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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Going Deeper with Suzanne Stabile and the Enneagram In everything from health care and politics to technology and economics, we are experiencing feelings of loss, anger, and anxiety. In the Enneagram's wisdom, our number determines how we respond. We automatically move to another number when we're feeling stress and to yet another when we're feeling secure. Such moves may help us feel better temporarily but don't last. For those who want to dive deeper into Enneagram wisdom, expert teacher Suzanne Stabile opens the concept of three Centers of Intelligence: thinking, feeling, and doing. When we learn to manage these centers, each for its intended purpose, we open a path to reducing fear, improving relationships, growing spiritually, and finding wholeness. In The Journey Toward Wholeness, Suzanne - Draws on the dynamic stability of the Enneagram to explain each number's preferred and repressed Center of Intelligence, - Illuminates each Center of Intelligence's role in helping us move toward internal balance, and - Provides brief, focused chapters that contain what we need to deal with the constant change and complexity of our world in order to achieve lasting transformation in our lives.
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FOR GIUSEPPEbecause walking beside you teaches me thatevery moment is filled with potential for goodness,and that miracles happen all the time.
FOR SHERYL FULLERTONwithout your wisdom, clarity, discipline, humor,and kindness, and in the absence of our friendship,this book would not have been written.
and
FOR OUR GRANDCHILDRENWill, Noah, Sam, Gracie, Elle, Joley, Piper, Jase, and Josephine:it is my hope that this book will add goodnessto the world you will inherit.I love you!
How we choose and what we choose make a difference in what we become and in what the world becomes.
SAINT BONAVENTURE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
TOWARD ABALANCED LIFE
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what’s there: all of it.
RICHARD ROHR
The first time I taught the full content you encounter in these pages was at a workshop in Dallas during the summer of 2019. In the months leading up to that event, I became fascinated with some reading I’d done on the accelerating pace of change and the effect it was having on all of us. I was particularly concerned with technology, climate change, and the realities of globalization, and how, in each of those realms, what had worked in the past was no longer relevant. Which meant that the present was tumultuous. And the future, unknown.
I had been saying for a while that there was anger and anxiety everywhere, falling on all of us, unbidden and unnamed. It seemed to have no focus; it was everywhere in daily life—in families and churches and politics and workplaces and communities. People in places where I was teaching around the country were talking about an erosion of their sense of security and stability. Things felt more chaotic in my own life than usual, and there was an obvious change in some of the things I’d always been able to count on.
The more I read, the more it sounded like what we were and are experiencing is liminality, an existential state that I describe as being “betwixt and between.” In other words, it’s not where we’re going and it’s not where we’ve been. Having taught the wisdom of the Enneagram for twenty-five years, I was certain it could help us navigate such uncertain times. I just needed some space to clarify how it would be helpful and what parts of it I should teach in relation to liminal space.
So on the first evening of that event in Dallas, I confessed to a room of three hundred people that I was feeling a lack of peace, and that answers to my questions felt inadequate. But I had no idea how much uncertainty we would be facing only nine months later when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Since then, and as I write this, people around the world have experienced the uncertainty of liminality even more acutely and for a prolonged time. We spent months wondering if and when the surges of infection would recede. We waited anxiously for a vaccine, and then just as anxiously sat in our cars in very long lines, waiting to be vaccinated or to receive distributions from food banks, wondering if there would be enough for all of us. Even as infection rates improved, no one knew what the future would hold for any of us and we wondered if we could even hope for a return to “normal.”
LIVING IN LIMINAL TIMES
The pandemic era is not the first or last liminal time, but it is ours and it is especially acute. Living life during a betwixt and between season—on the threshold that separates what was from what will be—is a balancing act that few are prepared for since our usual ways of managing life no longer work.
We don’t like it when the world around us seems out of control, but let’s face it: control is an illusion. It is my favorite illusion, but that doesn’t make it real.
The truth is that nothing new happens as long as we are inside our self-constructed comfort zone. More importantly, nothing creative comes from business as usual. Every moment—even, dare I say, a liminal moment— is full of potential if we have the desire and the courage to walk toward it. And the Enneagram is an extraordinarily helpful tool to help us do that.
While liminal space is challenging, it may paradoxically be the best, if not the only, teachable space. We can no longer locate a single cause for anxiety and discomfort, and we can’t fall back on our usual explanations or habits or assumptions. Nor can we discern the meaning of the unrest, anxiety, anger, shame, and dis-ease we feel. So we have to seek new ways of seeing and making meaning, of letting the uncertainty teach us.
Everyone responds to the discomfort and stress of a liminal time according to their personality type, often with unfortunate results. If we are risk takers by nature, we are anxious to quickly move forward toward a future of our own making. The move is often hasty and lacks the pieces of the past that have value. If we are risk averse, our nature is to “go back to the way things used to be,” unaware that there is no such place and that we will have to find the comfort we seek somewhere along the path that lies before us. For those who are present to but confused about what could be accomplished while on the threshold, doing whatever is right in front of us alleviates our cares and woes, but only momentarily.
FINDING BALANCE
I’ve been told more than once that it’s important to live a balanced life. I’ve been to workshops where speakers taught how to achieve greater balance. I’ve read books on the topic. I’ve heard sermons preached about it, and I’ve visited monasteries where they’re actually pretty good at it, though they might not say they were. As it turns out, living a balanced life is not that easy.
Sometimes when I know something should be done, I question whether I’m up to the task and then reach for the nearest excuse. Until about ten years ago, I had pretty much given up on achieving any kind of balance for my life. My excuse was that I’m just not well equipped for a balanced life. But as it turns out, that isn’t true.
It isn’t true for me, and it isn’t true for you either.
In fact, Enneagram wisdom suggests two things: First, the key to living—in liminal time or any time—is balance. Second, we all have exactly what we need to find that balance. And that’s what this book is all about.
Every moment is full of potential if we have the desire and the courage to walk toward it.
Perhaps you’ve studied the Enneagram enough to know what your motivations are. You may know which of your wings came first, what triad you belong to, and the sin or passion associated with your number. All of that is very helpful. But this book is about the three Centers of Intelligence: thinking, feeling, and doing. It is generally and universally accepted by the world’s philosophies and religions that human beings are born with these three native intelligences. Enneagram wisdom teaches us that these intelligences are simply three different ways of meeting the world.
We all have a different combination of these three qualities: one is dominant, one supports the dominant, and one is repressed. These Centers of Intelligence, as the Enneagram names them, are our natural resources, and if we can learn to use each one for its intended purpose, the result will be a more balanced approach to life.
The nine numbers of the Enneagram are divided among three ways, known as triads. Your triad is determined by your first response when you encounter information or situations—with either feeling, thinking, or doing. That is, when you take in information from the environment, do you respond initially with What do I feel?, What do I think?, or What will I do? It’s an intuitive, automatic move and it identifies what is known as your dominant center. You don’t need to try to change this response, but you do need to understand how it affects what you do next.
The other two centers are present, but one is supporting the dominant center, and one is repressed or unused. As you’ll discover, if you aren’t aware that there is more than the dominant center, you end up seeing only one-third of what’s happening. And that is the beginning of losing your balance, which will only be exacerbated as you continually try to understand and make sense of your life while using only one of your natural resources.
This is really important because your responses are how you make sense of things, and how you make sense of things determines your worldview. Your worldview determines the choices you make, and your choices have the power to contribute peace and goodness to a world that is in need of both.
TRIADS AND THE DOMINANT CENTER OF INTELLIGENCE
We’ll begin by exploring each of the three triads and the way each number in that triad uses its dominant Center of Intelligence. The challenge we all face is learning to manage our dominant center because if we don’t, it will end up managing us.
In all three triads, when the dominant Center of Intelligence is unmanaged, there is a lack of balance. But as you’ll see, you can learn to manage your dominant center. There are things you can do to be more aware of its limitations and choices you can make that will help you in learning to use it for its intended purpose.
Enneagram wisdom teaches us that the key to living—in liminal times or any time—is balance.
But first, a caution: you will have no success in an effort to manage your dominant center unless you wrap your arms around the whole of who you are and then do the personal and spiritual work that allows excess feeling, thinking, and doing to fall away. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish Carmelite nun who lived in the Middle Ages, was a theologian of the contemplative life, and her words have much to offer to all of us who are on this journey toward wholeness. As she said in her best-known work, The Interior Castle, “The feeling remains that God is on the journey.” Teresa emphasized the importance of being able to draw near to one’s self, all of one’s self. In fact, she said, without this embrace of the self, there can be no growth.
Managing Your Dominant Center
The dominant center for Twos, Threes, and Fours is feeling. They are all about love, empathy, connection, loss, and pain. But the reality is that emotions are not made, they are allowed. And no emotion is final. For these heart people, anxiety and activity crowd out emotions. And when that happens, emotions can be expressed in unhealthy ways. The result is often fragmentation in relationships, which is the last thing they want.
The dominant center for Fives, Sixes, and Sevens is thinking. They are rational—they choose reasoning over emotions and judgment over reacting. They all struggle with fear, which in Fives is underexpressed, in Sixes is overexpressed, and in Sevens is reframed as a positive. Both feeling and doing for them can be compromised. Their dysfunctional responses to fear limit productive thinking, so they settle instead for lazy thinking, which fails to produce the result they hope for.
The dominant center for Eights, Nines, and Ones is doing. People who make up the Doing Center are all somewhat preoccupied with control and less likely to acknowledge feeling or think about what they are doing. They intuitively convert varying emotions into anger, which is why it is sometimes referred to as the Anger Triad—they attempt to manage anger while engaging in activity as a response to the events in their lives. They hold their ground rather than adapt. And they all have some boundary issues.
STANCES AND THE REPRESSED CENTER OF INTELLIGENCE
Although Enneagram triads are determined by which of the Centers of Intelligence—thinking, feeling, or doing—is dominant, Enneagram stances are determined by which center is repressed. By repressed, I mean underused or ignored. The numbers in the Withdrawing Stance (Fours, Fives, and Nines) repress doing in part because they aren’t comfortable connecting with the world. It’s not that these numbers don’t do anything. The problem is they often don’t do what needs to be done.
The numbers in the Aggressive Stance (Threes, Sevens, and Eights) repress feeling. They have an unconscious desire to reshape people and situations. It’s not that they don’t have feelings and emotions, but they avoid them when they can. And when they can’t, they express their feelings indirectly. And the numbers in the Dependent Stance (Ones, Twos, and Sixes) repress thinking. It’s not that they don’t think—they all would tell you that they think all the time. The question is what they are thinking about. The Thinking Center is underdeveloped in these numbers, so they think nonproductively.
Be intentional about what is yours to do, and after that let go.
Along with managing your dominant center, the key to wholeness and balance is learning to access and bring up your repressed center. In the wisdom of the Enneagram, we bring up our repressed center, the center that we least prefer, when we are able to consciously draw on it. For me as a Two, that has meant learning to balance feeling—my dominant center—with thinking so that I consider more than my emotions in my choices and decisions. I have learned well that living a balanced life will forever be illusive if we don’t learn to appropriately use the repressed center.
In the second section of the book, we explore each of the three stances and each number in detail. For now, here’s a brief overview. The first step toward balance is for each number to accept that their dominant center needs to be managed. The second step is to recognize, and then own, that they are either thinking, feeling, or doing repressed, and then follow that recognition with working to bring up that center. These two steps help us to find more peace and experience less pain, both for ourselves and for those with whom we are in relationship. That’s how we begin the work toward achieving balance. It takes effort to choose to do that, but it’s well worth it.
THE CHALLENGE OF SOUL WORK
As we commit to this journey, please keep in mind that this is a process. We are making some space for lifelong work, so any thought of reaching a destination is a misunderstanding of the depth of Enneagram wisdom. But along the way, every effort will be met with growth that is worth the work.
Over the years of teaching, leading retreats and workshops, and offering spiritual direction, my husband, Joe, and I have learned that we need to set the table for people to do spiritual work. They can’t just come in off the street from the traffic and the noise and the hurry of the world and start reflecting on their lives in a meaningful way. Spiritual leaders have always known that. That’s the reason many of the great cathedrals of the world have a labyrinth set into the floor stones in the nave: so all who enter can walk it as a form of meditation, transitioning from the secular to the sacred.
I would encourage you to take time to create a space that can be a home for spiritual practices, including this challenge of deep Enneagram work. Joe and I are blessed with enough room in our home to create a space for prayer and meditation. But when our children were small and we were living in parsonages, we had to settle for a chair. The space is not nearly as important as what you do—and do not do—when you’re in it. You might want a small table with a candle and a prayer book of your choosing. Depending on your Enneagram number, you might add a journal and some meaningful objects that represent where you’ve been and where you hope to go on your journey toward balance and wholeness.
Having some knowledge about your dominant and repressed centers will be very helpful as you try to discern which spiritual practices might be best for you at any point along the way. Your spiritual journey is greatly affected by the spiritual disciplines that you practice. If you choose only disciplines that are based in your dominant center, you lose an opportunity for both growth and balance. It’s a challenge to choose disciplines and practices that rely heavily on your repressed center, but that is your growing edge, and it helps orient you toward using the centers in a more balanced way.
Soul work is also best done in the context of community, as we do at the Micah Center, our ministry home in Dallas. We all need companions for the journey because it feels risky to make a commitment to awareness and self-observation. When you add spiritual practices such as centering prayer, journaling, days set apart for solitude or silence, fasting (not just from food), reading authors you don’t agree with, volunteer work, and prayer—to mention just a few—it seems hard, ominous, and intimidating. To be sure, you will have to risk being in process, and you will also have to take a chance on being broken in some ways, only to be more enlightened and healed in others. Big things happen one day at a time, and you might miss the nuance of that if you travel alone. It’s a courageous journey, so be kind to yourself and your companions, and celebrate every success along the way, no matter how small.
It’s my hope that after you read this book, you will want to meet with a friend, or gather with a group of friends, who are committed to doing some deeply personal and potentially transformative work toward wholeness. For that reason, I wrote The Journey Toward Wholeness Study Guide, which includes six sessions that offer direction as you try to incorporate what you learn here into your everyday life.
I have one final piece of advice as you begin this book: be intentional about what is yours to do, and after that let go.
Henri Nouwen is one of my spiritual heroes. I’m drawn to him in part because he was a Two, but also because when I read from his work about spiritual growth and faithfulness, I feel like I can do it. Of the many stories he shared with friends and readers, one of my favorites is about his relationship with the Flying Rodleighs. They were a troupe of trapeze artists from South Africa that Henri met in Freiburg, Germany. He wrote that he was “raptured” by their performance. The next day, he returned to see them again, and after the show introduced himself as a great fan.
In the days that followed, they invited him to watch them practice and gave him free tickets. They asked him to dinner and then suggested that he travel with them for a week. He immediately agreed. On that trip, Henri was talking with the leader of the troupe (also named Rodleigh) about flying:
Rodleigh said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him on the long jump. The secret,” Rodleigh continued, “is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me and pull me safely over the apron behind the catchbar.”
A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.
The truth about a serious journey under the tutelage of Enneagram wisdom is that you will make changes that lead to transformation. Some of the people in your life will be very happy for you, but others will remind you of the “old you” that they counted on and honestly preferred. As it turns out, people don’t love you for your essence, which is your truest self found beneath your personality. They know and love you for your personality.
On the other hand, you will have a chance for moments of loving and honoring yourself from a deep place in your soul that is the very best of you. But you’ll never get there if you can’t let go, trusting that life will catch you and celebrate with you the gifts of a more balanced way of living your days.
OVERVIEW
HOW WE ARE BROKEN . . .AND HOW WE CAN BE HEALED
As the spouse of a pastor, one of our realities is that my husband, Joe, has been in the pulpit of the congregation we serve on Sunday mornings, except for rare occasions when we had an opportunity to visit another church for worship. One Sunday, when the children were young, we decided to take one of those days during Black History Month to allow them to experience worship in a predominantly African American church. Saint Luke’s United Methodist Church here in Dallas is well known for hospitality, good music, and good preaching, so we decided to join their congregation for Sunday service.
The ushers at Saint Luke’s offered us the warmest of greetings, handed us bulletins, and escorted us down to the front row of the sanctuary, declaring that the pastor would be so happy to see Joe and meet the children. BJ, the youngest of our four, was just six years old and, at the time, adjusting to a medication that helped him with being quiet, following rules, and staying focused. We were given the option to medicate on the weekend or not, and we made the choice to medicate on school days only. We were well into the second hour of worship when I ran out of Tic Tacs, pieces of paper for drawing, and patience. BJ had the most wonderful time for the first hour, but then he reached his limit, and I lasted about twenty more minutes before I reached mine (with BJ, not worship). Joe was pastoring a congregation that had strong feelings about getting to Luby’s Cafeteria before the Baptists and, added to that, missing the kickoff for the Dallas Cowboys games was deemed unacceptable. So our children were accustomed to a one-hour worship service.
As it turns out, my usual options for managing my children are limited when an entire choir is watching and the preacher is either right in front of me, five feet to my right, or five feet to my left. I used up every stern, angry, “you’d better settle down right now or else” look in my repertoire. I was so stressed I could feel the heat in my cheeks and the tension in my neck and shoulders. Joe, who had very little experience worshiping from the pew while surrounded by our children, was no help. He was thoroughly engaged in every aspect of what he later referred to as “one of the best worship experiences he’d ever had.”
During the closing hymn I whispered to Joe, “I’m giving BJ his medicine as soon as we get to the car! I’m exhausted! We can skip the weekend next week!” As soon as we got to the car, I told my daughter Jenny to give BJ her water bottle, and I told BJ to lean up so he could take his medicine. The older children and Joe were going on and on about worship when I finally located the pill bottle in the bottom of my bag. Still flustered, I took out two tiny pills and without thinking, put them in my mouth instead of his and swallowed, something the other five family members found hilarious. I’m fairly certain that the dosage was so low that it had little, if any, physical effect for me. But recognizing my own lack of patience with BJ’s inability to be patient became a bridge that we crossed to meet one another for many years after that.
OUR RESPONSES TO STRESS
Stress is a reality for all of us for most of our lives. Sometimes stress is brought on by a situation of little consequence, and other times it’s the result of a life-changing event. Life may be stressful for minutes, hours, weeks, months, or years. And in every case, it feels terrible and it takes a toll.
It seems that stress is part of life for everyone I know, regardless of age. Living in communities that range from personal to global, we have access to the stories of other people’s lives. And whether their stories are my business or not, I find it all stressful.
First graders who need to be quiet and sit still for a long time experience stress. Children who have no one to sit with in the school cafeteria tell me it feels terrible. And middle school seems to be stressful most of the time for everyone involved.
When my children were in their early twenties, they all shared with us from time to time that “adulting” was very stressful. Finding employment, performing well, perhaps losing a position and looking for a new one—all stressful. Finding a home, affording rent or the mortgage, replacing the air conditioner, repairing appliances, maintenance—also stressful.
Other stressors we face at various ages and stages include
■ living with family members who are struggling with addiction or who are in recovery.
■ aging and everything that goes with it.
■ facing health challenges—our own or those of friends or family.
■ dealing with rapidly changing technology can be a challenge for some (that’s me) because it can make you feel so inadequate.
■ understanding our national and local political situations, no matter the political party or beliefs.
Change comes so quickly, and it’s inevitable. Many among us struggle to make the necessary adjustments. The list is endless and unique to each of us. There is an equally unending library of material available to tell us how we might mitigate the effects of stress on our bodies and souls. I find it discouraging that, for the most part, we are encouraged to “manage it.” That suggests that we can’t avoid stress, even though we all want to.
Given the reality that stress is sure to have its place in our lives, we need to take responsibility for naming it and then addressing it in ways that are both healthy and effective. Thankfully, the Enneagram has an ever-deepening wisdom about humanity. As a system, it shows us both how we are broken and how we can be healed. The beauty of the Enneagram is that it can give us tools for being more secure and more at peace in facing stress as we learn to do the inner work of managing our dominant Center of Intelligence—thinking, feeling, or doing—which is the primary way we encounter people or situations in our natural response to the world. Our goal is to develop a structured and organized way of using all three centers, each for its own purpose.
TRIADS AND THE CENTERS OF INTELLIGENCE
The nine numbers of the Enneagram are grouped in triads, each of which shares a dominant Center of Intelligence.
The Feeling Triad: Twos, Threes, and Fours
■ In the Feeling (or Heart) Triad, Twos, Threes, and Fours respond to information, events, and people with the question, “What am I feeling?”
■ They are fully aware of, and always paying attention to, the needs and agendas of others.
■ They have a significant need for approval and yet they struggle to believe that they are loveable as they are. Their response to life is due, in part, to the fact that they generally search for both love and affirmation outside of themselves.
■ Twos, Threes, and Fours are very familiar with anxiety. In fact, many of them can even tell you how it manifests itself in their bodies. And because they feel “somewhat anxious” most of the time, they often turn other emotions into anxiety.
■ Those who make up the Feeling Triad are pulled to the outer world by focusing on everything outside of themselves. This focus on the outer world results in a desire to control their environment by ordering other people and activities.
■ They like people. They also easily adapt to what they think other people want from them. In fact, sometimes they adapt so easily and so quickly to the feelings of others that they don’t have any idea what they feel.
The Thinking Triad: Fives, Sixes, and Sevens
■ In the Thinking (or Head) Triad, Fives, Sixes, and Sevens respond to what’s happening around them by asking, “What do I think?”
■ Those in this triad want to fully understand everything that interests them. They want to perceive things before acting. And they often work things out in their head—their focus is on their inner world—without ever engaging with others.
■ Intelligence and understanding and mental connection are important in this triad, so they find themselves at home in what has been called the information age.
■ They like to gather and sort information, perhaps because they are logical and usually very knowledgeable about things and ideas that interest them. Concerned with memory and strategy, they are really talented when it comes to finding where systems overlap.
■ These people live their lives by planning. It could even be said that making plans is what makes them happy.
■ Fives, Sixes, and Sevens find safety by trying to control or order their inner world. And safety can sometimes be a preoccupation. Hanging out in their heads, so to speak, feels great because they can arrange their perceptions in ways that suit them.
■ Someone in the Thinking Triad may be dismissive of a friend in the Feeling Triad whose response appears to be illogical or overly emotional. Managing the dominant center is the key to balancing all three, which is essential to health and wholeness.
The Doing Triad: Eights, Nines, and Ones
■ In the Doing (or Gut) Triad, Eights, Nines, and Ones respond to life by asking, “What needs to be done?” (Although that doesn’t necessarily mean that they see it as theirs to do.)
■ They are focused on accomplishing and pleasure seeking, while making sure to keep themselves safe physically, emotionally, and relationally. The people who make up this triad are usually busy, which suits them because they have lots of vitality and they are very determined, often to the point of being stubborn.
■ Those in the Doing Triad are pulled by both the outer and inner worlds, focusing on one and then the other. They want control over both.
■ They convert varying emotions into anger. Anger may not be pleasant to them, but it is familiar. With some self-observation, they find that they hold their ground, and that they have some boundary issues.
■ Someone in the Doing Triad may have very little patience for someone whose dominant center is thinking because they refuse to move forward without taking time to think things through.
■ Managing doing for this triad means using it intentionally and productively. Otherwise doing will manage them, as they act before they feel or think. And that can potentially negatively influence relationships with others.
THE GIFTS OF YOUR STRESS NUMBER
Within your Enneagram number, if you are self-aware, you can observe patterns of behavior that vary depending on the degree of balance among the three Centers of Intelligence. For example, when Twos in the Feeling Triad don’t balance feeling with thinking and doing, they take things personally. As a Two, everything has the potential to feel like it is either about me or because of me when I don’t bring up thinking. But when I’m able to balance feeling with thinking and doing, using each center for its purpose, it is clear to me that many of the happenings in my life actually have very little (if anything) to do with me. I’ve learned to stop and imagine myself as an observer of the scene in order to find my true place in things.
In the absence of prolonged stress, most self-aware people can draw on all three Centers of Intelligence. But when something upsets that balance, they respond by exaggerating their dominant center in an attempt to regain control. When that doesn’t work, they do more of the same, which also doesn’t work. The solution is to regain balance rather than try to compensate by using more of the same center that is your go to.
One of the gifts of the Enneagram is that each number has a dynamic relationship with four other numbers: the two numbers on either side (wings), as well as the two (stress and security numbers) at the other ends of the arrows in the diagram included here. These four other numbers can be seen as resources that give you access to different patterns of behavior. While your core motivation and number never change, your behavior can be influenced by and even make you look like these other numbers.
When we encounter the inevitable stresses of life, whatever their cause, our initial reaction is to exaggerate our normal behavior. In Enneagram thinking, our personality takes over—because our usual way of behaving has worked for us in the past, why not do more of it? It’s then that our behavior becomes excessive. And when excessive behavior is still unsuccessful, we intuitively draw on the resources of another number in order to feel stronger. That number is our stress number, indicated by the arrow pointing away from your number on the diagram.
After you have correctly identified your Enneagram number—your type—the next most important number for you to understand is the number you move to when you’re stressed. The stress number has often been perceived as a negative move. But the reality is you can’t take care of yourself without the number you go to in stress.
Sometimes, when we’re prayed up and mindful, we find that we do or say just the right thing for the moment at hand. But at other times, when too much is happening or we haven’t had enough sleep or we’re distracted or sad or afraid or confused or angry, we find that we are slipping. And it’s a slippery slope from healthy space in our number to average, and then from average behavior to unhealthy, and maybe on to excess. That place of excess almost always indicates that we are headed for trouble. That’s when we intuitively draw on that stress number.
You need to know that drawing on that stress number is a lateral move: it gets you out of the excessive behavior of your number and increases your options, but it doesn’t automatically get you to the healthiest aspects of the stress number. A lateral move that takes you to the unhealthy side of the stress number, where you add its regrettable behavior to your number’s excessive behavior, is most definitely not helpful.
But after many years of teaching, I have come to believe that the Enneagram is always helpful. It makes no sense to me that a system that offers us so much wisdom, and so many options for making better choices that ultimately lead to healthier relationships, would have this one move that makes things worse.
Here’s the thing: your instinctual move to your stress number is to its limited and immature way of reacting to people and events. I’m a Two, and I can tell you without hesitation that the move from unhealthy Two to unhealthy Eight doesn’t make life any better for me. And it certainly doesn’t improve things for those with whom I am in relationship. But a move from unhealthy Two to some of the characteristics of a healthy Eight is one of the primary things that eliminates stress in my life.
The reality is you can’t take care of yourself without the number you go to in stress.
Here’s why that is true. Twos in general have terrible boundaries. They say yes to things that are not theirs to do, and every yes requires saying no to something else. When I’m aware that I’m beginning to feel stressed and I stop to look at my calendar or examine my priorities, I am usually overwhelmed and somewhat shamed by all that I have committed to and the lack of time to honor those commitments. It has been difficult for me to say no to people since I was a child. However, I’ve never met an Eight who struggles to say no to things that they either don’t want to do or don’t think are theirs to do. So, when I’m behaving badly in my own number and I am aware enough to choose behavior that I’ve learned or experienced from the healthy side of Eight, I can say no. That one gift from the number I move to in stress has the potential to keep me from doing things that are not mine to do. And that keeps me from exhaustion, which protects me from excess in my number and keeps me from stress.
As true as that is, it’s not entirely simple. Accessing the best resources of our stress number is an enormous help, but only that. It may not resolve the problem because not all problems can be resolved easily. We need to learn to be aware of the many ways we respond to life. And that sounds simple too, but it isn’t.
We need to invest ourselves in learning how to access the healthiest, most beneficial resources of the stress number. You don’t literally move to that number, and you certainly don’t become that number, but you do take on certain behavior patterns of that number. And you act out of those patterns long enough to achieve the self-care you need, to begin relying on your core personality type again. That’s why the most important number for you to understand after you have correctly identified your type is the number you move to when you’re stressed.
What We Can Learn from Stress
■ As a One, you might learn from Four that there are feelings inside of you that don’t need fixing.
■ As a Two, you might learn from Eight to identify and honor some personal boundaries.
■ As a Three, you might learn from Nine that you don’t have to make everything happen.
■ As a Four, you might learn from Two that giving to others pushes away feelings of fear and abandonment.
■ As a Five, you might learn from Seven to move toward others instead of withdrawing and observing.
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