as I live a few more questions

Enneagram Two: "Why I Suddenly Went Missing"

Continuing on from where I left off...

Simply put, Enneagram Twos are all about love and pride. At their best and finest, Twos exemplify altruism, the humble and selfless giving of the self to others (think Mother Teresa). They can be valuable teachers of humanity and love (think Leo Buscaglia, Ann Landers). At their worst, they are manipulative, histrionic, possessive, and self-deluded (think Princess Diana, especially during her unhappy marriage; many would classify her as another personality type, but I found in talking with other Enneagram enthusiasts over at the Enneagram Institute discussion board that those who had actually met her in person say she's a Two, and I believe it).

Obviously, most Twos fall somewhere between the two extremes :-)

The key here is helping; Twos are the helpers, driven to see themselves as helpful people. They want people to depend on them; they need to be needed. Twos are all about emotional (heart) energy projected outwards, with very little directed inward to the self. They can be uncannily skilled at "reading" other people's emotional states and responding accordingly, but they often can't "read" themselves and their underlying motives. To other Enneagram personality types, average-to-unhealthy Twos can come across as insincere, even ridiculous, in their desire to be helpful, needed, and loved (think Richard Simmons).

Fulfilling other people's needs gives the Enneagram Two a sense of pride (sometimes even a false sense of entitlement), something that most Twos would hotly deny because it conflicts with their self-view as "helpful". Average-to-unhealthy Twos hate looking at their real motivations, which essentially are pride in what they do for others. Usually they cover it up to others (and often to themselves) as "being helpful to others" as a goal in itself... but it's the ego strokes that Twos get for doing this work that are the real payoff. Pride can run rampant in unhealthy Twos, and the unhealthier the Two the more they try to repress their self-knowledge of what drives them. The unhealthiest Twos are extremely manipulative and also completely self-deluded about how "good" they really are; they can casue immense destruction and still think of themselves as "saints".

The problem with pride-serving people-pleasing is that, ultimately, the Two does not know whether he/she is unconditionally loved for who he/she is, or loved just for what she/he does for other people. This fear of being unloved can lead to manipulative behaviour as the Two seeks appropriate "tokens" of love and gratitude from others in order to calm their fears. Ironically, just like every other Enneagram personality type, the Two can bring about the one thing most feared as they become more stressed out and unhealthy: people will resist the manipulation and possessiveness, and will begin to pull away.

Enneagram One: "The Rules"

I've been meaning to do this for a while now, sketch out each of the nine basic personality types of the Enneagram, to help you understand them better.

("to help": argh. How Enneagram Two of me).

Of course, nine types is a gross simplification, as each type subdivides and subdivides and subdivides further, to accommodate the wide variety of people in everyday life. There's no "better" or "worse" number to be; an Enneagram Four is not inherently better than an Enneagram Three, for example. Think of the nine numbers as labels only.

Ones are the judgers; they are all about seeing the world as black and white, good and bad, right and wrong. They act on gut instinct, but instead of it being directed outwards to other people (like Eights), this energy tends to be directed to controlling the self. This may display itself as an unusually strong adherence to "rules and regulations".

All nine personality types have a range, from healthy to unhealthy. Healthy Ones are natural advocates, reformers, and activists, acting out of a genuine desire to do good for the world (think Mahatma Ghandi). But under increasing stress, or as they become more unhealthy, Ones have a tendency to mope, nag, find fault, and place blame. Among all the Enneagram personality types, they tend to be the ones who find it difficult to make friends, partly because of this fault-finding and blame-placing behaviour. At their unhealthiest they can split into their presentable "good" self and their shadow "bad" self, acting out and then repenting; the deepest fear of the Eneagram One is that she/he is morally deficient, "bad", evil.

Character Strengths and Virtues

In a follow-up to this post, I serendipitously came across this book on the New Books shelf at Elizabeth Dafoe Library. I plan to peruse it to get a better sense of the classification of virtues done by Drs. Peterson and Seligman; I must be a true librarian, because I am fascinated by classification schemes (a place for everything and everything in its place). As I find out more about this particular classification of character strengths and virtues across all societies and cultures (and especially how it relates to the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram), I'll post more.

The Enneagram: A Brief Introduction

I first learned about the Enneagram in November 1997 at a workshop put on the Beginning Experience of Winnipeg.

I guess I'd better explain what Beginning Experience is. The Beginning Experience (B.E.) movement began in Texas in 1974, and has since spread to Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The purpose to B.E. is to help separated, divorced, and widowed people to work through their pain and grief, provide a safe space for them to work through their emotional healing and begin a process of self-awareness, and ultimately to free them to live again and love themselves, others and God. It is, at heart, a faith-based peer ministry, organized and led by former B.E. participants (of various Christian denominations) who have undergone some training and have become lay facilitators to help the newer participants through the first steps of the grief and healing process. I went because I had never dealt with my guilt and anger over the failure of my 2-1/2 year marriage in 1991.

B.E. consists of retreat weekends, as well as a weekly "levels" program, levels 1 through 4 of weekly classes. Lower levels focus on the failed/ended relatonship; upper levels tend to focus more on self-awareness and personal growth. After a participant completes level 4, there is a Level 5 available: Enneagram workshops.

I attended two 10-week sessions during 1997-1998 as part of a group of about 20 B.E. facilitators. Our workshop leader was a tiny French-Canadian Roman Catholic nun called Sister Thérèse, a member of the Holy Cross religious community and a co-founder of Contemplative Outreach Canada. I took lots of notes during the sessions, and put them away in a binder, along with my Myers-Briggs personality type stuff, etc. I had to put the Enneagram aside to deal with more pressing matters (i.e. burning out of my job AND coming out the closet to myself). I had other, much more serious, things to worry about than some silly personality system.

Last year, I decided to pull out my 1997/1998 Enneagram workshop notes and read through them again, and I was surprised at how much wisdom there was in what Sister Thérèse had said, and how that fit in with my previous readings on self-awareness (Anthony de Mello, for example). So I made the decision to contact her again. I have since been talking with her regularly as a sort of spiritual counsellor or "guru". I have learned a lot more about the Enneagram along the way, from Sr. Thérèse and from my readings, and what follows is my (admittedly amateur) attempt to explain "what's it all about":

Eudaemonia: Happiness is Flow; and a Comparison of Virtues

Quote from an interview with Dr. Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association (from The Edge):

The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.

The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more—recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life.

Coming out this month as part of the DSM is a classification of strengths and virtues; it's the opposite of the classification of the insanities. When we look we see that there are six virtues, which we find endorsed across cultures, and these break down into 24 strengths. The six virtues that we find are non-arbitrary—first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster. We sent people up to northern Greenland, and down to the Masai, and are involved in a 70-nation study in which we look at the ubiquity of these. Indeed, we're beginning to have the view that those six virtues are just as much a part of human nature as walking on two feet are.

Fascinating reflections. As an exercise, I tried to see if I could create links between the Nine Virtues of the Enneagram, and the six virtues enumerated by Dr. Seligman:

• "first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster": I belive this would correlate to the Enneagram Four (the artist) and the Enneagram Five (the thinker, the investigator, the innovator, the troubleshooter).
  
• "second, a courage cluster": Courage is the virtue of the Enneagram Six. This could also be said to apply to the Enneagram Eight (the challenger, the leader type).
  
• "third, virtues like love and humanity": This is the domain of the Enneagram Two (the lover, the caretaker, the altruist).
  
• "fourth, a justice cluster": This is clearly in the domain of the Enneagram One (the reformer, crusader, activist, and moralist type) and also the Enneagram Three (whose virtue is Veracity or Truth).
  
• "fifth a temperance, moderation cluster": Sobriety is the virtue of the Enneagram Seven.
  
• "and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster": This is the Enneagram Nine (the optimist, the reconciler, the peacemaker and peace-seeker, the utopian), that which encompasses and includes all of the other types.
  

Wow, the two sets of virtues actually correlate well with each other.

Epiphanies

Sedalina has opted to reclaim the original name for her blog: Plain Layne. And in this post Layne talks about epiphanies: "waking up" and finding things out about yourself that you couldn't/wouldn't see before, significant things that require you to do the work to change them (which is the hard part :-)...

I am willing to bet money that Layne's an Enneagram Two: The Helper personality type. A lot of how she talks about herself and her realtionships just clicks with me (another Enneagram Two): Twos define themselves by the network of relationships around them; they define themselves through other people's eyes. And Layne's epiphany is that she is starting to see the downside of this approach, this stance, to her life and her world.

Four Stages of Spiritual Growth

Snippets of an interesting discussion held last year on the Enneagram Institute discussion board (the wonderful conversations that sometimes spring up being one of the reasons I like to hang out there).

I wanted to post this to my blog because of my brother's family's recent decision to join a local church, and my experiences of the past six years, leaving one church and joining another. Peck's Four Stages of Spiritual Growth provide an explanation of why some people grow by joining a church (mosque, synagogue, etc.), and why other people grow by leaving:

Ryan: "(This) has led me to recall something that I had read by M. Scott Peck about the four stages of spiritual growth about 15 years ago when I was still living in Toronto.

I googled and found this Web page, which is an excellent summary of Peck's theory. The Web page is:

http://www.escapefromwatchtower.com/stages.html

(NOTE: Please travel the escapefromwatchtower site as you see fit for yourself; it appears to be mostly anti-Watchtower ranting from a disgruntled former Jehovah's Witness; I am only interested in this particular page from that Web site and its summary of Peck's theory.)

Peck's theory of the stages of spiritual growth intuitively makes sense to me, and although I never stopped going to church, I felt that I have been in a spiritual "dry spell" for quite some time (I think I kept up with the church going more for a sense of community and for appearance's sake than for spiritual reasons).

I think, that with my recent work with the Enneagram and with my experiences with healing touch, I am slowly moving from Stage 3 (skeptic) to Stage 4 (mystic). Then again, I might be moving back from Stage 3 to Stage 2 for all I know.

Any comments on this page and Peck's theories? What stage would you say you were at? Your thoughts and feelings, about your own experience/journey? And what would you think is the best way to raise children so that they go through these stages naturally, and not get "stuck" somewhere along the way (like Stage 2 for example, I know quite a few people who are stuck there, either in a fundamentalist religion or cult)."

The Nine Passions and Nine Virtues

I have been tinkering around with the Moveable Type (MT) software all week, and I can understand why it has so many fans. It's very configurable and powerful software, and even though it lacks some of the features of other blog software like blogger and LiveJournal, I'm going to stick with it. There is still lots that I haven't investigated yet, notably how to change the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to overhaul the design of the Web site. I had found a Web site caled Moveable Style (I think) that illustrated this feature nicely, but I've lost the URL.

Oh no, wait, I've found it! Check this out: Moveable Style, which brilliantly demonstrates how you can make dramatic changes to the layout of your blog just by adjusting your CSS. Cool.

Anyway, one of the features of MT is the ablity to assign your entries to one or more named categories. It can be an interesting exercise to see how your life divides up into categories; everybody seems to have their own way of splitting life up into little boxes, don't they?

This past summer I attended a particularly funny one-man show as part of the 2003 Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival. The show, Seven Sins, was written and performed by the openly gay American standup comedian James Judd, and featured vignettes from his eclectic and bizarre life and career experiences, demonstrating each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn, to sell-out crowds at the Festival. And Judd has had a rich life to mine for material: at various times he has been a grape farmer, a criminal defense attorney, and an editor of a technology magazine during the height of the dot.com boom.

This got me to thinking: hey, I could use the same sort of thing to organize quite a few of my posts. But of course, I had to change things a bit, given that I've been studying the Enneagram for a full year now:

The Enneagram (pronounced "ANY-a-gram") is a geometric figure that maps out the nine fundamental personality types of human nature and their complex interrelationships. It is a development of modern psychology that has roots in spiritual wisdom from many different ancient traditions.    (Riso, Don Richard.  The Wisdom of the Enneagram.   Bantam, 1999.  p.10)

The Enneagram, as "an ancient tradition of remembering the nine Divine attributes as they are reflected in human nature" (Riso, p. 22), found their way into the Christian tradition in a flipped way; the opposites of the Divine attributes became the basis for the Seven Deadly Sins, or Capital Sins, or Passions.

So I went and created categories, not for the Seven Deadly Sins, but for the seven sins plus two (fear and deceit) which comprise the Nine Passions of the Enneagram:

1. Anger (Resentment)
2. Pride (Vainglory: pride in one's own virtue), associated with Flattery
3. Deceit (Lying, Arrogance), associated with Vanity and the Ego
4. Envy, associated with Melancholy
5. Avarice (Greed), associated with Stinginess
6. Fear, associated with Cowardice
7. Gluttony (not just for food, but for all positive, stimulating experiences), associated with (Over-)Planning
8. Lust (for intensity, power and control; does not refer only to sexual lust), associated with Vengeance and Revenge
9. Sloth (Indolence, Laziness)