SUMMARY: Enneagram Type 3 (PDP Pattern 3) Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Motivation: Bonding for Connection
Attendency: Dyadic
Primary Emotion: Separation-Distress/Sadness
Emotion Regulation Mode: Down-regulate (Contain and Channel)
Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Heart or Feeling Intuition, Knowing, and Perception
Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow (ALIEF): Heart/Solar Plexus
Enneagram Type: The Performer/Achiever
SUMMARY: Enneagram Type 3 (PDP Pattern 3) Core Dynamics in Therapy
The following sections use "type" rather than "pattern" as the descriptions come from David's writings.
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 growth for 3
Vanity vs Hope – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Vanity -- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives
- Excess in conceit in own appearance, qualities, gifts (good points), achievements. Attention on doing and accomplishing. Achievement is up to me and I’ll be admired. Addiction to success and efficiency. Real value in just being is lost.
- Hope -- Cognitive Higher Capacity
- Providing a model that shows things can get done. Seeing/realizing what really needs doing and what doesn’t. Functioning does not depend on effort/efficiency of the doer. Things work out according to natural law.
Deceit (Self-Deceit) vs Veracity (Honesty) – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
- Deceit -- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity
- Energy in image, approval, action. Projecting what is wanted, not real feelings. Specious and spurious. Concealment, like an actor becoming what is desired. Impatient.
- Veracity -- Emotional Higher Capacity
- Energy of self-deception going to recognition/appreciation of true feelings the healthy body/person expresses only real concerns. The body does not lie, but only expresses truth.
Enneagram Type 3 Synopsis
Brief Description
The Type 3 believes you must accomplish and succeed to be loved. Consequently, Performers are industrious, fast-paced, and focused on goals and efficiency. They also can be inattentive to feelings, impatient, and image-driven.
Key Interventions
Help the Type 3 slow down, welcome and appreciate their feelings, and notice that love is “being” as well as “doing and having.”
Somatic Profile
Type 3’s are feeling types who, like Type 2, hold a lot of energy in the area of their chests. But rather than feel their own feelings, they prefer to channel everything into action, productivity and results. With their high charge, it's hard for them to sit still. Some 3's are quite expressive, but if they are more on the rigid side, they may accrue lots of tension around their heart. Emotional pressure builds up, but the lid stays on. They are the original “Type A’s” and are vulnerable to early heart attacks or a weakened immune system. Often a single, dense layer of armoring over the chest covers up underlying grief.
Communication Style
Direct, topic-focused, fast-paced and confident. Others may perceive you as impatient, unfeeling, overly efficient and restrictive, and overriding of others’ views.
Behavioral Profile
- Strengths: Effective and industrious leadership, seeing possibility, enthusiasm, hope in action, encouragement, problem solving and solutions, ability to provide, efficiency, practicality, competence.
- Difficulties: Self-deception about real needs, missing own feelings, moving to a new task and leaving items incomplete, avoiding reflection and acceptance by doing something instead, suffering and fear appears to come from “nowhere” and wants to be chased away, impatience with differences, which are seen as obstructions in the path towards the goal, wanting too much admiration and attention.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
Obstacles that get in the way of the goal. Anything or anyone that threatens or thwarts progress and our ability to get to completion. Indecisiveness. Inefficiency. Criticism. Not being recognized or applauded when it’s due. An insult to the image that’s been constructed and wanting to be projected to others. Failing.
Social Profile
Type 3’s tend to be more on the extraverted side due to their assertive energy (see energy flow Harmony Triads).
In addition, their social disposition is impacted by the three instinctual sub-types. Dominance toward self-survival or self-preservation is a focus based on me first 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) scale. Dominance toward group survival, the social focus on groups and organizations, can lead to being more extraverted.
Enneagram Type 3 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
Holy hope means that everything gets done according to universal laws or principles. With this in mind just go sit on a hillside in nature or a bench in a park or by a stream in the woods. You soon realize that nature functions just fine and quite efficiently. Similarly, an infant does very little. Others provide the hope.
This original state of hope wherein things work efficiently according to universal laws, and are not dependent on the effort of the doer, is damaged in the Performer child by an environment that is experienced as rewarding doing not being and certainly not feelings. If you are a Three, you can't have your own original honest feelings and reactions wherein you naturally express just what is there in your body and heart.
Consequently there is a compensatory fall into image and into a go ahead or over-eager energy which is called deceit because it places action, achievement, and a good image, not true feelings, as what are necessary for survival. In short, you must gain love, status, and acceptance through performance, doing, and succeeding and through matching these with the image of success and approval. You are what you do and perform. You must compete to win. Hence, attention must go to the many tasks to accomplish, to converging onto goals, often simultaneously, and to action and approval. This proposition requires other-person referencing (how else can you get approval) and a present to future time orientation (you can't succeed if you tarry in the past).
What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 3
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Enneagram Type 3 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a mental preoccupation that I am the doer to cognitive awareness that the world organically moves forward with or without my efforts
- Moving from emotional urgency/deceit to emotional honesty with self and others
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with knowing that the world will naturally move forward with or without me, rather than the “vanity” that I’m responsible for doing and achievements becomes a theme of therapeutic work as well as daily practice. Then, there is an emotional experience of slowing down and experiencing both self-honesty and an emotional veracity of what’s really happening.
