I part

ENNEAGRAM OF PERSONALITY
Understanding the system…
The Enneagram is a system developed in the past century (XIX) but it uses an ancient Wisdom
and geometric figure of star of 9 tips. It is a system of self – knowledge and self – development.
This system teaches us that the human being can be basically seen in nine basic types of
personality. So, according with this system, the more or less 7.8 billion of the people that live in
the world are divided in nine basic personality’s type.
You can ask… how can be? A example that can help us understand this is the musical octave
(Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do). We have eight basic musical notes. With them we can
compose infinite melodies.
The same, with this nine types we can “compose” 9 different kind of personalities
All of us have one predominant personality type. But each one of us, in the different way also
have a little of the others types due our sharing in human condition.
So, with this variety, we have infinite individual that experience the life in a very particular way.
We are similar in some aspects but we experience our similitude in the particular & different
way. Even for those are twins. No one live the life in the same way of other.
The Enneagram teaches how you behave, what are your blind points, how function your
“automatic pilot”.
Doing the test and reading some characteristic of the types you can pondered: well, Am not like
all this, I have a little from the other number… but some number will speaks more about you
than other…from there you can compose your dominant personality profile and than you will
start to understand how function your defensive mechanism, how your fixation guide you, how
your passion manipulate you…
The Enneagram is not a deterministic system but a dynamic system. It considers our
transformations; it doesn't give us a label like the one we find in sardine cans or cookie packages
that describes the product. The system intends to indicate how we are organized in terms of
attention, energy, or reactions to conflicts.
Based on this understanding of ourselves, the system teaches us to design a growth path that
can develop our standard (with our talents, strengths and weaknesses).

Understanding what is personality

Distinctive patterns of behaviour and emotions that characterize individual…patterns of
adaptation to reality.
A person's personality is formed, by individual characteristics, way of acting, thinking, feeling,
moral values, emotional traits, judgments, etc. This group of elements, in turn, makes the
individual a unique and complex being in the context in which he lives.
Personality formation occurs gradually during life. It starts in childhood, when the person has the
first contacts with the family environment, home and the school. The formation of personality is
lifespan, since the human being comes into contact with different environment during his

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trajectory, as wheel of friends, college, work… In this sense, it is possible to affirm that our
personality is formed both by genetic characteristics and the environment where we are inserted
or experiences throughout life.
Other very important aspect for the formation of any person's personality is self-knowledge.
Once we develop such a skill, we are able to understand our individual characteristics, our points
for improvement, limitations, fears and desires, as well as enhance skills, our emotional
intelligence and build our own individuality.
In the Enneagram when we talk about personality, we also refer to the pattern of emotion and
behaviour that we answer to the reality. This behavioural pattern is learned. The Enneagram
system adopts also the Greek meaning of personality (mask).
To tell us that personality is the mask that we assume to protect our essence. The set of beliefs,
fears, defences, compensation that we use "Protects" our Essence from dangers. In Enneagram it
is common to call personality EGO. We will use sometimes this expression to refer to
personality.

The “Essential Self” And The “Ego” (Or Personality)

“We are essence but we manifest personality.”
The Enneagram presents us nine basic personality types. The personality types are
presented to us from distortions, that is, from EGO or PERSONALITY.
Sometimes, some discretion may seem exaggerated and even cartoonish. This is due to the
Enneagram's own oriental methodology: we start by looking at our mask to unmask ourselves.
The Enneagram allows us to identify the vein that prevents us from seeing, to remove it and see
clearly. We perceive the bonds that prevent us from seeing to untie them.
The Enneagram, like the other religious and psychological systems, believes that we have
come into existence in a good essential state - Essential Self.
What really we are in the sense spiritual of our existence - Our “True self”: pure, enlightened,
full, healer…unconditional love, affection, consideration for the simple fact that the individual
exist. All of us have this Essential Self (our origin, divine love).
Around 3 to 6 years of age, we began (through trial and error, in our interaction with the
environment outside of us) to develop mechanisms and behaviours that threaten and mask our
Essential Self. This mask is named Ego or Personality.
EGO (personality) is the distortion or exaggeration of our essential quality (Essential Self). We
can define Ego as a false self.
As we grow, to “protect” ourselves we create a layer between Essence and the Personality that
limits us and “make asleep" our "True Self”.
The challenge of knowing our type is to reverse the process through perception of this “shell”,
“breaking it”, and reintegrating Essence and Personality, manifesting our “Full True Self”.
Our Enneagram type of personality is this shell.
The Essential Self and EGO are two sides of the same coin of our being.

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The purpose of the Enneagram is to help us to know not only our Ego, but also our Essential
Self.

The two states of our Self: the “Essential Self and Ego”
As we delve into self-knowledge in the Enneagram, it is important to know how to distinguish
the symptoms that our whole being (mind, feelings, visceral center and our body) registers
when we are centered, that is, living from our Essential Self, and which ones records when we
are off-center, living from the Ego.
Knowing how to distinguish and differentiate these characteristic symptoms of the two states is
what we call discernment in Enneagram.

Essential Self Ego

Flows into us spontaneously, causing a great
sense of inner freedom.
It is the divine image in us. The reflection of
good.
It is real, objective, and authentic.
It makes me feel in harmony and in unity with
myself and with the environment, people, and the
universe.
The Essential Self is experienced by me as the
original state in which I feel I was born.
In short, the Essential Self is the most authentic of
myself, my integrated self, unified, free, in
harmony, connected with the source of energy,
united with divinity, with essence, with life.
Is compulsive (out of our control). It leaves us
with a feeling of internal rigidity.
Symbolized in everything that expresses evil in
us.
It is illusory, based on our subjectivity
It makes me live in conflict with myself and as
dismembered and disconnected from the universe.
The Ego is learned, acquired.
In contrast, my Ego is experienced by me as
disintegrated, divided, lacking in freedom,
compulsive, disconnected from the source of
energy, separated from divinity, from life, from
light.

The Ego: my off-center Self - Components

Fixation or compulsion: in general, we learn compulsive behaviours by repetition. This

repetition causes such behaviours to be fixed on us. It is a thinking strategy that is always
repeated. It is a fixed idea that each type of Enneagram has. Fixed ideas act as a filter through
which the personality type analyses and judges the things that happen around him/her. These
fixed ideas consume a lot of energy and consume your thoughts. Another way to define fixation
would be to say that it is distortion, abuse or misuse of the essential quality proper to each type.
Fixation in this case is a behaviour that automatically triggers when given a certain stimulus; we
could say that compulsive is what dominates us, not what we dominate. It is important that
everyone knows their own fixation.

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 TYPE 1

A very linked to body sensation type. The type is known as the perfectionist. Person who seeks
quality, seeks excellence, press for perfection. For type 1, everything needs to be correct, perfect,
fair. Type 1 excels in quality and fairness. The positive in this type, especially in the exercise of
leadership 'is the fact of seeking excellence in everything you do. If you are a type 1 personality,
there is no way for you to do things in half or do more or less. You either do it well or you do it
well. The type one person when you was once combined/agree something with him, that
becomes a rule, a law. They are people who are often guided by rules, laws, and instinctive
strategies. Type 1 act instinctively on what is the norm, the rule, the standard. Often the type 1
takes time to touch the heart, takes time to touch the reason. Often they are mistaken for a
rational, but deep down, type 1 acts without thinking, without putting his heart on it because
deep down he is acting above a rule, a standard. When they are at a very low level of
development, they are very reactive, critical and defensive people, especially when criticized.
The person with the type 1 personality infallibly believes that perfection is in his head. Type 1
people are very detailed, often controlling. Often they are the ones who control the house, keep
the house rules. They always have an opinion on everything and everyone. Often ends up being
intolerant and impatient.
An emotional addiction of type 1 is anger. When things do not go as you would like, that is, the
world, the people, the circumstances are not as perfect as you would like, and you enter a deep
state of anger.

FIXATION TYPE 1: Ego- resentment/annoyance

Type 1 has a fixation. A fixed idea, a fixed mental filter: resentment.

He resents it when he fails to get people to understand his idea of perfection.
Type 1 demands perfection of oneself and others and the world around him. The perfection you
seek to achieve is subjective, according to your own canons (rules) of perfection. For failing to
achieve this perfection, an internal frustration or annoyance/resentment with respect to oneself
and others and to the world is automatically triggered, since their demands for perfection are not
fulfilled. As a perfectionist I easily detect imperfection: it is as if I have certain special antennas
to detect the slightest imperfection. This leads me to be very critical of myself, with others and
with my surrounding reality.
I feel within me an internal judge or internal critic who is constantly watching me, analysing,
criticizing and correcting me. This critic's voice prevents me from being quietly quiet or inactive:
I must always be active: I can't waste even a minute of time. There is still so much to do in order
to achieve perfection!

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My internal criticism makes me go over all my activity and examine whether I acted
appropriately. I often project my internal criticism on others and I believe that they are judging
and criticizing me with the same harshness and demand with which I do in relation to myself.

PASSION: The Anger

For the Enneagram, passion is the dominant emotional tone in a person when he lives under the
tyranny of his ego, fixed on the proper compulsion (Compulsion = behaviour that you can not
control) of his personality type. Like one “emotional addiction”.
An emotional addiction of type 1 is anger. When things do not go as you would like, that is, the
world, the people, the circumstances are not as perfect as you would like, and you enter a deep
state of anger.
In type 1 many times, this anger is unleashed on him so quickly that he almost doesn't have time
to control such a reaction. It appears involuntarily and automatically as he identifies that
something is imperfect.
As his demand for perfection is so strong, he does not easily satisfy himself, nor do the others
satisfy his demands: therefore, he is bored, because he considers that nothing and no one is as it
should be.
MY EGO RUN FROM… anger
I try to avoid precisely what constitutes my passion: the anger, the annoyance that I feel so
easily. I try to avoid these emotional sensations precisely because of my demand for perfection.
“After all, it is not good that someone perfect is bored or angry.” Boring seems to me
incompatible with being perfect. I am often not very aware of my internal boredom. When I am
conscious, I try to repress it and hide it, I try to smile.
MY EGO WASTES ENERGY IN…
TYPE 1 wastes energy by constantly worrying about the righteousness of his posture. The belief
that you are always right makes you constantly check if you are or not right.
He wastes time and energy trying to find out who is right or wrong. When others disagree with
his opinion, he tries to get them to agree with him. On the other hand, he also wastes energy in
his eagerness to teach and, above all, to correct others.
DEFENSIVE MECHANISM OF EGO
As the word itself indicates, defensive mechanisms automatically fire at us to defend ourselves
against impulses, experiences, events that we experience as threatening and that therefore cause
us anxiety. Defensive mechanisms are usually activated in us in an unconscious way: therefore,
the aim of the Enneagram is to make us aware of our defensive mechanisms and prevent them
from taking action without our control. The defensive mechanism is that most human instinctive
energy.
The defensive mechanism of type 1 is the opposition and reactivity.

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Opposition: He ends up opposing people who have a different understanding from his, from his
standard of perfection, from what he believes is perfect.
Reactivity: this means that I manifest in the outside exactly the opposite of what I feel inside.
Internally I feel a great boredom, but as if my internal critic tells me that a perfect person should
not be bored, which I do and repress my feelings of anger and appear before others smiling and
happy. I try to look like a "good person", and good people are not bored. Although I do
everything possible to dominate my abortion and it is not noticed, sometimes I miss sarcastic
comments. I can tell others something really critical or harsh with the best of my smile.
EVOLUTION PATH:
How to get out of the last level of development, from your imprisonment in the personality, in
the ego, to your essence for your evolutionary path? When type 1 accesses its virtue which is
serenity and acceptance. This is a great way of growth and evolution for type 1: TO ACCEPT.
Accept that the world is not perfect as he believes it is perfect. If type one understands and
accepts that not everything is perfect, he will have the ability to enter this virtue of serenity and
acceptance. which will make you less access to that anger.