The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types (Part 1: Introduction)
Joanne Kim (OliveMe Counseling) & Melinda Olsen (Inviterra Counseling) are Enneagram therapists who love helping people grow beyond their reactive patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing.
Our Enneagram type patterns used to be helpful when we were actually vulnerable and powerless (often in childhood), but when we grew up, our autopilot patterns didn't update accordingly. What used to be our greatest strengths eventually become some of our greatest liabilities.
In this 4-part series on The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types, learn about:
Why emotions are important for personal growth, relationships, and professional development.
What the BIG 5 Feelings are.
Why feelings are important for Enneagram inner work.
The main emotions for each of the three Centers of Intelligence (Body, Heart, Head)
An overview of the three instincts (SP, SO, SX).
Watch the video below for Part 1: Introduction (or keep scrolling past the downloadables for the transcript!)
Downloadables
Grab each of these guides separately!
Video Transcript
Melinda: Sup, everybody. What's up, Joanne? How are you doing today?
Joanne: Good! Good to see all of you on the other side of the screen. My name is Joanne from OliveMe Counseling, and this is my lovely BFF, work wife, Melinda Olsen from Inviterra Counseling. We are both Enneagram Therapists here in Silicon Valley, and we are super excited to share with you about our topic today which is the emotional habits of Enneagram Types.
Melinda: Wooh!
Why Feelings Matter for Personal Growth
Joanne: Generally, why emotions are important is that they're super important sources of information for us. They're essential for our personal growth, our relationships and also, surprisingly, our professional development in terms of you finding out what really matters to you, what trajectory you want to take in life.
A side product that I'm doing is called Intelligent Emotions. I do cover the basis of how feelings operate and actually that each feeling has its own corresponding themes, messages, action steps, etc. So, we're going to be integrating the Enneagram, the Nine Types of the Enneagram, with what I call the BIG 5 Feelings: MAD, SAD, GLAD, SCARED, and NUMB, and how each Type basically does each of these guys. For the sake of this particular video we're going to add one extra piece in the BIG 5 and it's SHAME.
If I had a sixth finger then it will be BIG 6 feelings with SHAME attached. It's super important of a topic, but it has some extra nuance information, especially when it comes to identity, authenticity, relationships, et cetera, which is a very central theme for the Heart Types, Twos, Threes, and Fours.
So I'm going to add, MAD, SAD, and SHAME, GLAD, SCARED, and NUMB. We're going to be covering each of the Nine Types in triads, Body Types, Heart Types, and then Head Types.
Why Emotions Matter for Enneagram Growth Work
Melinda: I don't think Enneagram work can happen without us exploring our feelings.
Every type does feelings in a different way, as Joanne mentioned. For example, y'all who are in the Heart Triad, Twos, Threes, and Fours, don't think you're getting out of this. Though we do feelings a lot, and we have our own relationships with feelings, it doesn't mean we do them well. We can attest to that.
Joanne: She's a Type Two. I'm a Type Four. We got a lot of feelings between the two of us.
Melinda: I say we're recovering types. So, don't think that we're letting you off the hook. In fact, all of us have a lot of work to do with emotions and the Enneagram. That's how we actually do the deeper work of the Enneagram, which is what I jam on. It's so important.
Let's talk about how each Type, or at least in the Triad, kind of engages emotions. What we've found is there's one Type that either overdoes the emotion, there's a Type that underdoes the emotion, and then there's a Type that has a conflicted relationship with the emotion and internally that can feel like a chaotic relationship with emotion.
So if we think about the Heart Triad, right? And we talk about sadness and shame, right? We have Type Fours that overdue sadness and shame. We have Type Threes that really don't keep in touch with sadness or shame. And we have Type Twos who, if I can say so myself, we have a conflicted relationship or a chaotic relationship with sadness and shame, and we found this similar pattern with every Triad. We think it's important to talk about that.
Joanne: One piece we forgot to mention is that each center of intelligence has its own corresponding thematic feeling. The Body Types, Eights, Nines and Ones have a particular relationship with anger. Heart Types, Twos, Threes, and Fours have a particular relationship with sadness and shame. Head Types, Fives, Sixes, and Sevens have a particular relationship with fear. As Melinda mentioned, one of the Types in that Triad one overdoes the feeling, one underdoes it, and the other one tends to have a complicated, mixed relationship.
Melinda: Absolutely. Then things can get even a little more complicated when we add in instinct and subtype. Everybody has an instinct or subtype. You might already know about that as you've engaged Joanne and my other materials and resources around that. What we found is that Self-preservation instincts tend to, if we're talking about the BIG 5 emotions that Joanne mentioned, they tend to favor SCARED or NUMB as emotions that they tend to go to automatically. This is Despite type, like your core Type.
Social Instincts tend to overdo maybe SAD or SHAME. SHAME being an emotion that's associated with social situations. That's kind of developed in society.
Then we have the Sexual Instinct. Which tends to favor, if I do say so myself, as a Sexual Instinct, the GLAD and MAD, which are kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum. We tend to go back and forth.
Joanne: Both very vibrant and expressive feelings.
Melinda: Yes. Self-preservations tend to shut down and be more internal. Social Instincts tend to be more external, but diffused as they try to engage and fit in to the larger social context.
Joanne: All of us have one of the Nine Types. Within the Nine Types we have three different versions according to the three instincts, Self-preservation, Social and Sexual Instinct.
One tends to be the dominant emotion. So regardless of your type, if you happen to be a specific dominant instinct, it's as Melinda mentioned. There's also a repressed instinct as well. So, one that's in the top of the stack, one that's at the bottom of the list and the repressed Instinct also has its own corresponding emotional patterns as well.
Basically, the feelings attached to that instinct, when it's repressed, tend to take the most amount of energy and deliberate effort for you to summon that forth.
To give you an example, Melinda and I, we're different types, also our instincts are the exact opposite. Sometimes just between our two stackings, because of the opposite, she tends to be really good at what I suck at and then vice versa.
Being Self-preservation dominant, that means that I tend to be very practical, steady, focused. So, leading with anxiety and numbness, which happens to be in Melinda's repressed, and saying it's something that takes a little bit more dedicated effort for her to summon. In the opposite way for her being Sexual dominant, very easy attunement to joy and anger. That took a lot of work for me, not just because I'm a Four, but because the Sexual instinct is also my last place, too.
For you, regardless of where you are in your Enneagram journey if you don't know your Type, then we'll add a link as to the step-by-step approach of how you can identify yours. Even if you do know your Type, the next step might be for you to find out what your instinct sequence is. Then coming back to the subsequent videos we'll be releasing in knowing what your type and your particular instincts and emotional habit is because our Enneagram Type, our autopilot, are ways that used to be helpful before but are now what's creating problems for us.
Melinda: Causing our suffering.
Joanne: So, whatever emotions we tend to overdo, we need to reign it back. Whatever emotions seen most foreign or repulsive to us are what we need to dial up so that we can be more well-rounded, more balanced, more integrated, instead of being lopsided and getting caught on things.
Melinda: I think it's really important too to just mention that every emotion, whether it's labeled positive or negative, they're important. They contribute to a vibrant life. If we shut down or overdue any of these feelings, it leads to suffering. It's really important to mention even something like scared or sad is really important in our journey of understanding who we are and who we are in the world and our essential selves.
With all of that said, let's talk a little bit about our upcoming episodes that I hope that y'all tune in to. We are going to be going over every Triad and talking about the emotional habits of every Triad. Starting with the Gut Triad, Eights, Nines, and Ones. The Heart Triad would be next, Twos, Threes, and Fours. Then rounding us out with the Head Triad, Fives, Sixes, and Sevens. We're really excited!
Joanne, of course, has made a chart because she is a Self-preservation dominant person, that she shall be sharing with you. And we have some more resources as well.
Joanne: This is what it looks like. We have the BIG 5 emotions on the side that shows up differently for each Type and also some variations depending on the dominant instinct. That will be available in the section below this video.
Melinda: We want to call you to watch all of our videos on the Types, find out more about your Type and the Types of your loved ones. Then I think we have a few other things for you to explore.
Joanne: If you want to learn more about emotions in general, I have what's called the Big Feelers First Aid Kit. So, especially if you're the emotionally expressive types, either the Heart Types, especially Twos and Fours, or Sexually dominant, Sexual repressed.
Basically, if you tend to have emotions that show up when you least expect it, because you might've repressed it, I’m calling out to Ones and Twos, this will come in super handy because not every situation is safe or the best time for you to be actively processing those feelings. Grab one of these and you'll be able to learn a little bit more about the nature of each specific emotion.
Melinda also has given us a fantastic guide as well, "The Growth Tips of Each Enneagram Type".
Melinda: "The Growth Tips of Each Enneagram Type", I'm going to hold my own because I designed it, it’s so pretty! I'm very proud. Basically, I found that in the Enneagram work that we do we don't tend to push past understanding the habits of our Type. I think it's really important to use the Enneagram to do the depth work, the growth work.
So, I have developed this handy dandy little guide for you to get a bite size, just a taste of the things that you can do to grow more deeply out of your Enneagram Type and get to know your essential true self, which interestingly might not look a lot like your core Type. Pick this up!
Joanne: Thanks again for joining in today on the introduction. Tune in, the next episode up will be about the Body Types, Eights, Nines, and Ones, and the others will follow, just in suit.
Melinda: Looking forward to it!
What are the emotional habits of your Enneagram type?
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© Copyright 2023 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.
JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT
Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.
Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:
“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”
“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”