Enneagram Type 1 Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by Dan Siegel, M.D.

SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 1 “Agency Inward” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective

Enneagram Type 1 or PDP Pattern A-i | Pattern of Developmental Processing

PDP A-i: Agency and Empowerment Sought Inward, Contain and Channel Aversive Emotions

Enneagram Type 1: The Perfectionist/Reformer

Motivation: Agency for Empowerment

Primary Emotion: Anger

Emotion Regulation Mode:  Down-regulate (Contain and Channel)

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 1 Core Dynamics in Therapy

Growth, integration, and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:

  1. relaxing the pattern
  2. renewed aspirational intentions
  3. moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath

Resentment vs “Perfection” – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness

Resentment

  • Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Inner demand for correctness. Self-critical. Self and others not right enough. Repression of wants. Over-controlled. Righteousness.
    • Low Integration:  To resolve tension between being and doing, between being at-one-with-the-womb and alone-in-the-world while working-to-live, the A-i Pathway adapts the strategy of constructing an inner template of how the world “should be” that organizes emotion, thinking, and the narrative of how the world could be in an attempt to return, or to regain, a sense of all-is-right in the world.

“Perfection”

  • Cognitive Higher Capacity: Connected to all things, no division. The blend of good and bad, right and wrong, positive and negative elements at any one time is the natural process. The way the world is arranged is fine. The universe works perfectly in its evolution.
    • High Integration:  The excessive differentiation of one’s inner template of correctness from the experience of acceptance of the world-as-it-is can lead to non-integrative propensities toward rigidity or chaos—outside of both the window of tolerance in a given moment and the river of integration over episodes of experience called a lifetime—that are at the heart of the experience of non-integrative states.  The movement toward higher integration involves the differentiation of this inner template from the realities of the world, and then combines this with the necessary linkage of acceptance and sense that life can unfold without the structure of the A-i’s should and sense of a need for control.  Higher integrative functioning enables both the benefits of high degrees of conscientiousness and detail-oriented work to be combined with accessing the higher states of other Pathways as well.

Righteous Anger vs Serenity – Emotional Dynamic

Righteous Anger

  • Emotional Drive, Tone, and Reactivity: Tense and rigid. Often suppressed or contained. Anger reflects the violation of standards.
    • Low Integration:  Emotional experience pushes toward rigidity and chaos when integration is low.  The fundamental “bind” of having a template of an ideal world while living in a real world is at the core of the reactivity for the PDP Pattern A-i CC.

Serenity

  • Emotional Higher Capacity: All the positive and negative feelings occur without resistance. Acceptance, peace, body at ease with self. Secure in capacities. Life is all right, not perturbed by differences.
    • High Integration:  Emotional experience flows in the center of the window of tolerance in a given experience and in the harmony of the river of integration across experiences when integration is high. The result of such a movement is to relax reactivity and move toward a more receptive state of being.

Enneagram Type 1 Synopsis

Brief Description

The Type 1 believes you must be good and right to be worthy. Consequently, Type 1s are conscientious, responsible, improvement-oriented and self-controlled, but also can be critical, resentful and self-judging.

Key Interventions

Help Type 1s notice and reduce the dominance of the critical mind, appreciate error as difference, and accept and integrate desire and instinct as the path to wholeness.

Somatic Profile

Type 1s tend to be grounded and practical, good at the tasks of daily life. As body-based types they usually have abundant physical energy and a high bio-energetic charge, but they exercise “top down” control over their feelings and impulses. This intense self-control can lead to lots of physical rigidity and tension, particularly armoring in the jaw, neck, shoulders, diaphragm, the pelvic floor. Teeth grinding or TMJ are possibilities. In some Type 1s, over time the face can take on an expression of angry judgment or resentful martyrdom.

Communication Style

Precise, clear, direct, and right/wrong oriented. To others this may be perceived as overly detailed, judgmental, critical, limiting, or closed- minded.

Behavioral Profile

  • Strengths: Persistent effort, correct action, honesty, responsibility, concern for improvement, accomplishment, idealism, high standards, self-reliance, dedication.
  • Difficulties: Critical of self and others, never satisfied with performance, compulsive need to improve, preoccupied with “should” and “what must be done,” difficulty in accepting imperfection, will not cooperate if standards are too high.

What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships

Unfairness.  Irresponsibility. Things being done the wrong way. The flagrant ignoring or disobeying of sound rules. Being unjustly criticized. Being lied to, manipulated, tricked or unjustly blamed.

Social Profile

Type 1s 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) which can lead to more introversion. Dominance toward bonding survival, the one-on-one focused relationships, tend to fall in the middle of the Introversion-Extraversion (I-E) spectrum.  Dominance toward group survival, the social focus on groups and organizations, can lead to being more extraverted.

Enneagram Type 1 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood

Holy Perfection is that undivided state of utter wholeness or oneness where everything is complete as it is in each moment.  There is no division into time or space, into good or bad, into right or wrong.  The universe functions perfectly, balancing out change as things move from cosmos to chaos and back to cosmos over and over.  The ocean is a good metaphor.  It is always changing yet never changing.  No wave is more perfect than any other wave.  Deep underneath the waves there is calm.  We all know this.  Similarly, we all accept the seasons and know that life flows through each season without judgment.  Underneath the seasons is life; underneath life is essence — permanent, unchanging, undivided.  The infant, in her rudimentary state of development, does not divide the world into good or bad, right or wrong, past or future.  She simply is present to the is-ness, to the undivided perfection of the moment.  This holy perfection is not to be construed that there is no pain or there are no times of great distress.  But in the undivided state there is no judgment, therefore no suffering piled on top of pain and distress.  The body is serene in that it is at one with itself and connected to its instinctual energy.

This oneness is damaged by a world that severely judges and punishes “bad” behavior and impulse.  At least the emerging perfectionist child, perhaps especially sensitive to damage of this aspect of essence, experiences this judgment as harsh and severe.  So in the interest of survival, holy perfection goes into the background and the developing personality substitutes the perfectionism of good versus bad, right versus wrong.  You, as a Perfectionist child, then gain worthiness and love through being good, correcting mistakes, striving to be perfect.  You develop a powerful inner critic or judging mind with exacting standards that meet rigorous criteria.  You replace the undivided state of holy perfection and protect it from future damage with its mimic, the divided world of perfectionism of right and wrong, of good and bad.  To accomplish this your attention must get organized around noticing errors to correct, comparing what is wrong with what is right, and constantly monitoring your own behavior.  You plot off and suppress desires, urges, impulses, pleasures in/and of what is good and right.

In the process, you fall into anger, first, at being knocked out of the perfect environment of essence, then at what is wrong or bad to correct.  You lose the serenity of being in perfect balance with the flow of life.  You suppress pleasure and impulse.  Since anger too is “bad” and punishable, you also suppress it becoming tense, anxious, exacting.  You resent imperfection as judged by your critical mind.  You resent those who violate the standards it has set.  You resent that the world isn’t a better place or what your critical mind says it could be.  You develop the mechanism of reaction formation against whatever is judged as wrong or bad which includes the instinctual pleasures.  Ironically, you strive to regain a perfect individual world along this false path of the divided world that will never get you there.  But, given this basic proposition, the Perfectionist’s strategy makes perfect sense.

What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 1

What does greater wholeness look like when those with Enneagram Type 1 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?

  • Moving from a cognitive habit that my way is the right way to cognitive awareness that true or natural perfection includes my way and other ways, both rights and wrongs, accepting differences.
  • Moving from emotionally contained anger inside to serenity with others.

When Enneagram Type 1 integrates the idea of natural perfection and order, the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with one’s acceptance of differences as differences, rather than imperfections or wrongs is present and used often. There is an ability to act out of a place of unbiased action, rather than out of my individual sense of what is right and wrong and an emotional serenity is experienced. Agency/sensing and self-sovereignty is balanced with Bonding/feelings and compassion for self and others, and more logical, analytical and multiple option creation of the Certainty system.