I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Samantha Mackay on her Youtube channel. Samantha and I talked about how knowing our Enneagram type can help us recover from burnout.
Watch the video or scroll down for the transcript.
Healing Burnout With The Enneagram
Samantha: This conversation is jam packed with insights and tools and beautiful metaphors that will help you on your journey for healing with burnout and avoiding burnout in the future. And even if you've never burned out, it will help you support someone who has, or who is recovering today. I'm talking with Joanne Kim of OliveMe Counseling, a marriage and family therapist based in California. She's a Certified Brainspotting practitioner and Enneagram trained professional. We talk about the five main feelings. The fifth one might surprise you and the surprising feeling we need to access more often to help us shift out of burnout and the five things we need more of to help nourish ourselves and support our recovery. And we talked about which one each center of intelligence needed to do more of or to focus or prioritize on. Now there are a lot of links in the notes to get more information to help you connect with Joanne. And let me know in the comments, which metaphor or framework you love the most, and they're going to start using in your life. All right, that's it. Enjoy.
Samantha: So we're talking about burnout and how we can heal it with the Enneagram. It may be that a good place to start is what is burnout? Like, and how do we know that we have it?
Joanne: I think one signal for burnout is that we've just exhausted our reserves. That when we had more energy, we operate one way. And then when we burnt out, it has all the spiky stuff that we're usually not proud of. So as a therapist, I usually work with people around their emotions and our emotions. I'm biased. I'm a four. Like I do a lot of feelings work, but I believe that each emotion has its own message behind it. Our emotions are supposed to tell us what we need at the end of the day. But if we label some feelings as good and others as bad, then we kind of get all tangled up. And burnout is one outcome where we've played favorites with our feelings so much so that we get all tangled up and stuck. And then on top of that, we get frustrated at ourselves, frustrated at other people. So I think anger is probably a really central emotion when it comes to burnout because usually anger is a very active, dynamic, powerful emotion. Once you use up all your resources, you're usually left with the other ones. Anxiety, numbness, sadness, loneliness, partially because in our burnt out state, we make a lot of decisions that cause more problems for us to have to clean up.
Samantha: It's really interesting the way you, you frame it all within that realm of emotions, because I remember when I was burnt out the second time, I was just exhausted, I'd taken a job that I had loved and stopped caring. And when I, when I resigned to essentially go and sleep for three months, they offered me what then was my dream job. And I just, I couldn't care about it. I couldn't, I couldn't find any, any emotion to get excited, to come back from the brink, um, there.
Joanne: Well, the, there's a possibility that the emotion that you were feeling a lot of back then was numbness. I asked people like, what are you feeling right now? And often people say, well, I don't feel anything. I usually then follow up with the question, is it that you don't feel anything in particular or that you feel numb because numbness is the presence of a specific feeling. And so like chafing, you know, when our skin keeps rubbing against the same part over and over again until it's like rub raw, right. Numbness kind of kicks in to help reduce it constantly being activated, right? Constantly being stimulated or triggered. And so part of burnout is we've exhausted our resources in overly focusing, overly working, overly paying attention to things that we just can’t anymore. So numbness comes in. It's a very protective thing. It's so that we don't continue to expend more energy, but numbness is sometimes seen as a problem. You see someone sitting on a bench just staring off into space and you're like, are they okay? Hey, wake up. Come back, right? We kind of shake people out of that state because sometimes we're uncomfortable with people being in a flat state But maybe that's our body's way of trying to actually help us in that instead of us needing more, more stimulation, more activity, more intensity, maybe we actually need less. If we give ourselves less to give our bodies a chance to recover, then I think naturally our faculties will come back online, will be present again, and we'll be able to enjoy things. What you're describing when you said, you know, like they offered me a position that was my dream job and I just wasn't interested, There's a term called anhedonia that is one, it's actually one particular marker of depression or burnout. Hedonia, that's kind of where we get the word hedonic pleasure, right? So anhedonia means no pleasure. It's the state that person gets into where they don't feel joy over things that really used to excite them, probably because their nervous system has been so bombarded already.
Samantha: It's so interesting because that's a seven. You know, it's all about pleasure. And it's so interesting to think that at some point there is just no capacity for pleasure anymore. It's um, that's fascinating. So I'm gonna turn to the types in just a second, but I want to just call out what you said, that numbness is a protection mechanism. And I think that's really important because most of us think numb is bad, but I think one of the most pivotal moments in working with my therapist was when she said, could you be numb? Could you be feeling numb? And I'm like, Oh, I feel numb all the time. This is just my state of being. And having lived in that state for such a long time, it was amazing to have a reframe for it. That was so helpful.
Joanne: Yeah. I mean, I think about numbness kind of being like a styling back on our sauces in food. One of my favorite foods is sushi, Japanese food. And one of the things I love about Japanese food is that it's not centered around heavy sauces. It's more down to the freshness of the ingredients themselves. I live in the United States where like most of the restaurants here, they constantly just like douse their salads, their meats, everything in like such intense flavors. And then they accompany that with like extra cocktails or other things that just keeps adding more intensity. And some of the close people, um, in my life, that's what they gravitate towards, because that's what their taste buds are used to. And so when it comes to them eating Japanese food, it's like a taste test. Very bland and boring. And so it's taken me some time as a way of connecting with my body to actually practice cutting out flavors, reducing the amount of sugar I put in my coffee, dialing it back on the sauces, drinking tea without any extra additives into it. And then like noticing like, Oh, there's actually a lot going on here. There's a lot of subtlety to it. That totally got missed, buried under all the extra stuff that we do, but that's basically what we do in our day to day life lots of activities, full schedules, you know adding TV shows that are about like murder mysteries that keep us up until you know late at night because of all these cliffhangers.
Breaking the Cycle: Embracing Silence, Stillness, and Solitude to Reconnect with Yourself
Samantha: I'm thinking as a head type, I need to learn some more, and I can imagine for heart types, I've got to keep relating, I've got to keep connecting, and body types, I've got to keep doing. And we get stuck in those, that, those false, you know, narratives, um, that we don't realize add intensity into our system, that are extra source.
Joanne: Yup. And so one of the main things that I teach my therapy and coaching clients, they usually reach out to me because they're so good at focusing on and taking care of other people's needs that they forget their own until they get so resentful that they just can't take it anymore. And so one of the first things that I teach them is about numbness. As I've shared with you, that numbness is not the absence of feelings, but it's the presence of a very specific emotion. And then they're like, Oh yeah, that's what I feel all the time. And then the concrete step is to focus on one of the Five S's of Less. Okay. These are Silence, Stillness, Solitude, Simplicity, and Space.
These are the different ways by which we can dial back and all the ways that we're constantly bombarding ourselves. But three of those things, silence, solitude, and stillness correspond with the triads of the Enneagram. Silence for head types, lots of chatter going on. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many possibilities or options. Solitude for hard types. And dialing it back, spending time by oneself to oneself for oneself, instead of constantly focusing on other people's experiences, stillness for body types, because there's constantly a lot of activity and busyness. Busyness is seen as a badge of honor, especially in my part of the world, in the Silicon Valley. These three things are also described in a lot of different spiritual or faith traditions. Like they've been talked about for thousands of years, maybe. And the Enneagram has also been talked about for thousands of years. Right. And so it's like, it's no wonder that, you know, a lot of human existence is us just trying to learn the basics all over again. And it's just not quite getting, making its way in.
Samantha: And it seems ridiculous that it's so hard to learn the basics and yet is our daily struggle. So when I took those three months off work, you basically described those five things exactly what I had unintentionally. So I did have an extremely long list of things I was going to do every day. And thankfully I had a mentor who said to me, write them all down, but only do exactly what you like you and your body feels like in the moment. And literally all I did was sleep. I would occasionally eat and occasionally go for walks. I didn't watch TV. I didn't read books. I didn't do yoga. Like I didn't do the massive list of things. And it's still even with that three months. And then I sort of started to slowly work again, still took another two years before I could work full time. And even on those first few weeks and months and years, I could still only work a few hours a week in terms of providing that focus because I still need so much of those five things. Cause I'd been denying them for myself for so long.
Joanne: Yeah, I kind of think of them as items on a menu. Take your pick. What's on your, what's on your plate today?
Samantha: Yeah. And if you push it, you'll have to do all five at once.
Joanne: I mean, we're trying to do less here, not more. I get it. I mean, so I think one of the, main instincts that tend to show up in my practice, I get a lot of folks who are self pressed dominant who are so good at trying to optimize and hyper optimize, like how can I cram the most stuff in the shortest period of time, go for efficacy and efficiency? It's the trap of optimization in that the more we try to optimize, the less efficient we get. I mean, this is, you've heard of instances where, you know, multitasking is not effective, but it happens so easily for a good number of us like it's just reflex like thinking I need to get I need to go to the grocery store to grab some milk, on my way to the grocery store I'll also pass by the post office and I'll also stop by the you know other store where I need to return something and then somehow a single task of getting milk from the grocery store becoms like five or six things and then I'm frustrated because people won't drive fast enough in front of me. So I was like, where did this frustration come from? It came out of nowhere. It came out of thin air, but really is the expectations that I placed on myself. For what reason? I don't even remember anymore because it's part of my autopilot and being self pressed dominant person. And so that's one of the things that I also share with them. It's like, well, Could it be possible that you try to optimize is actually what's leading to anti-optimization? If that's the case, would it be the case that you focusing on one thing at a time might actually make you quicker? Can we just take things off your plate? Focus on that one thing at a time. A lot of my clients hate it. They're like, why?
Samantha: Well, and I feel like getting so burnt out and getting so sick forced me to have to focus on one thing at a time. And yet I've noticed the past couple of weeks that actually multitasking has started to look different from what I expected. And so it's sneaky how it creeps back in, even when you think you've done like a lot of work on it.
Joanne: So when it comes to our own personal inner work, like, uh, my Enneagram teachers like mentioning that we have to be extra vigilant in constantly looking out for how our Enneagram autopilot will try to sneak its, sneakily sneak its way back in. And then we're all of a sudden tangled back right back up again. Mm. So sneaky.
Samantha: So you mainly see nines, ones, twos and fours. Is that right? In your practice? And so like, what are some of the like differences that you see in terms of what burnout can look like? Because I know some people think, well, nines, they're so slothlike how could they possibly have burnout? But they're such hard workers. I'm curious about that. And then, you know how the different types can start to focus on one of those five S's. And how they can start to be a little more inefficient.
Joanne: Yeah, so the reason why I work with nines, ones, twos, and fours is because on the Enneagram Diagram, they're the right side of that circle. Nines kind of straddle it at the top. But I've heard in some resources that the right side of the symbol is called the Social or the Prosocial types, and then the left side being called the antisocial types. Hmm. And the difference is that prosocial types tend to have their own patterns that are often oriented around going along with other people. Whereas antisocial types tend to do things more independently of others or sometimes even against other people. So because that's what's built into the type structure, the reason why those who are on the right side of the Enneagram tend to get burnt out is because they constantly orient themselves around other people or things outside of them. You know, focusing on other people's experiences, their feelings, their needs. Like you can see 9s, 1s, 2s, 4s are kind of the exception to the rule, but like in a lot of ways, nines and twos just generally focusing their attention outside of themselves forgetting themselves their own wants and needs. Twos they might think about their own needs, but kind of in after they already get resentful about it and not having it reciprocated in their relationships. Ones often repressing their own wants and needs because they think their needs are bad and trying to be a good person whatever that means to the point where they just paint themselves as a dead corner and they find out they have needs anyway. And then, fours, fours tend to focus on other people, but in opposition. So on the surface, it seems like they're the ones where they don't care about what other people think. They absolutely care about what other people think, but they just try to define themselves as opposite. And so they also get burnt out. In that there's no central anchor point in them being connected to who they inherently are, image type. And so all four of them, I mean, I would work with threes too, if they thought that therapy was useful. I don't often see them. Uh, but in, in the way that the prosocial types, their types often and, blurring distinctions between themselves and others, they blur the boundaries. So, it's like we're ones. I am not myself, but I am someone who fills a specific role in a collective. I am known for my position, for my power, my responsibility, my actions, the consequences. I don't have any sense of inherent individuality. I am a cog in a bigger machine. Like that's just kind of generally how I think ones operate. And so there's a lot of guilt in even admitting that they're exhausted and they have needs because they should be doing more, you know, twos also feeling similarly, but more for relationship reasons. It's like, well, what if they don't like me anymore? Type of thing. There's a lot of anxiety that keeps people focused outside of themselves. Until they get burnt out, they get resentful, shit hits the fan, things break, and then they, you know, reach out to a therapist like myself, and they're like, I don't, I don't know why I keep doing this to myself, right? And some of them, they already know their Enneagram type, and so we can just jump right in as to how their type shows up in different ways. Some of them are like, I don't even know why I keep doing this to myself. And it's like a whole like eye-opening experience for them to realize that autopilots exist and that they happen to have a specific autopilot. So in terms of all four of those types, probably solitude is the main thing for nines and twos. As the others referencing types. Nines, especially like with sloth, you might see this less in self presence, but more social sexual lines that are inherently people oriented, where if they don't have anyone to merge to, they're just kind of floating aimlessly and there's no movement. Right. But that's precisely why they need to spend time away from agendas being implemented from other people and more to themselves. Um, ones probably could benefit from stillness and silence and quieting the shoulds instead of thinking of shoulds. It's, you know, the idealist types ones, fours and sevens are like, well, things, how things should be, how things could be, how things could have been versus thinking of how things are for, you know, how, how they just are, right? So for ones and fours, focusing on what's present, what exists already, instead of looking towards a potential or hypothetical possibility. Simplicity, ones and fours probably could use a lot of that because they make things way too complicated. Um, and space, I like thinking of space, like, yeah, uh, opposite of clutter, just having constant things around and just needing even physical room, literally going outside in nature, standing under the big sky, seeing oneself as a small, tiny speck in the larger universe, I think ones, twos and fours could really benefit from that because in our different ways, we think of ourselves as so important. So, those are just a little bit of different examples of how the five S's would kind of integrate for each person according to their type.
Escaping Autopilot: How Caring Too Much Can Lead to Burnout and Numbness
Samantha: And it's so interesting how that autopilot really creates that pattern of setting aside feelings, not tending to the things that are difficult. Or in the fourth case wallowing in those feelings, but yeah, you know, all the self pressure can equally just not pay attention to them. And just thinking about how we started this conversation about how there is all these feelings and we need the information that they're bringing us. And when we're just too busy or just too on autopilot or caught up with all the, the thoughts that are saying we should do this and we have to do that, those feelings don't get heard Because I wouldn't have thought of burnout as being not having the time to tend to or listen to our feelings coming up and that just and they bottling up till we get numb I'm just finding that connection fascinating and seeing that all come together in that way because I think it's easy to think of burnout is I've just done too much as opposed to I've cared too much.
Joanne: So there's a couple different terms. There's compassion fatigue. There's vicarious trauma. There's my favorite term, ruinous empathy or empathy gone too far. Kim Scott in her book, Radical Candor, fantastic. I would highly recommend it, but again, pro social types, giving too much of a damn about lots of different things. I mean nines kind of might have an easier time because part of their autopilot is to be in numbness - the narcotization right the checking out But in some ways all those types need to care less about whatever the types focus on and to care more about things that are in the blind spot. It's just that it just so happens that for all four of them what's in their blind spot is their own needs and wants. So I like talking in general. When I introduce emotions, I talk about what I call the big five feelings, mad, sad, glad, scared, numb. Obviously, there are more feelings than that. Yeah, but you add numb into the big five. That's really interesting. Okay. And part of the reason for that is I mean, anger, sadness, joy, fear. Those are usually mentioned when people talk about the main emotions, but I swapped out disgust for numb because numb is the presence of an actual feeling instead of the absence of them. And I like thinking of these as a set. They go hand in hand. For example, anger is a very present tense, action oriented, expansive, powerful emotion. Sadness is more focused on the past and what could have been. In a very low energy, more contemplative, kind of heart driven space, joy being the emotion that says that things are good and they're available in their presence right now. Anxiety that's pointing towards the future of what could be, but towards the negative and also very active emotion, but it usually makes a person feel Seems smaller, whereas anger makes them seem bigger and then numbness, which is like, I don't care about anything. I'm going to dampen all of these guys. Right. And so when it comes to burnout, usually the main emotions in question are anger and numbness. I mentioned why numbness is the case because we've given too much of ourselves and we just don't have anything left in the tank. Right. Or we've gone through too many experiences in a short period of time and our nervous system is completely fried. What we don't think about is that anger is actually something that we need more of, not less, when we're burnt out. But it's not anger being frustrated towards other people, because people usually think of anger as a bad emotion. Like, oh, we shouldn't be angry. Whereas anger actually says, this really fucking matters. Numbness says nothing matters. Right? So the opposite of that is like, you know, this specific thing or I or that other person really matters and that what's happening to that person needs to change now. There's a sense of urgency and the, um, requirement for major shifts to happen agency action will all that. So when we get to a point of burnout, we're not in a place to feel sadness, joy, anxiety, because we're checked out. Right. But we can't stay in the state in this space for very long because we still have things like life still continues even when we're burnt out, right? We need to actually use anger, see it as a potential good emotion and use it on our behalf so that we're not in a position where our body needs to summon numbness for us. If we had tapped into the fiery, vibrant, creative energy of anger in the first place. as pro-social type, we would not have been in a place where our needs were running on empty, that our own experiences were missed by other people. We would actually speak on behalf of ourselves. We would address situations where we are unfavored or looked over or taken advantage of. So I would think of burnout as being the outcome of us having done, underly having done anger, not doing it too much. And so in addition to us actually doing nothing, we need to actually start connecting with that creative energy again.
Samantha: I love how you call anger creative energy, that those things are rarely paired together, but I can really see how powerful that is. And my first thought was, It's not okay to be angry on your behalf. Like it's okay to be angry on other's behalf, but it's really hard to summon that energy on your own behalf. Cause I, as I think back to what led me to be burnout, I couldn't have expressed anger at other people, but you're right, I could have generated some anger on my behalf and led me to make different choices.
Joanne: Yeah. And I've come to this conclusion in my own Enneagram work, because I am a four who's self preservation instinct dominant and sexual repressed and I had a lot of biases against the sexual instinct and I think that instinct itself is probably the most directly connected to anger. The sexual instinct is also connected to spontaneity, intensity, what's wild, what's vibrant, what's fun, exciting, things like that. Whereas a self pressed dominant person, I kind of clamp it all down. Right. And so as I started summoning my own repressed instinct, the sexual instincts and started tapping into more of my anchor, it's like, well, I don't have as much buildup of those other feelings anymore because my needs are getting met more directly instead of in a roundabout way, instead of me constantly exhausting myself, feeling like I have to prove that I deserve goodness. As if I don't already deserve goodness, right? And so anger was probably one of the most healing emotions to connect with. That was a huge surprise to me. I'm like, what do you mean I'm supposed to do anger more? I want to do it less.
Samantha: I want to do as little as possible. It's so funny. It reminds me one time I was in this Martial arts class and I was hitting something and they said, imagine it's a person's face and boy, did I get so much more focused and I had energy that just, I didn't know I had the second I put someone's face in it.Yeah. I think it's, it is really important to reframe and re-understand what anger is because most of us think of it as rage. And yet it's simply an ability to stand up for ourselves and others, but anger can be extremely quiet. It just has this presence. It's grounded. It's focused, it's clear, it's direct. It doesn't have to be loud and critical or violent in any way.
Joanne: No, I think violent, the violent explosive type of anger is most likely to happen when we don't give anger its rightful place to show up. Like if there were adequate opportunities for us to speak up about what we're needing directly. Actually, the tone of anger can sound like, Hey, can I get my stapler back? It becomes big because it's repressed and then it goes underground and it comes out the black market. There's just one more piece is that I think in just studying different aspects of the Enneagram - those who have a sexual dominant instinct probably get unfairly pegged as being too much, too bad, too intense, too angry, too whatever But I mean i'm speaking as someone who's not sexual dominant I think sexual dominant folks probably get too much flack that they actually need to be seen with respect. And we need to know what value they bring to this world, that those who are sexually repressed, especially, need to actually do more of, not less.
Samantha: Completely. And the more I spend time with people whose Enneagram type I know, when they say something that I, that is really unexpected to me, I'm able to value it a lot more. You know, when a six says you should question that, I'd be like, no, no, it's fine. I I'll just take it. It's great. And I'm like, well, maybe. Maybe I should question that. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, you know, and it's, I'm finding that really useful because each type, each dominant instinct brings its own value, even though it brings its own autopilot. It brings value and we can learn so much from other people, even Um, as we're all doing our inner work to tame those instincts, calm those autopilots. So the thing I wanted to ask about is the caring too much piece and learning how to care less, because when I was going through that, it felt like a part of me had to die to start caring, to stop caring about the things I was cared about so much. And it was a really difficult reframe because I thought if I stopped caring about these things, who am I? What am I, what's left if I stop caring so much? And so I'm curious how you might help types make that shift.
When Growth Disrupts: How Personal Development Challenges Relationship Dynamics and Autopilot Tendencies
Joanne: Well, in all the types, I think of all the types as archetypes of the universal human experience. We resonate with a little bit about all the types. We just get stuck in one. It's the one that's most familiar. So much so that we just assume that's the default. And we see this, especially in relationships where different types tend to be drawn towards each other. And oftentimes they're like the types that share a line on the arrows path, right? Or wings even. Right? I think that the things that we value in our types are probably ways by which we outsource to someone else things that we actually need to do for ourselves. So, I'll give you type 2 and type 8 as an example. Type 2s. They care so much about other people in their autopilot when actually they actually need to take some of that care towards others and direct it towards themselves so that they get their needs met more directly instead of through another person. But it's as if them caring for themselves is bad, therefore they need to go about this in a direct way. Type 8s. Type 8s are known to really value strength and power, or at least not being vulnerable. But they outsource, they, they lop off their vulnerability. and they project it onto someone else, making someone else seem smaller and weaker than they actually are, and thereby making themselves feel bigger and stronger than they actually are. And so they're usually going together in a set, because often apes need someone to protect. Right. Right. And so, in a sense, like, we hear of instances where opposites attract. Well, part of the reason why they might attract each other is because each person is outsourcing to the other person what they ought to do for themselves. A lot of 2 5 combos in relationships. Right. And so at a certain point, when there are these relationships formed, there isn't a huge problem that happens when one person starts growing. When a person starts healing and starts doing their work, they give away things that they have no business taking on, like other people's responsibilities. And then they take back what's rightfully theirs, like their own power and voice. Well, what happens if you have equilibrium between these two people and then one person starts changing? Well, that's gonna completely disrupt the whole thing. And so often there's pushback because this person's like, well, what are you doing? You're supposed to stay in your position because that's the agreement that we made, right? And so when it comes to caring too much, it's not clear whether what we care about is actually what we, in our essence, care about, or what our autopilots care about. It's not clear whether eyes of four really value authenticity, or the type four values authenticity.and I need to recognize how I have my autopilot, but I'm not my auto, but there's some space that I need to create more distance from. And so when people do their personal work, there's a huge portion of it where everything is turned upside down and people don't know which side is up anymore. It's like, what do you mean? I'm supposed to like practice anger on purpose. Like I thought anger was a bad emotion. That's supposed to be like super destructive. Like, what do you mean? I'm supposed to do the very thing that I've vowed to stay as far away from. What do you mean? I'm supposed to have boundaries. Like, that's being selfish, like, you know, there's a lot of turmoil and resistance and the dissonance is actually probably a marker that people are growing. So I usually at this point encourage them, it's like, you're going in the right direction. It's just going to feel like crap for a long time.
Samantha: Yeah. And to be able to ask those questions and even to recognize that there is a paradox and there is things out of alignment is, yeah.
Joanne: So I like thinking about our autopilot, like someone who's about to get laid off, they're about to lose their job and they're freaking out. So they start creating all these problems that it knows how to solve so that it stays employed. I think that's what our Enneagram type ego structure is like. So instead of us judging ourselves, like, why do I keep finding myself in the same situation over and over again? I can't get out of it. And then they judge themselves like, no, there's an active second party with its own agenda and its own desire. Its agenda is to keep you in autopilot in the ego. This other person has an agenda for you to not notice what it's doing, but for you to judge yourself instead. So once we think about, Oh, There's another entity that is trying to get me to do something. Okay. Let me turn on my inner rebel and create some space and some boundaries with my own type so that I can find out who I really am. So it's a lot of cloudy mind work for a lot of people in their process.
Samantha: I love that explanation of the, the type is someone who's about to get fired and working really hard to stay employed, and to conjure your inner rebel. Like, I love these two little metaphors. They're fantastic.
Reclaiming Joy: How Building a 'Fuck-It' List Can Heal Burnout and Reconnect You with Your Inner Child
Joanne: I mean, in psychology, we call that externalizing. We need to put that outside of ourselves instead of thinking that it's a part of us and who we truly are. And so once people start. thinking that there's a whole way of living, then it just opens all these possibilities. But in order to get there, there's going to be a huge section of that path where it's going to feel like we're going in the opposite direction and that's okay. Keep going instead of stopping. But this is why I don't blame people for wanting to stay in their ego. It is everyone's personal decision as to whether or not to pursue this path. And so I'm very thankful when people do, but I also don't blame people for not doing so.
Samantha: Yeah, that autopilot works pretty hard and it can be hard to see it in action. So just, just wrapping up on burnout and all those feelings we can't access and needing to get into anger more to like advocate on our own behalves and what we need and also the solitude, silence, space.
Joanne: Stillness. Simplicity. Yeah. Stillness and simplicity. I'll, I'll give you the link to the blog so that there's a quick link. Perfect. It's all listed in there.
Samantha: Okay. Awesome. Any, uh, final thoughts or words on healing burnout with the Enneagram?
Joanne: Ooh. Um, one of my favorite activities I recommend is for people to build a Fuck It List. This is a list, not of all the things that people want to do before they die, like bucket lists operate, but a fuck it list is a list of all the things that they never gave themselves permission to do, but they really wanted to do growing up. This is learning how to tap into our inner children. Again, because a lot of the pro-social types are ones that grew up way too quickly. So they lost a lot of that innocence, that carefreeness, the inherent sense of their own goodness. And a lot of sense learning from a lot of our sevens, right? Tapping into joy, purity, ease to kind of offset the hard work that gets them to a place of burnout in the first place. So one of mine was to get a tattoo or to go watch a movie by myself in the theater. It doesn't have to be super intense. Instead of looking for permission from the outside, doing it.
Samantha: I like it. It doesn't have to be super intense. And yet going to the movies by ourselves can be a super intense experience. You know, you don't have to go jump off a cliff. To do some deep inner work, you know, and sit in that discomfort of doing something that you've never had permission to do before.
Joanne: Simplicity. Simplicity. Thank you so much for taking me through all this today. Thank you for having me here.
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SAMANTHA MACKAY
Samantha Mackay is an Enneagram coach certified by Chestnut Paes Enneagram Academy. She has spent 15 years healing from chronic stress, anxiety, depression, pain, an autoimmune condition and, more recently, trauma.
She believes that understanding the role of our ego in our healing is key. Samantha helps people reclaim their inner wellbeing through the wisdom of the Enneagram. For their bodies, for their work and for our relationships with others, at home and at work.
Learn more about her here.
I was a panelist at the EnneaSummit 2024 for the Enneagram Practitioner Panel.
In this panel, we share our experiences and observations about what different Enneagram types think they need in therapy, what they actually need, and some important growth steps so they can grow beyond their type.