Touch, Love, and Enneagram Types

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Sex is Much More than just “Sex” and Bonding is More Important Than We Ever Knew…

And How Does our Enneagram Type Play Into It?

In a new book I’ve been working on with co-author Suzanne Dion, slated for completion in 2018, we focus on the nature of intimacy as it relates to our sexuality and overall happiness. We include a powerful section on the sexual enhancements and diminishments by Enneagram type, suggested antidotes for each type, a section on how to develop true intimacy, the stereo-typical male-female differences, the key difference between sensuality and sensuousness, some of the many myths about our sexuality, and much more.

What I’m thinking about currently is the power of touch and the critical importance of bonding in our ability to experience loving, sexual relationships that will not only thrive but endure.

This vital topic has not been addressed much in the Enneagram world. The experience of love, touch, affection, and “bonding” are critical components of our human nature. We could even call these biological imperatives. What is their relationship to our sexuality? I feel this question is ready  to be explored, and from an Enneagram type perspective.

Over the years, working with countless couples, I have become immensely passionate about this question and this potential by-Enneagram-type discovery. It’s been fulfilling for me to work with individuals and on this topic, couples, who have been willing to create a genuinely receptive and open-hearted environment for this discussion, which allows all of us to expand our understandings of such precious and delicate of subject matter and the possibilities for growth and exploration.

Losing Robin Williams Type 7 4 1 Triad

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Robin Williams: Could the Enneagram Have Made a Difference?

by David Banner, Ph.D. and David Daniels, M.D.

The remarkable actor, comedian, and humanist Robin Williams, who left us too soon, was likely an Enneagram Type 7*[1], the type that comes to believe that to assure a good and satisfying life you must keep life expansive, upbeat, and flowing.  It’s a type structure that believes that life should not be restrictive or limited by suffering and agony in a world that underneath you experience causes pain, distress, and frightening restrictions. Similar to 7s in general, Robin’s attention likely focused on positive options and opportunities so that he wouldn’t get trapped in pain and suffering. He probably became a glutton for new experiences and adventures. In reading biographic material about Robin, we can see how he tended to stay stimulated with ideas and adventures and avoided sad or painful feelings, even though these feelings were lurking below the surface and, of course in time, surfaced.

Robin was able to manifest a depth of feeling, a longing for wholeness and acceptance, and the welcoming of all possibility in his movies. Depth was a core part of his roles, including his characters in “Good Will Hunting” and “Dead Poets Society.” This “darker side” seemed to lurk within him, but perhaps without his acceptance. He likely feared sinking into darkness and suffering. In his relationships, he would have most likely been optimistic, possibility-oriented, pleasure-seeking, and adventurous in an effort to avoid limitation and suffering. But, at times, he may have also expressed preoccupation, longing, deep distress, and moodiness.

A Separate Self and Love

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On Having a Separate Self:

We Can’t Really Live With Someone If We Can’t Live Without Them, No Matter How Much We Believe We Love Them

Living on Borrowed Oxygen

We all need to develop a separate self with good personal boundaries. What does it mean to have good personal boundaries? It means having a distinct self with a sense of who we are individually. When absent or deficient, this easily overlooked core ingredient in relationships makes it difficult to work with all the other ingredients. Without this ingredient, we’re living on what I call “borrowed oxygen,” with the other person becoming, in a sense, our “must have it” oxygen supply. If you leave me, I’ll be without oxygen. So it goes from joy-mode to survival-mode, with me having to hold on to you at any cost. Borrowing oxygen from others keeps us from breathing on our own and takes away our own empowered ability to fully inhale and exhale – to truly give and receive – love. This is a set-up that leaves us limited, dependent, clinging, demanding, and even dominating. Just check out figures #1 and #2 below. I even have a saying that goes, “We Can’t Really Live With Someone If We Can’t Live Without Them, No Matter How Much We Believe We Love Them.” We each need to have, and be, our own definitive oxygen supply, one that the sustenance of our being, of our own aliveness, provides. As with the oxygen on our planet, as with the aliveness in our being, there is plenty of what’s needed for each of us.

First Enneagram
Global Summit

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The First Enneagram Global Summit 

 What it Means and How it Matters

The Enneagram Global Summit, sponsored by the Shift Network, has just come to a close here on June 5, 2014. This event has attracted over 10,000 participants worldwide. I was honored to have been asked to open the Summit with the keynote session, giving an overview of the series and, hopefully, I compassionately presented the power and importance of the Enneagram system, the nine fundamental types, and their paths of development. There were numerous other Enneagram teachers and authors who presented during the Summit, including our very own Enneagram Narrative Tradition faculty Marion Gilbert, Peter O’Hanrahan, Helen Palmer, and Terry Saracino.

Enneagram Prison Project and Teaching in Prison

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Working With Prison Inmates

Freeing Prisoners from the Prisons of Our Own Making

My friend and Enneagram colleague, Susan Olesek, founded the very moving, rapidly growing Enneagram Prison Project (EPP) in April of 2012.

In order to do so, Susan and the founding EPP Board — Susan’s husband Rick Olesek and colleague Suzanne Dion — have been facing and overcoming the prejudices and stereotyping so pervasive in our culture regarding “those” who have been imprisoned, including our perception that prisoners are somehow “less than” – less flexible, less intelligent, all the way to not interested in bettering themselves and/or being beyond reproach.

Last week, Susan and EPP Founding Board Member Suzanne Dion invited me to join them at Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas, CA, a facility where Enneagram Prison Project (EPP) started its first pilot program, where Susan and Suzanne have been teaching two side-by-side 12-week classes to both female and male inmates. I went from “hearing about” what they had been doing with EPP to standing right there with them, teaching, talking, and sharing with a group of incarcerated men of various Enneagram types. What immediately surprised me was the extent of openhearted curiosity present in the attending men and the incredible awareness they had each fostered at the ten-week mark of their Enneagram style and defense patterns.

Working with the California Youth Authority

In the early 1980s and before I had begun studying the Enneagram, I was working on a project in a California Youth Authority facility. I was brought in to teach a participative management style to the staff in order that their already-existing-yet-struggling transactional analysis treatment program had a chance of succeeding. The process and teachings I fostered worked. The number of youth acting out went down significantly, grades went up dramatically, and cooperation between the youth-aged inmates and the staff grew enormously. I learned working there that these young guys were just “young,” trying to find the only way they knew to a good life and trying to learn more about self-control in order to do so.

Russ Hudson and David Teaching the Enneagram Together

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Teaching Together with Russ Hudson | Phoenix, AZ | November 2013

The Arizona Enneagram Association (AEA) invited Russ Hudson and me to teach a full weekend class in Phoenix, which we did on November 9-10. Their loving effort, support, and care made all this possible. Thanks so much to everyone involved.

Russ and I have taught together before, but not for an entire weekend. Our topic was “Love, Spirit, and Relationships.” We wanted to answer the question, “How can Enneagram understandings be the path to real love, to healthy relationships, and hence, to a fulfilling life?”

For each type we explored peak experiences, which are high points in life experience (Webster’s dictionary) characterized by full presence in the moment, an imprint in memory across all senses, a sense of profound wonder and awe, often a sense of the oneness of all, and an integration of our essential qualities.

What Is Integration?

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What is Integration?

What’s Its Role in Personal Transformation?

Well, to start with… “integration” is, in my opinion, a kind of transformer of human life. Integration can simply be defined as the interweaving of differentiated parts. Applying that to us, for example, it could be the interweaving of our higher, essential (spiritual) qualities, our awareness of our somatic experience, and the psychological aspects of our existence.

It’s important to consider this. Bringing together key, vital elements of our lives, of our being, is part of our path to becoming a more whole, “integrated” individual. Interweaving the higher qualities of our essence, into our personality, for example, is one particularly valuable integration process to pursue. In addition, the integration process addresses all the functional triads of Enneagram training: our three energies, our three centers of intelligence, our three biological imperatives (subtypes), our three forms of emotional regulation/conflict resolution, and our lives with those in our lives.