SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 9 “Agency Dyadic” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective
Enneagram Type 9 or PDP Pattern A-d | Pattern of Developmental Processing
PDP A-d: Agency and Empowerment Sought Inward and Outward (Dyadic), Reframe and Redirect Aversive Emotions
Enneagram Type 9: The Mediator/Peacemaker
Motivation: Agency for Empowerment
Primary Emotion: Anger
Emotion Regulation Mode: Shift (Reframe and Redirect)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Gut-Body/Instinctual-Moving-Sensing in Perceiving the World
Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow (ALIEF): Gut/Body
Enneagram Type 9 Core Dynamics in Therapy
Growth, integration, and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:
- relaxing the pattern
- renewed aspirational intentions
- moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath
Sloth vs Right Action – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Sloth
- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Laziness toward self. Self-forgetting. Comply/oppose. Other people and events are focal point. Absence of own priorities makes attention go to inessentials. Keeping peace, being comfortable.
- Low Integration: The tension of both an inward and an outward Attendency leads to the Vector of Agency shutting itself down in the drive for the individual’s seeking empowerment for personal needs being met. This feature helps to understand the emotion regulation Mode of Shift as the energy of needs to be met is reframed as something else—like needing to take care of others’ conflicts—and then redirected—as in making peace as a mediator.
Right Action
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Just knowing what supports the world –plenty of energy. Proactive. My action is important and appropriate without thought.
- High Integration: Releasing the proactive Agency drive for empowerment from the inhibitory tension of the inward plus outward Attendency, the more highly integrative path moves away from the rigidity of only aiding others to asserting the skill of empathic listening and care without inner diminishment and exclusion. Accessing the positive aspects of the protective emotion of Anger is also made possible by releasing the Shift mode of emotion regulation to feel the emotions in this area with more flexibility and freedom.
Self-Forgetting vs Love – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Self-Forgetting
- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Energy is reactive. Anger neutralized or opposed. Body energy out, dispersed and/or merging with the other.
- Low Integration: The tension of both an inward and an outward Attendency leads to the Vector of Agency shutting itself down in the drive for the individual’s seeking empowerment for personal needs being met. This io feature helps to understand the emotion regulation Mode of Shift as the energy of needs to be met is reframed as something else—like needing to take care of others’ conflicts—and then redirected—as in making peace as a mediator.
Love
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Just knowing what supports the world –plenty of energy. Proactive. My action is important and appropriate without thought.
- High Integration: Releasing the proactive Agency drive for empowerment from the inhibitory tension of the inward plus outward Attendency, the more highly integrative path moves away from the rigidity of only aiding others to asserting the skill of empathic listening and care without inner diminishment and exclusion. Accessing the positive aspects of the protective emotion of Anger is also made possible by releasing the Shift mode of emotion regulation to feel the emotions in this area with more flexibility and freedom.
Enneagram Type 9 Synopsis
Brief Description
The Type 9 believes that to be loved and valued, you must blend in and go along to get along. Consequently, Mediators seek harmony and are comfortable and steady, but they also can be self-forgetting, conflict-avoidant and sometimes stubborn.
Key Interventions
Help Type 9 pay attention to their own self and needs, to determine priorities and take action on them, and welcome discomfort and change.
Somatic Profile
Type 9s stay comfortably undercharged. They are good at belly breathing and may avoid breathing into the chest. Low energy Nines suffer from inertia and physical laziness, while high energy Nines tend to constantly discharge in order to keep a safe equilibrium. The lower back is a particularly vulnerable area. Since Nines so easily “merge” or blend with other people or the environment from their belly center, they have difficulty establishing personal boundaries. For better or worse, they experience in their bodies much of what is happening in their environment. This can result in digestive problems and elimination difficulties.
Communication Style
Steady, easygoing, non-confrontational, amiable, friendly, other-directed or focused, and inclusive of both feelings and facts. Others may perceive you as avoiding conflict, indecisive, over-explaining, and unclear about your own position and role.
Behavioral Profile
Strengths: Being caring, attentive to others, giving, empathetic, adaptive, accepting, supportive, participative, accountable, sensing, steady, calming, receptive, generally non-judgmental.
Difficulties: Going along and later resenting and resisting it, forgetting the self (indolence toward self), doing what makes life comfortable instead of what is important, and sometimes not even knowing what is important to you (narcotization), containing energy, especially the expression of anger, missing opportunities through delays when deciding, self-depreciation.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
Being treated as not important or invisible. Feeling controlled or pushed to do something by others. Being “forced” to face conflict, state an opinion we don’t want to state, or feeling pushed into making decisions. Saying “yes” to something we really don’t want to say “yes” to. Disharmony. Angry, mean, or pushy people. Confrontation and disruption.
Social Profile
Nines range from introverted to extraverted, and their social disposition is impacted by the three relational sub-patterns. Dominance toward self-survival or self-preservation is a relational focus based on me first (or put your life jacket on first, before attending to others) can lead to being more introverted. Dominance toward bonding survival or one-on-one focused relationships tend to fall in the middle of the I-E spectrum. Dominance toward group survival or social focus on groups and organizations can lead to being more extraverted.
Enneagram Type 9 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
Holy Love is that original blissful state of unconditional love and union wherein everyone is joined together equally. No one or no thing is more or less lovable. No one or no thing is more or less important. In Holy Love we all count, we all belong, we all matter. We only need to recall experiences with infants and very young children where a smiling nascent presence emanates from a developing separate self that loves without prejudice. Or recall an experience of a mother, perhaps yourself, with an infant in a state of union. At such time there is no thought, no agenda, no ego.
This original state of love and union naturally disappears and reappears in the practical world that demands a separate personality in order to function. But for the Mediator child, the world is experienced as making you unimportant as a separate self or gives you the repeated message that to cope you must learn to blend in. You thus learn that there are more important agendas and needs than your own. You don’t feel valued for yourself.
So, you fall into a self forgetting state of laziness or sloth toward yourself. You develop a separate personality but not a strong separate self. You compensate by making others the object of importance. You over accommodate. It is as though you say “I will get my importance through others.” You substitute inessential cravings for essential purpose. These substitutes in effect narcotize you, numbing out your own essential desires. Since someone or something else is important and you aren’t, to have a separate, important self would be threatening. Who would value me just for me? As a replacement, you settle for comfort, and belonging.
Your attention gets pulled by the endless present environmental claims made upon it, like many magnets pulling you all at once. Your mind is occupies with many thoughts simultaneously; co-processing takes place. Inessentials (details) pull with almost equal force to essentials. The chores to do, errands to run, television to watch. Your energy becomes dispersed, spread out among all these claims. You sense and reference to others, not yourself, resulting in merging into their needs, energy, agendas. You don’t know you are doing this merging, it just seems like the external world is controlling things. In going to sleep on yourself, your anger also goes numb or comes back indirectly through stubbornness, passivity, resistance. After all there is someone inside that has wants, wishes, needs, desires. All of this, of course, makes sense when you gain importance not from love for your separate self, but from love you give to others which while genuine is also a replacement for self-love. There at least “I can belong and have comfort.” This becomes the mimic of the true comfort and bliss of the original essential state of union.
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 9
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 9 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a cognitive habit of referencing others and indolence of own self love to cognitive awareness that both others and self are equal and worthy of love
- Moving From emotional laziness of own feelings and externally merging with others to emotional appropriateness for self and others
When PDP A-d RR is well integrated with the essential quality of love of self and other, the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with one’s own self-love and truest priorities is present, practiced and used. There is an ability to act out of a place of unbiased action, and find a harmonious way that is beneficial to other and self. In that capacity, a sense of emotional action begins to feel very comfortable. Agency and sensing and self-sovereignty is balanced with Bonding and feelings and compassion for self and others, and more logical, analytical and multiple option creation of the Certainty system.