Putting People in Boxes

How to work out Enneagram types.

This is part 3 of a short series on the Enneagram. You probably want to read the previous two parts first:

1. Personality Machines, which is my explanation of the Enneagram in terms of how Essence (loosely the “true self” or “soul”) creates a personality (loosely “the ego”) by mechanizing three Centers (the Head, Heart, and Gut).

2. Ego Spirals, which is about how to use the Enneagram to unwind the knots we tie ourselves into.

In this post I want to talk about the most popular part of the Enneagram: typing people.

From The Funny Beaver

This is just about everyone’s favorite focus when they first encounter the Enneagram. “What’s my type?” and “What’s so-and-so’s type?” It’s fun, both because people just seem to be drawn to putting themselves & others into categories (“Which Hogwarts house do you belong in?”), but also because the Enneagram suggests explanations for folk’s behavior and inner experiences. And the humans really seem to love rich explanations for what they and others do.

There’s a particularly fun experience when someone feels “caught” by a type description. They’ll be listening along (“Ones experience the world thus and such way, Twos this other way…”), and then all of a sudden some type description feels like dissecting the intimate details of their life. When I first had this experience, it felt like someone had been spying on my thoughts and private behavior and then wrote a chapter about me in particular. It’s weirdly exposing. Embarrassing and funny at the same time.

Once the system has really impressed you, there can be a temptation to play with it by explaining everything in its terms. Stuff like:

“Oh, of course he’s tidying up. He’s a Two. He just has to do nice things for people. And that One wing is why he does it by creating order.”

At this point I really want to urge caution.

I don’t mean to say “Don’t do this.” I think it’s an important stage in developing a good idea for what the Enneagram types even are. You have to play with it a bit to grow familiar with it. By all means, try it on! See if you can explain people’s behaviors with it. Try typing public figures and fictional characters. Try typing nations! I think this is fine and good.

But be careful. There’s a pitfall right here.

The most common way I see people (including me!) getting bricked by the Enneagram is by taking this too far. They start trying to see others and themselves entirely through the tool’s lens. Instead of using type to inspire insight about where to look to create more freedom, they’re using type as a complete explanation of who they and others are. They’re seeing people as Enneagram types, instead of noticing how knowing someone’s type can help them see that individual person (and their suffering) more precisely.

When that confusion happens, personality has taken over use of the Enneagram. And the tool becomes useless as a map to freedom.

…at least while you’re using it this way. Several times I’ve noticed my thinking about the Enneagram becoming mechanical and rigid, and I’ve had to set the tool aside for a while — sometimes years. But it kind of refreshes for me after a bit. When I stop taking the tool so seriously, my personality loosens its grip, and I can again use the Enneagram as a guide to freedom.

But I recommend skipping that whole arc. Play with typing yourself and others, but use type to see through personality.

Two stories

I want to share two of my own stories of typing turning out well. I think that’ll offer some good context. Then I’ll go into some pragmatics about typing yourself and others, and what to do with that knowledge.

Getting closer to my dad

When I first read an Enneagram book, the main thing that leaped out at me was how much I didn’t resonate with several of the types. And yet, I knew people who felt immensely caught by those very types I couldn’t see myself as.

It was my first clear glimpse into just how different people can be. I didn’t realize just how much I was assuming everyone experiences the world basically like I do with a few adjustments (things like being more or less emotionally controlled, or more or less intelligent). But I felt extremely nailed by type Five, enough to make me squirm in my chair while reading about it. Whereas one of the people introducing me to the system felt super pegged by type Two. And yet I didn’t relate to Two almost at all.

So my mind was blown. I started devouring Enneagram stuff in order to get a better sense of how people who are very different from me might feel on the inside.

(I still think this is among the most precious things I learned from the Enneagram. It taught me to be very humble about my understanding of others’ subjective experience. And it’d be silly to assume that learning the Enneagram in particular could completely patch my ignorance here! As far as I can tell, people are infinitely interesting when I’m seeking to understand them, Essence to Essence. It’s actually the personality that’s pretty boring and completely understandable.)

It’s pretty common when reading a type for people you know to leap to mind. For me, reading type One had me thinking vividly of my father. It was hard to miss, honestly. The book I was reading from has little quotes along the edges of the pages for each type, and the quotes for type One felt like someone had just transcribed things my dad would often say or mean.

And upon seeing that, I realized something. I had long felt like Dad was really critical of me, like he expected me to screw up basically anything I tried to do. (“Now Son, did you call to make sure the theater is open today? Remember to take some money with you to buy a ticket.”) But when I imagined him doing it as a One, it became incredibly obvious to me that his criticality was his expression of care. It wasn’t that he thought I in particular was incompetent. It’s that Ones tend to view everyone as less competent than they are, and therefore that it’s the One’s job to make sure that everything goes well. If I forgot my money, Dad would feel bad because he’d blame himself for not reminding me!

That revelation created a lot of ease for me. Even when Dad would get irritated with me or others, I could see the kindness and care that’s underneath it. I stopped bristling so much. I definitely stopped taking it so personally. That made my experience of my connection with him much more pleasant.

And I think it improved our relationship too. We were on great terms anyway. But it became a lot easier for me to be affectionate with him and to see his persistent positive intent, which I think helped him to relax too.

I also realized that there were some tensions I could just resolve with this insight. Ones have a hard time taking criticism because they’re already so hard on themselves. I started trying to find ways to reflect the sincere message “I see you’re right” to Dad, which often helped a lot with dissolving arguments.

I think this is an excellent use of the Enneagram. It helped me see my father in a way that made our relationship and the family dynamic more pleasant.

Mistyping myself

I got my own Enneagram type wrong twice.

I mentioned up above how I felt nailed by type Five. The reason that happened was that the person who introduced me to the Enneagram handed me a book and said something like:

“I think you’re a Five with a Four wing. I mean, I could be wrong! You should read the types and notice which one resonates with you. But I have a pretty strong hunch.”

So when I read type Five, I had her guess in mind. I was trying to see how Five is a description of me.

It turned out that reading it that way prevented me from understanding what Fives are. I looked at type Five using myself (as I saw myself at the time) as a template. I’m pretty smart and well-read, and Fives are about something like intelligence and knowledge-gathering, so I could make it fit.

The thing is, I couldn’t become more functional by viewing myself as a Five. Fives need to focus on embodiment and action (Gut Center stuff), and then on making contact with others and being affected by the world (Heart Center stuff). But no matter how much energy I put into that approach, I couldn’t unravel what I saw as the main Five temptation of going into my head (the Wake-Up Call).

Thirteen years later, in 2014, I went to a week-long training offered by The Enneagram Institute. On the first day we gave our introductions, including our best guess about our own Enneagram type. I said I was a Five. A couple of ladies who’d long used the system in their therapy practice watched me for a few days and then pulled me aside:

“Hey, just something to consider: we really don’t think you’re a Five. You really come across much more like a Six. Maybe consider it?”

I did, and I reread stuff on Fives and Sixes. When I imagined that Five might be talking about a pattern very different from my own, I realized that something coherent arose in my understanding, and it very much did not fit me.

Whereas I could read Six as describing me. Stuff about self-doubt and seeking some external source of guidance. I mean, here I was doubting my Enneagram type and using books and others’ opinions as authorities to tell me what my type was!

Maybe you notice the error. I made literally the same mistake again. I reinterpreted Six using myself as a template in order to figure out whether I’m a Six.

And again, I couldn’t get the Enneagram to work for me while viewing myself as a Six. No matter how much energy I put into stilling my mind and acknowledging my successes, I couldn’t release what I was interpreting as how the Wake-Up Call (looking for a sure thing) shows up for me.

I noticed the error earlier this year while talking with someone about stuff unrelated to the Enneagram. I was telling a story about how in kindergarten I would get sent to the principal’s office every week. It was usually because I got in a fight with the teacher. She would enforce rules in ways I could tell were out of line, and when I tried to correct her she’d say stuff like “No, I’m right because I’m the adult and you’re the child.” At which point I’d go absolutely berserk with rage. Because no, her social power over me had absolutely nothing to do with whether what she was doing was fair! That’s not how truth works!

The person I was talking to was pretty struck by this story:

“Wow! That’s a lot of moral clarity for a five-year-old to have. That’s got to be a big theme in your life!”

I hadn’t really thought of it as moral clarity before. But when I started reflecting on it, I noticed that yes, actually it is a big theme. I refused to become an Eagle Scout out of moral protest for how the adults in my Scout troop were behaving. I got a Ph.D. in math education because I thought the way math is taught is criminal and needs fixing. I relate pretty strongly to this meme:

And after that conversation, it slowly dawned on me:

None of that is the self-doubting, external-orientation-seeking pattern of type Six.

It’s the righteous rigid certainty of type One.

Suddenly a lot of things clicked for me. I remembered how when I first looked at the Enneagram, I saw that the types were sorted by dominant emotion: rage types (for the Gut Center), shame types (for the Heart Center), and fear types (for the Head Center). And I pointed at that and said “Oh, yeah, I’m totally a rage type. No question.” But I overrode that to see myself as a Five.

I also keep my room immaculate. And I bristle when the shared kitchen isn’t immaculate too. I had imagined that’s the type Six nervousness about rules being broken, but if I’m honest it’s not fear. I’m irritated when things aren’t right.

But however compelling all that is, it could be the same error I’d made with Five and Six. Reinterpreting type One using myself as a template.

The key difference is this:

I’m now finding that the Enneagram map of the type One spiral actually works for me.

I realized that the particular flavor of my Wake-Up Call is when I confuse condemnation for moral clarity. It feels automatic: I can tell when something is right, and when people are violating it, and the obvious thing to do is to highlight the error and point at what the right thing to do is. But there’s a very particular charge that comes from closing my Heart and trying to pressure others to align. It’s a forceful “This is wrong” kind of energy.

When I watch for that charge and I release it, I notice an alternative arising: I can just name the good thing, and align myself with it, and let others come along as well if and when it’s right for them to do so.

Obligatory Gandhi quote

That move has in fact been softening me. It’s part of why I’ve been able to write and publish more often. All my relationships are feeling more pleasant and free for me. I’m getting some reflections from others that I’m coming across differently now — that it’s easier to listen to me, and that my ideas make more sense to them, and that I’m more pleasant to be around.

That’s actually the part I care about. I could come up with a new explanation for my experience and behavior based on being a One. But that’s just storytelling. The whole point of the Enneagram, as far as I’m concerned, is to live a life filled with kindness, clarity, and presence. I now find it’s doing that for me. I consider that to be the fruit of typing myself right.

Finding people’s types

There’s a bit of a cyclic problem with the Enneagram. You have to develop your understanding of the types by seeing how they actually play out in examples. But in order to see the examples clearly, you need to know how to see them as the types, which requires understanding the types first.

This showed up in my own story of discovering my type. I used myself (with the understanding I had of myself at the time) as a possible template for some of the types, which warped my sense of the whole system and severely limited how much insight it could give me about myself.

But such warping is inevitable. It’s a hard-to-avoid property of models of subjective experience. That’s why it’s so important to ground your guesses in something other than compelling explanations: knowing someone’s Enneagram type should make life more wholesome when you interact with them. If you can’t do that when seeing them as that type, then you want to consider that you’ve maybe mistyped them and/or that you’ve maybe misunderstood how the types work in general.

(Or that you’re viewing them too rigidly as a type. Remember that the Enneagram is a map of mechanistic personalities. Knowing I’m a One can tell you what general patterns my personality will robotically tend toward, but it doesn’t tell you the specifics, and it tells you next to nothing about my Essence. Seeing me as a One is an invitation to notice ways you might come to see past my personality. It’s the same for everyone: personality is robotic and possible to completely understand and predict, but Essence is endlessly beautiful and interesting and creative and worthy of wonder. Finding ways to connect Essence to Essence is the whole point.)

Hold your guesses lightly

So first, I want to recommend that you hold your sense of the types in general and of individuals’ types (including your own) in particular extremely lightly. You might start by thinking of Fours as “tragic romantics”, but you’re going to have a bunch of associations with that stereotype, and you can’t yet know which of those associations are good guidelines and which are misleading. For instance, I think of tragic romantics as theatrical, which fits some Fours I know but very much misses the mark for others. Be ready to table-flip your entire impression of what Fours are like, or whether a friend who really seems loudly Four-like to you really is a Four.

In particular, don’t believe the “Oh God, this describes me so painfully well” reaction too strongly. I got that from the type Five descriptions at the very beginning, and I got it from Russ Hudson’s description of Sixes at an Enneagram workshop in 2018. I think in both cases I was seeing something accurately, but I was mislabeling it, and as a result I warped my sense of what the Enneagram was actually saying.

So I really recommend that you keep a big fat “maybe” around all typing, no matter how compelling a given instance might seem.

View others’ guesses as about them

Second, track who’s talking when being told what your or someone else’s type is.

Getting others’ guesses about type is necessary to some extent. It’s probably helpful to learn that I think Donald Trump is an Eight and that Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show “Wednesday” is a Five. That tells you something about how I view those two types. But that’s all it tells you: it gives you insight into how I in particular view both (a) those Enneagram types and (b) those characters.

Likewise, Sasha Chapin self-describes as a Seven. Does that mean we should view him as an example of a Seven? Well, maybe. But what we really know from his assertion is that when he combines (a) his sense of the Enneagram with (b) his sense of himself, he concludes he’s a Seven. So when he says

“I am an absolutely classic example of type 7”

we should take that as insight into how Sasha views the Enneagram (and himself), rather than just assuming our current impressions of him tell us what the type Seven pattern in fact is.

I mean, how warping would it have been to give myself as an example of a Six? I did so for many years! Anyone who believed me inherited some of my personal confusions about the Enneagram types. I’m in part wanting to protect others from whatever of my own distortions about the types still remain. Even now I hope your read is “Michael views himself as a One” rather than “Michael is a One.”

Relatedly, I suggest avoiding online Enneagram tests. They’re mostly just confused. They’ll ask you about some traits, assuming you’re thinking of the traits in ways that fit the system. (“People probably see me as distant” could apply to several types, but an online test might take a “Strongly agree” response as evidence for just one of them.) Then they list some ranked order of which types supposedly fit your responses. This is just misleading. You’re better off rolling a nine-sided die to figure out which type to consider as your own first: at least the die won’t implant a premature guess in your mind!

Try on many types

Third, I suggest you try on at least a few different types to see what fits. Both for typing yourself and for typing others.

Doing so involves some storytelling. How do you retell the story of your life if you’re really a Nine? How about if you’re a Two? Can you make sense of your career if you view yourself as an Eight?

Last year I sincerely tried on the possibility that I’m a Four. I could make it make some good sense: I have lots of stories about how I’m strange and unique, and I often feel profoundly misunderstood. I’m pretty sensitive and can fall into bouts of melancholy. I told this story vividly enough that for a few days I really wondered!

(Ultimately I rejected it because that view of myself isn’t useful. It doesn’t help reverse the downward spiral. This again emphasizes how a narrative is not enough on its own to determine type, no matter how compelling it is.)

Remember that you’re simultaneously developing your understanding of both (a) the types and also (b) the person you’re typing. That requires some pretty wide and varied experimentation! You might even need to return to a type as a guess as your models develop.

Be playful, but really sincerely try on each type you’re considering. Reminiscent of what John Vervaeke calls “serious play”.

Check if it makes you more wholesome

Finally, at the risk of beating this drum too much: the measure of whether you’ve typed someone correctly is if viewing them that way makes your interactions with them more wholesome.

I don’t know for sure that Dad is a One. For some time I thought he might be a Six: he’s very security-minded and puts a ton of his mental energy into worrying about what could go wrong. But viewing him as a Six doesn’t help make interactions with him better. He doesn’t get indecisive, for instance, and when he claims not to have a preference it doesn’t help much to make the options binary. (That’s a common hack that I’m told can help many Sixes.)

But viewing him as a One definitely helps. It makes interactions with him more pleasant, and over the years it has inspired me to try conversational moves that have panned out well with him.

So in practice I think I’ve got Dad’s Enneagram type right. I see both him and the type well enough to get good results.

Same with my own: I can tell I’m also a One because viewing myself this way lets me reverse my downward spiral. The fact that it’s working suggests that I’m understanding both Ones and myself usefully.

Not to say my understanding is final or complete. I hold the possibility that I’m still wrong about my type, or that maybe there’s no correct answer. Since seeing myself as a One, suddenly several people close to me obviously look like different types than I’d thought before. That might change my sense of the Enneagram in a way that has me notice an even more effective interpretation of my own type.

But as long as I keep aiming for wholesomeness, I think this process is totally fine. The goal isn’t to type myself or others. It’s to live a good life.

Why do I keep emphasizing this part?

I emphasize this pragmatism so much because not doing this is the main pitfall I see in Enneagram spaces. People like to treat the Enneagram as a God-given classification system and want to know how to sort themselves and others into it. And then they want to use that system to explain everything: why someone chose the color of bedsheets they did, why a person likes artichokes, why their friend uses a 2H pencil instead of HB, etc.

They’ll even go on to contort themselves to fit their new self-image. It’s a bizarre thing to see. People will say stuff like “Well, I’m such a Seven, so I can’t help myself from going out tonight even though I’m tired!” This strikes me as an almost perfectly backwards application of the Enneagram. The whole point is to have more freedom from the personality. Why take your current view of a type and impose it more firmly on your behavior?

At a guess, it’s the same thing that makes sorting people by astrological sign, or by Hogwarts house, or whatever, so meaningful. It offers a framework for making sense of the world. So if you conform to it, everything makes sense! At least in some narrow way.

I really recommend not doing this. Have some starting stereotypes about the nine personality patterns, and some guesses about your and others’ types, and then experiment. Find out what creates wholesomeness. The aim is wholesomeness, not correct classification. In the end you might throw out the Enneagram entirely! But if you have a better life along the way, then that was a correct use of the tool.

Why type others?

As far as I’m concerned, the right use of the Enneagram is internal. It’s not about other people. It’s about your own suffering, and how to unwind it.

So why develop an understanding of all the types? Why not just laser focus on your own?

I have a few answers:

1. You can’t tell ahead of time which type is yours.

2. Because the types interrelate, they form a system. You might not be able to usefully understand your type until you see how it fits as part of the larger system.

3. All personalities display all nine error modes to some degree or another. It can be helpful to notice how each one applies to you, even if one of them overwhelmingly dominates.

4. It’s helpful to see patterns from the outside too. That’s especially powerful if you see others of the same type as you. But there are analogies and symmetries between each of the types, so you can learn more about your own personality machine by observing others’.

5. How you relate to others is subtly a fact about you. Learning to see others compassionately and clearly is about how you see them. It looks like it’s just about them, but that’s because that’s how psychological projection works.

An additional answer I used to give is, correctly identifying someone’s type should let you predict their behavior and reactions. I think that’s kind of true, but it’s also anti-helpful to focus on. The personality wants to use that power to manipulate others according to its strategy. That’s part of how you make the Enneagram useless to you.

I really encourage you to keep bringing the focus back on yourself. If you see your spouse is a Three, what insight does that give you? Maybe you come to understand your dynamic with them more clearly as a result: they get impatient with you for not “growing into your potential” more actively, and you respond by going quiet and then later watching your favorite Netflix show. What does that tell you about yourself? How can that insight create more space in your life and more tenderness and aliveness in your connection with your spouse?

And please remember: look through someone’s Enneagram type to see them more clearly.

What’s next

I have two main points still in mind for this Enneagram series.

One is, what’s up with those lines inside the diagram? Why is 5 connected to 7 and 8 for instance? Why are the primary types directly linked to each other but the secondary types have this weird six-sided star thing going on?

I brushed the topic aside in the last two posts. Here’s another teasing take: I can’t tell if the lines are useful in general. I found them very useful for the first time in over a decade once I tried viewing myself as a One. And it mattered a lot! But I’m quite sure the explanation given for why the lines are the way they are is at best incomplete, and might in fact be wrong. But I still suspect the lines have some value.

The other main thing I want to talk about is validity. I’ve been explaining the Enneagram so far. But is it right? Is this an accurate way of describing personality? Or is it just generating an illusion of insight? E.g., are the types so generic that anyone could see themselves as any of the types if they tried, and thus if you start digging into the Enneagram and later feel better, you falsely attribute your progress to the system?

The validity question dives into the domain of subjective science. What’s a scientific approach to spirituality that both scientists and spiritual folk would consider to be high integrity and in good faith? I don’t claim to have a complete answer, but I’m pretty sure I have a solid foothold on something that can become one.

In particular, I think most approaches I’ve seen so far don’t sufficiently account for reflexivity. Because it’s hard to! But not impossible. It’s just that science usually assumes non-reflexivity, i.e. objectivity. So domains that are “loopy” (like how understanding your own Enneagram type is a prerequisite for understanding Enneagram types in general and vice versa) can’t use the familiar corpus of scientific tools.

So that’s what I’m currently expecting to publish next. Probably in at least two more parts.

(You can view part 4 here.)