Success- Oriented, Pragmatic: Adaptable, Excelling: Driven, Image-Conscious

Gifts: Life-enhancing, life embracing, self-renewing, ability to vibrate & resonate with people & situations, sensitive to beauty and to suffering.
In Search of: Identity, wants to find themselves & their significance.
Sees Purpose of Life as: Find identity: “Who am I?”
Gifts in Practice: Inspired creator, expressive, and self revealing, self-aware intuitive, sensitive, sensitivity towards suffering, fascinated by human nature, balances need for withdrawal.
Often Seen as: Creative, intuitive: self expression is important, see self as ’special’ / different, tends to withdraw into a need for sanctuary: often speaks phrases – “I like this…” “I don’t like that…”: will express that something missing in the make-up, a deficiency: tends to build a sense of identity from emotions, often dark emotions: will tend to be sensitive to qualities of environment and to use such qualities to soothe their inner experience: familiar with the dark side, process constantly: “what does this mean about me?”, easily affected; impressionable, concerned about their individuality, often seen as “dramatic” and can feel like life is an ‘emotional roller-coaster’.
Wake-Up Call: Holding onto &/or intensifying feelings.
Wrong Turn: To become introspective & self conscious & then to externalize emotions.
Compulsive Style: Refers to own history, self absorbed, indulgent, moody & aloof, “no one understands me”; processes constantly, taking ‘emotional barometer’, temperamental, dramatic.
Addiction: Envy – experienced like a constriction, comparing self to others, a poignant yearning.
Fear: Of having no significance, or no identity.
Avoids: Simple sadness, or simple joy.
Defense Mechanism: Introjection (take into themselves the lost object – hold onto longing), sublimation: distance from emotions and exteriorize, art form, drama.
Challenge: To move away from retrospecting, enter the ‘hole’ of the sense of deficiency: know the life /birth renewal aspect of all, know emotion as reactivity, not heart (leads to inner calm).
Examples: Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Judy Garland, Anne Frank, Artist formerly known as Prince, MIchael Jackson, Ingmar Bergman, Franz Kafka, Paul Simon, Edgar Allen Poe, Marcel Proust, Greta Garbo, Sylvia Plath, Frederic Chopin, Martha Graham, Gangaji, Joni Mitchell, Tchaikowsky, Bob Dylan, Johhny Depp, Sarah McLachlan, Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen, Ann Rice, “Hamlet,” Cartoon character: Garfield, ‘Prof. Snape’ and ‘Prof. Trelawney,’ in Harry Potter series. Argentina

Centre: Heart

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Don Riso and Russ Hudson. © 2003. The Enneagram Institute. All Rights Reserved.
Canadian additions, and cartoons © 2004. Penny J. Whillans. All Rights Reserved.