Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Enneagram seminar to analyze personality types
Second Presbyterian Church in Little Rock will host an Enneagram conference this fall featuring best-selling author and therapist Ian Morgan Cron and Enneagram master Suzanne Stabile, authors of The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery, to be released in October by InterVarsity Press.
The Rev. Karen Akin, associate pastor of the church, hopes the program will aid in the spiritual growth of the church’s members, as well as members of the community.
The Enneagram is a system for determining someone’s personality type. It is thought to be ancient, with some tracing its roots to a Christian monk named Evagrius, whose teachings were eventually used as the basis for the “seven deadly sins.”
The Enneagram is also thought to have been used by the desert mothers and fathers in the fourth century as a tool for what today is known as spiritual direction. The personality tool also has been found in other religions of the world.
Today, the Enneagram is being used increasingly as a form of spiritual discipline. The church’s Enneagram conference is an opportunity for the curious to learn more.
The term Enneagram comes from the Greek words “ennea” (nine) and “gram” (drawing or figure), and its symbol is a nine-pointed geometric figure for nine personality types. They include: Type one: Perfectionist Type two: Helper Type three: Performer
Type four: Romantic Type five: Investigator Type six: Loyalist Type seven: Enthusiast Type eight: Challenger Type nine: Peacemaker Cron, an author, therapist and Episcopal priest, first heard about the Enneagram more than 20 years ago while attending seminary in Denver. Studying in the school’s counseling program, he was impressed by what he considered the efficiency and accuracy of the Enneagram.
“It reveals both what is best about us when we are healthy and doing great, and where we kind of default to these repetitious, predictable patterns that follow us through our lives, that we just do over and over,” Cron said.
Those patterns of behavior are formed in childhood, he said.
“We’ve come up with adaptive strategies to make our way in the world,” he said. “It works when we are kids and helps us explain the way the world is. The problem is, they hang around a lot longer — long after the threats of early childhood are over … and we develop this belief that they constitute our identity.”
Those strategies, Cron said, “work against the very thing we want to get in the end, which is to experience a sense of love and belongingness in the world.”
He said the real “you” is buried beneath all those masks and strategies, and the Enneagram can help people rediscover their real selves in one of the nine personality types.
That’s not to say the Enneagram is infallible or an all-seeing oracle. It’s a tool for personal insight, Cron said.
“I would say like any map — this is a map of the human personality — no maps we possess are precise,” he said. “They don’t literally have complete accuracy. This is an imprecise model of personality that’s very helpful.”
Stabile has taught thousands of people about the Enneagram for 22 years.
“I think the greatest gift of the Enneagram is you can find yourself in one of those nine spaces,” she said, adding that the number will reveal the best and the worst of a person’s personality.
That’s the point, she said. “If you can’t identify that, it’s very difficult to work on it.”
Stabile said she’s a Type 2 (the Helper). According to the Enneagram, that means she’s inclined to “mother” and wants to help everyone. Her place is at the center of her family and home. The other side is that the instinctive need to help can become overbearing and controlling.
“The Enneagram helped me to see the fact that I’m a giver and a helper is good to a point, then it’s not so great,” she said.
Stabile said the Enneagram can help people be more compassionate as they learn that each of the nine types see the world in a different way.
“There are nine ways of seeing, of taking in information,” she said. “We all look at the same thing and have the same experience in the same room, but what we see is determined by how we see and that’s determined by where you fall on the Enneagram.”
As a spiritual tool, Stabile said the Enneagram can help people discover which spiritual practices fit their personality. For example, the contemplative practice of centering prayer is meaningful for some and impossible for others who find the silence intolerable.
Cron said the Enneagram is “a kind of spiritual technology in the sense that it reveals to you where the spiritual work is that you have to do in your life. It’s a great spiritual formation tool.”
Cron and Stabile said they’ve taught about the Enneagram in churches of various denominations, from Episcopal congregations to Churches of Christ. Stabile led a class in Italy that had participants from 21 countries who spoke 17 different languages.
“Everybody got it,” she said. “It serves us well across denominational boundaries and faith boundaries because it has to do with wanting to be a better human being and it doesn’t have any boundaries that would make it oppositional to a faith belief or would stand in opposition to a denomination.”
Cron said he thinks congregations appreciate the Enneagram because it’s a tool that can increase understanding, foster forgiveness and compassion and lead to matching individuals with ministries that fit their personalities. He said it also can be an effective tool to help pastors with marriage counseling.
“Nothing has helped my marriage more,” Cron said of the Enneagram. “I realized my wife saw the world, took in the world, and interpreted things I did in ways I never could have imagined. It gives us so much compassion and patience and information about each other.”
He said participants at the conference “will laugh and may cry a little,” but they also will leave knowing themselves and others better.
Akin said, when she learned about her Enneagram type, it gave her a greater awareness and appreciation of her own gifts and those of others.
“When I started reading about my number, my first thought was who has been running around in my head and in my heart,” she said. “It was absolutely amazing to me to feel so known, and the way I felt known was by God … That God has made me in this way for a purpose.”