading to only your number. Read about your spouse or a friend. Consider reading about the type you suspect represents your parents or your siblings. You might even want to read about someone you have little affection for but are willing to try to understand.
You can never change how you see, but you can change what you do with how you see.
ON BEING A THREE
Everyone needs a spiritual director and a therapist,” says my friend Suzanne Stabile. So I spend Monday mornings with John.
John is my therapist, my “I don’t give a crap who you are” guy. As an Enneagram Three, I find it helpful to know John and people like him—people who couldn’t care less what I do, who I know, or what I’ve accomplished.
My first spiritual director was Don, who I met in seminary at Fuller Northern California. Don showed me what it looked like to be real, open, and honest. Before he knew me much at all, he shared with me his victories and defeats, as a son, husband, father, and businessman. He was open about the one thing I don’t want to share with anyone, even myself: failure.
As an Enneagram Three, my core sin is deceit. That doesn’t really mean what people often think it does. It doesn’t mean I lie, though, at times, I’m confident I do. Deceit means I live at the edge of duplicity. I don’t want to. I want to be esteemed. I want to be admired. I want to be loved. I want to be in relationship with people. In fact, I want to be in relationship with people more than I want anything else. But somewhere along my path I got the misguided idea that being loved required being valuable, worthwhile, or at least looking valuable and worthwhile. And not just successful in some generic or universal sense, but successful in presenting a version of myself that the person or the room of people before me wanted to see.
There’s just no way to be successful at looking successful to everyone without creatively shading the picture. That’s deceit.
In one of my favorite movies, A Few Good Men, Demi Moore’s Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway and Tom Cruise’s Lt. Daniel Kaffee go out for seafood. After Galloway gives Kaffee a rundown of her accomplishments, Kaffee asks, “Why are you always giving me your résumé?” JoAnne responds, “Because I want you to think that I’m a good lawyer.” I don’t know where JoAnn Galloway might type herself on the Enneagram (I never, ever, ever type other people), but Galloway’s response was pure Enneagram Three.
And that’s why I need John and Don.
They don’t care about my résumé. Giving it to them would make me feel silly, stupid even.
My problem is I’ve spent a good bit of time and energy building that résumé. I’ve been in professional ministry for over twenty-three years, currently serving as teaching pastor for a large church in Houston, Texas. I’m also a writer, speaker, and coach for other speakers and preachers. At the same time, I enjoy the gifts of a wonderful wife, Rochelle, and two beautiful teenaged daughters, Malia and Katharine. I have both a home office and a home gym because my daily instinct is to do something.
When I signed the contract for my first book, Unarmed Empire: In Search of Beloved Community, I called Don. All my other friends received the news with excitement. Not Don. There were no “congratulations.” No “well done.” No “you’ve earned it.” Don said, “Wow! How do you think that will impact your relationships with Rochelle and your daughters?”
I felt deflated. Why? Because I want you to think I’m a good . . . pastor.
Like Don, John doesn’t care if I’m a good pastor. He’s more concerned if being a pastor is good for me. Every Enneagram Three needs both a John and a Don. We need people who don’t care about what we’ve accomplished or are trying to accomplish. We need someone who looks at our failures with grace and kindness, who knows those false steps are passing realities of life and not a reflection of our value.
You might not have found a John or a Don yet. Even if you haven’t discovered your “I don’t give a crap who you are” people, you don’t really need to in order to unearth the truth your heart needs most: you are loved.
Stop.
Dwell on that.
You are loved.
The best thing you can do right now is let your heart hunker down in the deep truth that you are loved and lovable. The late Catholic priest, writer, and theologian Henri Nouwen wrote,
The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.
And isn’t love what you most deeply crave?
The Enneagram came to me after a series of prolonged and public failures, the kind that left me crying in bed at night and crushingly disappointed with God and myself. And I’m glad that it did. Had the Enneagram arrived any sooner, my outsized ego and dreams of a flourishing future would have silenced its wisdom. The beauty of failure—at least the beauty around my failures—was that in the midst of it, God revealed to me who my friends were, who my friends weren’t, and who loved me for me, rather than for what I did or how I performed. In a world consumed with fans and followers, nothing can replace the abiding love of the faithful people God surrounds you with.
The beauty of the Enneagram is its dynamic nature. For starters, you are not your number. You are your true self, the beautiful, wonderfully made person you were created to be, your “essence,” in Enneagram language. Your Enneagram number is a strategy to find love and meaning; that number is an explanation, not a reason or excuse for stagnancy or complacency. The Enneagram works best as a tool for growth, not a mechanism for a system of stasis.
Besides your core number, there are three crucial aspects of the Enneagram you will need to be aware of—your behavioral changes in stress and security, your “wings,” and “subtypes.”
First, let’s consider the direction of the arrows, or what some Enneagram teachers call “integration/disintegration” or “stress/security.” Stress and security seem more evocative and truer to my personal experience, so, with apologies to and with an appreciation for various schools of thought and experiences, I will use “stress/security” for shorthand throughout. In stress and security, each Enneagram type takes on some of the positive or negative behaviors of other types. For example, Enneagram Threes in security and integration adopt the positive or negative behaviors of Enneagram Sixes; while in stress, Threes will take on the positive or negative behaviors of Enneagram Nines.
There are three key distinctions we need to be aware of concerning stress and security. For one, no one “moves” to another number. Your core personality persists. We merely take on the behaviors and not the motivations of another number. Second, inside this dynamism you can adopt either (or both) the positive or negative behaviors of the other number. This is commonly called the “high” or “low” side of your stress and security numbers. Many Enneagram students misdiagnose their numbers because they examine their behaviors (not their motivations) only to find out, often much later, that they had actually been living in stress when they encountered the Enneagram and weren’t who they thought they were. Third, the behaviors we adopt in stress and security are necessary to survive. For instance, there was a time I was frustrated by a coworker who consistently shut down my ideas, even those our organizations spent thousands of dollars creating. After a time I checked out—disintegrated to the low side of Nine—because it was either that or allow my frustration to grow to the point of lashing out or leaving my job. I knew I’d eventually re-collect and re-center myself, but for about six months, that Nine space and energy saved me. So you can see that the most important numbers to know besides your core number are your numbers in stress and security.
Second, you need to pay close attention to the numbers on either side of your core number. These are your “wings.” Wings can be important or not, depending on your own spiritual journey and your location on that journey. It really is particular. Some of us, like me, have enormous wings, while others do not. The core of growth using the Enneagram will be found in knowing yourself within your number as deeply as you can.
Third, inside each core number are what Enneagram teachers refer to as instinctual variants, or “subtypes.” The three subtypes are self-preserving, social, and sexual (also called one-to-one). Each person, in addition to having a core number, also lives from within their subtype. For instance, I am a self-preserving Enneagram Three while my friend Lisa is a social Enneagram Three. Her motivations come from her core number, but often people assume she’s a Two because her subtype motivates her to curate successful social interactions for her and her family.
There is a widespread belief that subtypes are concretized and immoveable. That’s not true. Thinking about subtypes, I’m reminded of a house my family lived in near downtown Houston. It was three stories. The entire house was ours, but at different times or seasons we spent more or less time on some floors. On the bottom floor was a garage and a guest bedroom with attached bathroom that doubled as my home office. The second floor contained our living room, dining room, kitchen, and a half bath, with two large bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. The laundry was on the third floor. When I was working on writing projects, I spent a great deal of time on the bottom floor, but none when my wife’s second cousin moved in with us and we gave her that room. One summer when I could hardly sleep, I spent long hours in the living room on the couch. And when my wife or daughters had friends visit, I hid out in my bedroom. This is an apt metaphor for the same way an Enneagram
