Ego Spirals
The Enneagram as a map to freedom.
This is part 2 of a short series on the Enneagram. If you very much don’t care about the Enneagram, maybe skip this post. If you might be interested but you don’t know what the Enneagram is, or if you aren’t sure how the Enneagram types arise from the three Centers (Head, Heart, and Gut), I suggest reading my overview first:
The main point of the Enneagram as I see it is that it describes some systematic ways we create and recreate our own suffering. The intent being that if we can recognize what we’re doing at key moments, we can do something different and become more free.
Each of the nine types of personality has a downward spiral nature to it. Last time I gave the analogy of alcoholism: if you drink too much, your life gets worse, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more, which makes your life even more bad, etc.
But every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around. If you can identify the choice points and make a different choice, you can kind of unwind the “cramp” of the personality machine. With alcoholism, for instance, if you notice that you’re inclined to deal with stress by reaching for a bottle, you might be able to choose something different the moment you notice yourself reaching.
Ideally you notice your particular downward spiral and learn its choice points. The Enneagram tries to help by suggesting you look at nine clusters of spiral types to see which one is most like yours. Then the generic template can help you to pick out key choice points you might have otherwise missed.
Noticing moments of choice
The “downward” direction of the Enneagram spiral is toward a more overpowered or “thick” personality that takes over more and more of your life. Whereas “upward” is toward having Essence shine through ever more freely.
In practice this scale isn’t perfectly smooth. It’s not really a continuum. There are specific habits and mechanisms you learn to notice along the way which you either release or don’t. For instance, there’s a way that Enneagram Ones can turn into tense balls of condemnation and certainty. If your personality is running a One pattern, you either do this sometimes or you don’t.
And even in unwinding that pattern, there’s a pretty marked difference between each of:
(a) just following the impulse the way water runs downhill (“This is wrong!”),
(b) noticing the pattern and seeing it for what it is (“Oh, huh, that’s condemnation”),
(c) observing the opportunity to choose something different (“What’s the ennobling place to put my attention instead?”),
(d) in fact choosing that “something different”, and
(e) having that alternative choice become the new default.
A lot of Enneagram literature will name a bunch of these discrete patterns for each type. That’s most of the point of learning the types’ patterns (IMO): you get an overview of specific mechanisms that each type tends to use, which can help you notice how your personality employs them.
That said, there are two particularly stark transition points that I think are worth talking about in some detail.
When personality starts leading
It’s possible for Essence to shine through most of the time. When that happens, people come across as radiant and pleasant. Their personality is usually still present, but it’s less like a wall and more like a resource. This is when just one Center is mechanized, and usually lightly at that.
That pattern shows up for each secondary type like so:
Healthy Ones are open-hearted, kind, connected. Their sense of right and wrong is still very clear, but they no longer condemn others. They experience their moral clarity as a personal guide.
Healthy Twos are at peace. They stop pushing themselves to people-please. They still engage in kind acts, but the primary focus of their action is kindness to themselves through their enjoyment of loving and being connected to others.
Healthy Fours are clear-minded. Their creativity is engaged with the world and flows through them readily. They drop the effort to “dig”, to view themselves as special, or to stir their feelings with fantasy. They’re instead alive to the present moment, expressing their inner world gracefully.
Healthy Fives, like Healthy Ones, have freed their Hearts to shine with Essence. They stop retreating into their minds and instead remain in contact with others and the world. They still mentally tinker, but their playfulness becomes a medium for engaging rather than disengaging.
Healthy Sevens, like Healthy Twos, are at peace from bringing ease to their Gut Center. They drop the restless pursuit of something novel to throw themselves into. They still have intense joie de vivre, though, which is expressed through their involvement in, enjoyment of, and development of the life they already have.
Healthy Eights, like Healthy Fours, have clarity due to a free Head Center. They stop strategizing about resource or power accumulation from a place of needing to be independent. They’re still potent actors and highly strategic, but the drive is to live their life with full-on engagement.
I focus on the secondary types because I think the pattern is simpler to see: the secondary Center stops being involved in the personality’s machinery. That Center is instead a clear vessel for Essence.
The first “shock point” I want to talk about is when the second Center becomes mechanized in the personality. That’s the shift from “Healthy” behavior to “Average” behavior. Most descriptions of the Enneagram types are descriptions of Average behavior: Ones are precise but rigid, Twos are kind but graspy, etc. This is when the personality controls the majority of Centers and thus kind of takes the lead. At this point the word “I” often gets used to mean the personality rather than Essence.
Each of the types have a signal that they’re about to drop from Healthy to Average functioning — what Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson call “the Wake-Up Call” for each type. You might be able to derive the Wake-Up Calls for the secondary types from the above description of how Healthy behavior arises:
Average Ones start feeling burdened by the need to do or fix everything themselves. (Heart distortion.)
Average Twos start people-pleasing, trying to win others over. (Gut distortion.)
Average Fours start intensifying their feelings with fantasy. (Head distortion.)
Average Fives start withdrawing into their minds. (Heart distortion.)
Average Sevens start getting dissatisfied with their current experience and looking for where things are more exciting. (Gut distortion.)
Average Eights start feeling like they need to struggle toward being self-sufficient. (Head distortion.)
The equivalent for the primary types is when the personality grabs the extra two Centers and bundles them together into a secondary “mode”. It looks like so:
Average Threes have a Heart mode and a Head/Gut mode. In Heart mode, they’re very sensitive, often turning into a kind of crying or devastated mess that can’t take action (Gut) or think clearly (Head). When in Head/Gut mode, they’re efficiency machines that are all performance and no tenderness (Heart). So their Wake-Up Call is when they start thinking their value depends on their success.
Average Sixes have a Head mode and a Heart/Gut mode. In Head mode, they’re wrapped up in fearful worry about what could go wrong, but divorced from action (Gut) or vulnerable connection (Heart). In Gut/Heart mode, they become passionately devoted, refusing to ask whether what they’re devoted to is worth their loyalty. Lots of Enneagram literature refers to these as the “phobic” and “counterphobic” modes of Sixes, respectively. The Wake-Up Call for Sixes is when they start looking for a sure thing — i.e., something they can devote to.
Average Nines have a Gut mode and a Head/Heart mode. In Gut mode, they’re mechanically following habits or sitting around doing nothing in particular, neither planning (Head) nor really engaged with what deeply matters (Heart). In Head/Heart mode, they “float off” and fantasize in a way disconnected from action — stuff like imagining how lovely it’ll be to finally write that book someday, but not in a way that ever has them actually writing anything. Their Wake-Up Call is when they start automatically going along with others, as that’s a sign that they’re suppressing their “no”s and distracting themselves from the resulting internal violation via their fantasy mode.
So the shift from Average to Healthy behavior for the primary types is mostly about dropping the bundled mode. That release lets Essence shine through more clearly, which relieves some pressure on the primary Center as well:
Healthy Threes are authentic and open-hearted. They drop the efficient performance mode as their approach to success. They instead act based on what fulfills their Hearts, and they let others feel their tenderness. Their ideas and actions inspire others to make the most of themselves.
Healthy Sixes are clear and stable. They drop the attempt to find something to plug their devotional Heart/Gut mode into. They instead follow their inner knowing. This lets their authentic caring guide their hands to build and support systems that hold everyone.
Healthy Nines are present and at peace. They stop escaping into fantasy to go along with others. They instead maintain their inner peace by saying “no” when they mean it, letting others feel and understand what actually matters to the Nine.
Going from Healthy to Average is a massive loss of freedom. It’s a tipping point from “The personality is a tool for Essence” to “The personality is running the show while Essence takes a back seat.” It’s like the difference between wearing light, comfortable clothes versus being embedded in a mech suit that often decides for you how it’s going to move.
If you can notice your type’s Wake-Up Call, though, you might be able to choose differently. Sort of reversing the downward spiral before handing control over to the personality machine. It’s where you (as Essence) can intervene and say “No, thank you. I’ve got this. I’ll take it from here.”
When personality starts imprisoning the soul
The other main shock point is even farther down the dysfunction scale. It’s about a “danger zone”: how the types create things like suicide, homicide, schizoid breaks with reality, mania, catatonia, etc.
In terms of the Centers, the key transition is when all three Centers get mechanized as part of the personality at the same time.
Even when the primary types are in their two-Centers modes, the main Center kind of gets dropped: Threes disconnect from their feelings in high-performance mode, Sixes drop all attempts to orient in their unquestioning devotion, and Nines space out and take no action when they go to their inner world of pleasant fantasy.
The secondary types mostly neglect their third Centers. Hence Ones & Twos tending to be duty-oriented (kind of like Sixes in devotion mode), Fours & Fives withdrawing into inner worlds (like Nines in fantasy mode), and Sevens & Eights taking strategic action disconnected from what deeply matters (like Threes in efficiency mode).
This neglect is actually a good thing. It’s the robotic personality ignoring the third Center. Essence can most easily shine through that Center and intervene: Ones & Twos can learn to see their predicament clearly, Fours & Fives can take action and develop presence, and Sevens & Eights can let the world and others touch them more deeply.
Likewise, the primary types can kind of unwind their dual-Center mode from their primary Center: Threes can attune to the meaninglessness of their performance mode, Sixes can notice the way that their devotion doesn’t resolve their underlying fear, and Nines can become aware of the impotence of their fantasies via being present and attuned to their bodies.
So when personality co-opts that third Center, there’s no longer an internal intervention point. The system is sealed. The personality is running without any reference to Essence and becomes terrified (warped Head), hateful (warped Heart), and disconnected from reality (warped Gut). The overclocked personality engine needs to either run out of steam and release its grip on some Center, or have someone pry its fingers back from the outside. Otherwise it’ll continue in this locked mode perpetually.
The exact flavor of this hell depends on the type. But unless you’re a therapist or coach trying to use the Enneagram for a client, those differences probably don’t matter that much for you. The real point for individual practice is to notice the warning sign your type has carved above its own gate into hell. Riso and Hudson call these the “Red Flag Fears” for each type:
Type 1: “Are my ideals actually wrong?”
Type 2: “Am I driving people dear to me away?”
Type 3: “Am I failing? Am I a fake?”
Type 4: “Am I ruining my life and wasting my opportunities?”
Type 5: “Will I never find a place in the world or with others?”
Type 6: “Have I harmed my own security?”
Type 7: “Am I causing my own pain and misery?”
Type 8: “Are others turning against me? Are they going to retaliate?”
Type 9: “Is reality going to force me to deal with my problems?”
A fleeting thought along these lines is concerning, but not necessarily dire. What I’m talking about is a very dark kind of experience. E.g., Average Ones might wonder from time to time if they’ve made a mistake in how they think about their ideals, but the Red Flag Fear of Ones is more like a horrifying revelation of one’s own deep corruption and contributions to evil as an inevitable result of sincere attempts to do good.
If you’ve identified your type and you notice this kind of transfixed horrified fear bubbling up, that’s a “halt and catch fire” moment. Whatever you’re doing, stop. The tools you’ve been using are what are driving you forward. You absolutely do not want to continue with business as usual. It does not matter how much sense your plans make or how necessary the path forward looks. Stop. Get help.
On the inside, being in an Unhealthy personality doesn’t look like “I’m in an Unhealthy personality”. It looks like the world is awful. Existence looks inherently evil, or inhospitable to life, or like dire horrid action is just objectively necessary, or that people are alien creatures with inherently malicious intent. Or any number of other horrors. But the problems look real. Your responses make sense based on the world you see.
That’s why the Unhealthy realm can be so insidious. The horrors you see feel like objective reality. Like your problems are real and you have only so many options for solving them.
I should also emphasize that an “Unhealthy” type can feel good to be in at times. An Unhealthy Eight might sometimes feel victorious due to heartlessly obliterating some rivals for instance. The issue here isn’t constant misery. It’s lack of choice while in a pattern that recreates pain. Unhealthy Eights are constantly at war with everyone and everything; their machinery is powerfully and reliably creating the very thing they most fear — and they cannot stop.
That lack of choice is why it’s so critical to heed the Red Flag Fear. It’s your last chance. Life just gets worse if you plow ahead through that gate. Going Unhealthy is rarely a permanent transition, but you don’t get to decide how long it will last, what gets you out, or what price you pay along the way. Death, imprisonment, the destruction of people or systems that matter to you, physical mutilation, and permanent psychological damage are all very possible before the dark pattern ends.
It’s best just not to enter in the first place.
Mapping your own spiral
I named the hope that the Enneagram offers near the beginning:
Every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around.
The key is to notice where you can turn around. Where the personality machine wants to go in a direction, but you can tell that it’s pointing wrong way.
If you want to use the Enneagram for this, the first step is to discover your type. This can be a long road if done carelessly. I’ll talk more about typing yourself and others in a future post in this series. I’ll just suggest a few quick highlights for now:
Keep an open mind. Your initial impression of how a type shows up might be meaningfully wrong, and it’s hard to see yourself clearly from the inside.
Be careful of Enneagram tests and of others’ impressions of your type. They might offer some hints about your type, but they can also distort your sense of what you’re looking for. I think it’s best to look through the types with as little preconception about what’s a good fit for you as possible.
If you’re right about your type, then the map should work.
Once you have a solid guess about your type, the next step is to map out your choice points. This project requires a bit of back-and-forth between your experience and Enneagram theory. I suggest looking for three key transition points to start with:
If you’ve ever been fully free of your personality, such as via meditation or entheogens, what did it feel like for it to come back online? That should be when your type’s main Center gets its first mechanistic distortion. What exactly did you start doing inside? What were the signs of your personality arising?
How does your type’s Wake-Up Call actually show up for you? What are some specific instances? (If you spend most of your time in the Average range, like most people do, you’ll notice the tone of your Wake-Up Call basically everywhere in your life.)
If you’ve bumped into the Red Flag Fear of your type, how did that show up? What did it feel like? What were the circumstances? What seemed real to you? What happened afterwards? What helped you get out of it?
There’s actually a lot between those three transition points. You can learn a lot from reading Enneagram material on your type. Don Riso mapped out more nuance in what he called “the Levels of Development”, and he and Russ Hudson detail all nine Levels for all nine types in their book “Personality Types”. Their other main book, “Wisdom of the Enneagram”, explicitly spells out many of the key patterns to look for in Average functioning. I also like Richard Rohr’s Christian approach as a rich way of seeing the key choice points from a different angle.
But the important part is that the map actually works for you. Is it helping you to notice your habitual behavior, and does making different choices at those moments actually improve your life?
If the answer is “no” after sincerely trying for a little while, you should wonder if you’ve misidentified your type. Remember that the point is to become more free, not to have a tidy explanation for why you do what you do. I really recommend a very pragmatic attitude here: if the tool doesn’t bring you more peace, love, and clarity, then change how you’re using it.
If it does start helping you, though, I really recommend studying your type through lots of different sources. Getting those details with an eye for noticing choice points can be immensely helpful.
Preparing for Red Flags
I also recommend developing specific plans for what would help you in particular if you hit your Red Flag Fear. It’s very hard to gather the resources you need when you’re right at that gate. But if you know what helps you when you’re there, and you set things up so you can call on those resources when you need them, you’ll be much better off if you find yourself knocking on the entrance to that particular underworld. Things like having specific friends you plan on calling, or knowing to eat a bunch of chocolate and binge-watch Frieren. Stuff that’s wholesome and healthy and unwinds you from your downward spiral.
Just keep in mind that whatever your plan is, it needs to be one you can actually enact when right at that transition from Average to Unhealthy. A One might have a silly keyphrase he agrees on with his wife to get her help (e.g. “I am a pineapple, this is not a drill”), but when actually facing the Red Flag Fear, he’ll have to grapple with his terror that actually telling her that phrase might be him enacting evil. The answer might be “If I worry about that, then I’ll override the worry and tell her anyway.” But he probably does need that part of the plan laid out ahead of time for it to work.
In practice I find the Red Flag Fear stuff isn’t something to be super concerned about. But if you know you’re prone to going Unhealthy, or if you’re concerned about the possibility, then it’s a fine idea to have some attuned self-care tools ready to go.
Supportive psychotech
Finally, I want to suggest a few additional tricks from outside the Enneagram. I find that they make a big difference.
In my old company, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), we used to teach a technique called “Trigger-Action Planning” or “TAPs”. It’s basically a memory boost: if you want to notice or think of something when a particular event happens, you set a TAP, and most of the time it just works.
Once the Enneagram helps you identify your key choice points, you can set a TAP to notice each one. Each TAP should fire at exactly the right moment. And if it doesn’t, you tweak the TAP until it does.
You can read instructions for setting TAPs here.
There’s also a way to sort of tilt your internal landscape toward noticing and setting the right TAPs kind of automatically. You do this by developing an alternative self-image (along the lines that Maxwell Maltz talks about in“Psycho-Cybernetics”). You basically notice a coherent alternative way you could be and then kind of mentally rehearse it.
This doesn’t have to be complicated. Stephen LaBerge uses basically this idea in his MILD technique for inducing lucid dreams: you get a coherent sense of what you’d be like if lucid in a dream, and then you mentally replay past dreams but as your lucid self.
Here’s how this trick might look for encouraging a shift from Average to Healthy functioning:
Get a clear sense of how a Healthy version of you might act, feel, and think. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete. Just coherent. (Maybe my Healthy description of your type up above is actually enough!)
Think of a situation in which you missed your Wake-Up Call. E.g., if you’re a Four, think of a time you fell into the impulse to (say) stir melancholic longing and loss by reflecting on a past lover.
Call up the experiential details of it. Do you remember where you were? How it felt in your body? What was going on around you? It’s fine to make up some of it if you don’t remember everything accurately; the important part is that the scene is believable to you and has good sensory detail, like a dream or a movie.
Replay the detailed scene in your mind, but this time as the Healthy version of yourself. When your Healthy version feels the impulse to (say) fantasize, how do they respond to that impulse? What do they do instead? How does that feel? Get into the sensory details of it. Spend a while really feeling the whole thing, like you’re reliving the event (only as Healthy).
Set the practice aside and carry on with your life.
I want to emphasize that this last step is a real one. It’s kind of like when you struggle to remember someone’s name: after a point it’s helpful to stop trying so that your subconscious mind can keep working in the background without your conscious interference.
This mental rehearsal of Health is the same. The goal is to convey to your subconscious mind “This is the direction I want to move in.” Let it figure out how. Your job is simply to name the destination and then get out of the way.
More specifically, it’s not your job to make yourself act Healthy. That very much gets in the way. The thing trying to change behavior at that point is almost always the personality machine. Its efforts are basically guaranteed to backfire. E.g., a Four might try to force themselves to stop fantasizing but not be able to, which affirms their self-image of being uniquely flawed. (“Not even the Enneagram can help me….”)
The hope here is simply to notice choice points right when they happen. Merely noticing might sound inadequate, but it’s actually extremely potent. It’s just gentle. Truly skillful interventions often are.
Want help?
If you want to engage in the above and you might like my support, reach out to me:
I offer coaching. If working on becoming Healthy in the Enneagram sense calls to you, I might be able to support you in that. We can talk and figure out if we’re a good fit.
What’s next
I have at least three more pieces in mind to say about the Enneagram:
Typing yourself and others. There are a few common pitfalls here to be aware of. Not just mistyping, but also misusing the view that people are running specific personality machines.
Those inner lines inside the Enneagram’s main diagram. I think they indirectly say something potent about how science and subjective experience relate — but not for the reason Enneagram enthusiasts might think.
The question of validity. Are the Enneagram types real? Or is the system made of compelling illusion? If it’s illusion, does it turn out to be helpful anyway, and if so is there a way to benefit from its real value without believing in fantasies? This, too, touches on the interplay of science and subjectivity.
I might have more, and the above three might not be how I end up organizing the essays. But those are definitely the topics I’m itching to talk about right now.
(You can view part 3 of this Enneagram series here.)
Very interesting. I wonder if you've ever worked with Shirzad Charmine in developing the PQ program or if that's just converging evolution.
this helped clarify things i still didn't understand from the first post. i feel like i came out of this with a clearer picture of how having a center works by understanding in more detail how it malfunctions.