The Power of the Enneagram
Addiction, Recovery and the Zen of Change by Michael Naylor
My Path. At thirteen years sober, having worked the program of alcoholics anonymous diligently, and having gone to counseling for a good part of that time, I realized that no matter what I did I ended up feeling a familiar sense of suffering. There was a nagging sameness to this familiar agony I could not shake. This was in 1995. Up to that date, I’d done The Forum, the Six-Day (both offshoots of EST), and numerous other Forum seminars. I’d participated in Primal Therapy for four years. I’d been to various spiritual communities and had several important spiritual experiences. I’d gone through The Course in Miracles (which was a doorway to my arrival in Alcoholics Anonymous.) I’d been an active member of AA since 1982 (forty years sober in 2022), and I’d been working as an Addictions counselor since 1985. I meditated almost every day. I’d done an intensive four-year study of the Chinese Goju martial arts. I received hundreds of healing energy sessions and deep body massages by trained, skilled, and loving practitioners. And yet in some strange manner, I was stuck, caught in some kind of psychic rut that I could not fathom or shake. I felt lost. No matter what I did, I would go through painful cycles in which nothing could hold my interest or passion. My sense of self and direction was continually changing, fleeting, turning empty. I’d spent several years at a Zen monastery studying Buddhism. I journaled and wrote daily. I danced intensely and often. I exercised. I lifted weights. I’d spent time doing transformative breath work. And yet, and yet, as good as this was for me, something remained stuck and unmovable. After the bliss came emptiness that was stingy and unwavering. What was this crazy psychic stuff that would not let go of me?
Discovering My Enneagram Type
It was in 1995 that I discovered a book called Personality Types by Don Riso, in which I first identified my type. I was shocked and horrified at what I discovered. I was a Type Four, the Individualist, and was caught in a psychic flow of habitual thought and emotional habit typical of the Type Four that made it often difficult for me to move and sustain a direction that I loved and cared for. I was happiness averse. I couldn’t ‘hold’ joy but for fleeting moments. I identified strongly with a sense of angst and sorrow. Whatever I felt certain of slipped away like wind through my fingers. Unbeknownst to me was that all of my efforts to get better were being strongly influenced and disrupted by the unconscious power and control of an emotional habit I was completely unaware of (a passion), a mental habit (rather, a mental fixation), a potent core belief (that worked often on an unconscious level), and both a self-image I’d developed in response to particular suffering typical of my type, and a fast-moving Inner Critic who set the whole ball rolling into repetitious suffering. This package of factors is called my Psychic Structure, and kept me stuck on the same psychic spot, trying to go forward but landing in the same place over and over again in one fashion or another. Gurdjieff called it one’s Chief Feature, the Inner Robot that kept an individual stuck on the same spot of repetitious experience. Unaware of these dynamics until this point, I was trapped in a psychic prison that I was just getting my first glimpses of.
In addition, I was completely blown away when I discovered that what I considered some of my best strategies for improving myself and moving in the direction of what I loved—my expression of unique creativity, my attempts at establishing joyful relationships, my ability to feel the depths of sorrow, my capacity to not be satisfied with ordinary things, my longing for my true self—were being seriously side-tracked by these unconscious habits that I’d been held under sway since a small boy. If it hadn’t been for the wisdom and guidance of a therapist who handed me Don Riso’s book, Personality Types, in 1996, I might have remained on this circular wheel of repetitious pain, making no lasting positive gains. At the same time, I discovered via this same therapist, In Search of the Miraculous, an amazing source of Gurdjieff’s teaching, which provided the foundation for the Enneagram work.
Perhaps all the work I’d done previously to discovering my Enneagram Type had prepared me for being able to finally see my Type clearly and the habits I’d developed that unwittingly kept me away from arriving at my true nature, or my genuine self. As I later learned, many who learn of the Enneagram come at it with a variety of levels of experience and insight. Some easily identify their Type, and others struggle for several years. For myself, it took one reading of the suggested type to see myself in living color. God forbid, I thought. And yet, there was hope here, real hope, for transcending habitual suffering that I’d been unable to fathom, let alone change.
What really hit home was this: I’d unwittingly developed a self-image (typical of my Type) that supported a habit of noble and enduring suffering, the identity of “The suffering, sensitive one who knows the real and deep pain and truth of reality.” This unconscious identity and my attachment to it made me feel that suffering deeply was more important than actually being happy and joyful[D5] . So, in the face of being able to sense deeply into pain and suffering came a detriment: I could not balance it with equal measures of pure joy. Like all the Types, I had a strength that unwittingly doubled as a weakness. What was beginning to arise in front of me from the haze of this new understanding was the door to my personal freedom and happiness.
With further study, I learned that, typical of the Type Four, I’d become overly identified with my feelings and moods and was unconsciously trying to find myself through these shifting feelings and moods, desperately looking for an answer in the changing currents of my daily feeling tides. In essence, I became my mood or feeling of the moment. This is the default setting for the average to unhealthy Four, or for lack of a better term, the unconscious Four. My repeated questions to myself from age fifteen until 1995 were, “Who am I? How can I find myself? What’s missing in my life? I don’t understand. Nothing satisfies me for long.” In the aftermath of these questions, I’d struggle and get mired in the waters of my emotional nature, and from there would try to understand who I was and what I wanted. Don’t get me wrong, the questions I was asking myself were profound and real, but my navigational tools were captured, skewed, and unbalanced.
My non-Four friends would look at me sympathetically and think, “Thank God I’m not stuck in the same stuff he is. He’s too emotional and over-serious.” But I prided myself on these same features. (This too is the stuff of the personality types, developing a sense of pride over the very thing that blocks the arising and realization of what is best and truest in us. Remember this: pride covers suffering and perpetuates it.) Little did my friends know that they, too, were possessed by a script that rivaled my own, and which kept them out of touch with their finer qualities. But that was another story. I had my hands full with myself.
Their concern for me was genuine and real because, regardless of their particularized personality trap, they could clearly see the outlines of mine and wanted nothing to do with it. Yes, they loved me, but colorful, flashy, and deep as I was, I didn’t look functional or steady. I felt angst frequently and expressed it. And apparent to them was that I was making slow movement in the direction of concrete growth and expansion, not to mention experiencing stable joy or happiness. As a good Four, I suffered dramatically and deeply, and this, I was to learn, was both my gift and sticking point. It’s as if I were mesmerized by one portion of my gift—my awareness of my deep feelings and my emotional honesty—but couldn’t embody the depths of joy and lightness of being. That is, I couldn’t take this fine sensitivity and transform it into a real-world strength and capacity. This is not to beat up the Fours of the world; each Type has [D6] its own type-specific style of suffering that, like the Fours, can be very difficult to spot, at least in the beginning. In fact, the personality features that trap the Types ride so closely to them that they silently slip right into their stream of consciousness and are barely seen or sensed by the invaded individual. But guess who sees the patterns? The spouse. The children. The friends.
Here’s the good news about the Enneagram. As you begin to observe the structure of your personality and its unconscious levels of mechanical expression, and see more clearly what causes your habitual suffering, the door to transformation opens. This is the power and importance of the Enneagram in anyone’s spiritual growth, and for every individual who has entered the path of Addiction recovery.
With the wisdom of the Enneagram in my hands, I was able to begin to disengage from the more pernicious, unconscious personality habits that destroyed my best efforts, i.e., that had me disengaging from my commitments and those that I love because my feelings of the moment had changed. My longing to find what was “missing” in myself and my life experience was often sought through an imaginary source in my inner world, or via a particular object of relief outside myself. As I began to understand my Type Four patterns, I began to land in the here and now, gaining objective awareness of when I was stuck in the Type Four psychic habits, spinning on the old spot of repetitious suffering. That is, I began to notice when I was caught in the Type Four delusion of reality and was able to not act upon the delusion of the moment.
II learned that each Type, based on its personality configuration, also experiences a form of repetitious and predictable suffering (and type-specific misunderstandings of reality) that often brings embarrassment or shame. Worse, they are so accustomed to it that it is the psychological air they breathe. That is, they are unwittingly one with the pattern of their type and don’t have the objective awareness to step back from it and conclude, “Hey, I’m miserable. I seem to be repeating the same cycle of emotions and thoughts. I’m repeating myself internally, over and over again. What’s with that?”
In spiritual terms, their left hand cannot see what their right hand is doing. This is the predicament of all the Types at the average to unhealthy levels. Gurdjieff identified this phenomenon as the “buffers” that keep man or woman hidden from themselves, such that they are unaware of their suffering and its true cause, while running on automatic pilot and believing they are fully conscious. Call this denial, minimization, rationalization, disassociation, numbing, or sheer forgetting (Eckhart Tolle would call this a lack of Presence, Christ called it “sleeping”). A simple example: An Alcoholics Anonymous member with twenty-plus years of sobriety is railing at newcomers, accusing them of being wimps and crybabies, his voice accusatory and condemning. He chastises those who show vulnerability and feel sensitivity in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. When confronted with, “Hey, Bob, why are you so angry and attacking?” his immediate angry response is, “I’m not angry. And I’m certainly not attacking anyone. You misinterpreted me. I’m just concerned.” His stiff rationalization and anger fill the room and has people shaking their heads and avoiding him. Clearly, he is unaware of the emotional poison he is generating. His left hand cannot see what his right hand is doing. He is in the thrall of his personality type, a Type Eight who unwittingly (due to his type’s patterning) has over-identified with being strong and self-reliant (both great qualities), to the exclusion of his heart and his emotional sensitivity (which he calls weakness). But it is that sensitivity that’s the source of his deeper strength and capacity. The result of his lack of awareness: people are put off by him and avoid him. He doesn’t get it. He thinks they can’t stand his truthfulness and bluntness, not realizing how terrorizing and condemning he is.
Unless he learns to understand this and change, after several years of addiction recovery, he will relapse. In fact, his relapse is the way his soul reaches to him, saying, “Look deeper, my beloved one, you only see a portion of the truth. Look deeper, let others show you this hidden aspect of yourself.”
Sincere Blindness
In other words, he sincerely cannot see his anger or his buried heart. His sensitive heart is not available to him (nor is happiness). Due to his particular psychic Enneagram structure, his inner “observer” hasn’t been fundamentally built or developed via self-observation practices (meditation) to assist him in standing back and really seeing and sensing his emotional reactions (this is called reactivity), which would enable him to get a psychological “snapshot” of himself. What glimpses he gets are immediately covered by the defensive mechanism of his acquired personality, which, unwittingly, is wired to keep him unaware. His buffers to this realization, which keep him unconscious, make it seem to him that he isn’t angry, but instead, is being strong and assertive and even helpful. Go figure. While others around him feel “pushed away” and shamed, he perceives (wrongly) that he is helping people get strong like he is (which he isn’t—he is being defensive to protect himself from feeling rejected; all of our defensive patterns serve to protect us from hurt and rejection). He can’t feel or sense the anger in his belly or his tightened body or even his clenched fists; he can’t hear the anger in his tone of voice or the constriction in his throat that holds his anger; he can’t sense or feel the impressions he makes on others with his anger, nor really sense how he ‘lands’ on them, and why they back away or get angry with him. He rationalizes that they are angry at him because he simply told them the truth. And yet he unconsciously uses this ‘truth’ to hide his anger and his genuine suffering.
He is essentially blind. Sincerely blind. Blind “without fault.” And feeling invariably “right” about this blindness. This is the power of the personality at the average and unhealthy levels. The problem in recovery from addiction is that if you stay at this level of unconsciousness, you become one of the “tragedy stories” that frequently blow through the Recovery Community. “Say, did you hear about Bob? He’s been sober for fourteen years. He relapsed last week and was found dead in a back alley. He overdosed.” And the truth is, every recovering drug addict or alcoholic must pass through many layers of unconscious blindness, some of them thicker than others, to arrive at genuine happiness and comfort in one’s own soul and skin. This is sometimes referred to in recovery meetings as “peeling off the onion.” But this journey of peeling the onion is only vaguely understood, and it is this lack of understanding that is the source of the many relapses, deaths, and suicides that enter recovery circles.
It is the goal and purpose of this book to lessen these senseless tragedies and to articulate with greater precision what the journey entails and the true and sometimes knee-buckling difficulties that men and women in recovery must pass through to gain their freedom. This book is designed to provide a much-needed map for these soulful adventures. With correct and precise knowledge, an individual facing another layer of the onion (another unconscious, untraveled psychic structure within himself) will see the real opportunity before him rather than feeling he has failed miserably and wasted his life trying to be sober.
First tip: When an individual is on the verge of a breakthrough, he will likely feel as bad, if not worse, than the first day he arrived in recovery. As he begins to expand beyond his limiting beliefs and habits, he will feel abandoned, lost, empty, and terrified. If he understands this phenomenon in advance, he will do what any wise person does: he will ask for help from a teacher or guide who knows this deeper territory of genuine growth. AA and NA get a man clean, but do not provide the wisdom for the deeper and more difficult forays into one’s hidden suffering. However, without this foundation, a man cannot take the trip. That’s the rules.
Being Present
Essentially, caught in his angry reactivity, Bob is “not” present to what is occurring within him, and what is oozing out of him. Something in him is ashamed or fearful of being present, and thus unable to sense that, “Yes, I’m angry, I want to condemn these no-good newcomers. I judge them harshly and want to punish and humiliate them. And I’m not sure what that’s all about. Maybe it has something to do with an unhappiness that sits inside me.” Aha! Now we’re getting close to seeing through the buffer, the defense that stops him from simply experiencing what is going on within him without projecting judgment or condemnation to others, or internally onto himself. But seeing through these buffers takes Presence and the capacity to allow what is arising within him to be observed without self-judgment. But first, angry Bob must begin to understand the very dynamics of his personality structure that keep him “shut down” and unaware. His angry drive might have helped him to get sober, but it surely will destroy it unless he understands its source. He must begin to know what to observe via understanding his personality type. And “what to observe” are the particular nuances of his personality type that are initially so hidden and habitual they are like the very air he breathes. And this is where the Enneagram is golden, providing what is needed for each Type to begin the process of self-observation, and the development of the necessary Presence needed to navigate difficult inner patterns. The end result is well worth it: a deepened sense of self-appreciation and the holding of others with preciousness and deep regard. Pretty great stuff, and exactly what each of us longs for and loves when we experience it. Why get clean and sober if you don’t experience this positive transformation?
Psychic Structure of the Type
I had the great good luck of learning that, based on my Type, there were several doorways of spiritual practice that were open to me. These doorways could move me out of the Type Four fixation, particularly my habit of trying to find my significance through my feelings of the moment. Further, I might release my habit of feeling that my shape-shifting identity would never be stabilized, embodied, or known. With the study of the Enneagram, I saw that what ran my personality were the horrid feelings of “envy” supported by the mental fixation of the Four—imagining and fantasizing that everyone else had found their identity, knew who they were, and had what I did not receive as a kid. They got the instructions to life, and I did not. As a response to this lightning-quick error of perception, the Four—me—felt defective and broken because of my inability to find this mysterious secret of living that others appeared to possess.
I learned that a powerful cog in the wheel of my psychic structure was a contemptuous judgment toward those I envied. It went something like this: the very happiness I envied in others yesterday (or a moment ago) I now judged as “shallow” and “insignificant” happiness. I deemed it unworthy happiness and not “deep enough” (meaning, “How could I suffer envy over such stupid happiness possessed by others?”). In fact, I decided, those once enviable fools really were engaging in shallow pleasure. I refused to be like them and then rejected them for their shallow pleasures (talk about turning the tables; however, the same suffering is running the show.) It’s as if the reasoning of the Four in this reactive pattern goes something like this: “I feel insignificant and unable to deeply connect with my life and feel as though I am an outsider incapable of being a part of life (then comes a “pause” for reflection, followed by this “reaction”). No, wait a second! The happiness those people are experiencing is insignificant and trivial! I’m actually embarrassed for them for choosing such trivial pleasures (actually, I hate them and despise them for enjoying trivial pleasures). Who wants to be a part of their stupid world? I’d rather suffer any day than partake of such trivia. I’m a deeply sensitive person. They aren’t. And yet, I’m a little freakin’ tired of feeling so shitty. What gives?”
Thus, the feeling of “envy” shifted to “scorn” and “rejection” of the very folks the Four (me again) had originally imagined were content and happy. He reversed the tables and now judges them as inferior for being satisfied with “ordinary, mundane” pleasures. In essence, he has projected his inner suffering onto those he was envying, all of it fueled by pure imagination and fantasy, and not remotely rooted in objective reality. I learned that the karmic wheel of Type Four suffering ran from the emptiness and grief of not having found one’s identity, to envy toward others who appeared happy, to scorn and rejection toward those same others, and then back to the grief of living without a sense of true self or identity. This was and is the recycling treadmill of the Four. It was the turning of this inner material that was disrupting all my efforts to arrive and be present, where my true significance could be felt. Always, the answer to the dilemma seemed to be “out there” in some activity or person (the imagined soul mate or the fantasy life) that might awaken my True Identity or could be found in the deep and continually shifting longings and feelings of my emotional life. If I could just understand those shifting feelings, then I’d be happy.
It all made for a pretty heavy and dissatisfying journey. Yet, not completely. See, that’s a part of the Four Fixations. “Ah, yes, it’s been such a dark and difficult journey; you probably can’t fathom the meaningful, unique, and significant suffering I’ve endured. It’s like none other you know.” I’m saying this tongue in cheek because most Fours have endured some pretty dark times. It’s how they identify with these times that keeps them stuck and unable to resurrect and utilize the suffering for transcendent and joyful purposes. In fact, it’s how they learn to addictively take pleasure from their negative experiences that is the lock on the door of their True Self and true freedom.
As with all the Types, I realized that I had access to some of the wonderful Type Four aspects of Being—abundant creativity, passion, appreciation of beauty and the arts, depth of feeling, ability to boldly feel and be with the deepest of agonies in self and others (some would not call this an asset, ha!). But due to my over-identification with the aforementioned factors (a mental and emotional habit of the Four), my capacity to access the finest in the Four was only partial, limited, and unfulfilling. I got glimpses of the great and deep possibilities of my existence, but could not fulfill them.
This is the predicament of all the Types. Based on the unconscious habits they created in response to suffering, they inevitably lose contact with what is truest and most satisfying within themselves. In spiritual terms, this is called losing contact with one’s true nature, or real self. But despite this, each of the Types, based on their levels of health, has retained some connection with partial experiences of their Essence. If you talk with any of the Types and get to know them, you realize that, stuck as they might be, they do on occasion begin to access their Essence, or their authentic selves, and they like this. And yet their capacity to do this is often limited due to the nature of their acquired personality habits.
So, let’s talk about the good reasons for using this amazing map of personality and spiritual growth in addiction treatment.
Where we are Headed
When an individual arrives in recovery, little does he know that, captured in the hypnotic defensive patterns of his type, there is a map home. If fortunate and willing to engage the path of growth, he begins a real and mysterious journey toward the best of himself, as he learns to wear the structure of his personality type more lightly. It will be much like traveling a labyrinth in which a Minotaur awaits to devour you. The individual needs knowledge, support, and teachers to help him outwit the Minotaur at each turn on the path and must develop new and more creative ways of coping and transforming to find his way to his true source, his deeper Being, and his genuine connection with The Source.
So, in the words of that masked man, The Lone Ranger, “Hi Ho, Silver, away!”
Or, as Buzz Lightyear would proclaim, “To infinity and beyond!”
T[MN19]Dark amusement is good!