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Enneagram Type 7 Personality and Wholeness in Therapy by Dan Siegel, M.D.

SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 7 “Certainty Outward” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective


Enneagram Type 7 or PDP Pattern C-o | Pattern of Developmental Processing

PDP C-o: Certainty and Safety Sought Outward, Reframe and Redirect Aversive Emotions

Enneagram Type 7: The Epicure/Adventurer/Enthusiast


Motivation: Certainty for Safety

Primary Emotion: Fear

Emotion Regulation Mode: Shift (Reframe and Redirect)

Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Head, Cognitive Critical Thinking and Logic, Knowing and Perception

Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow (ALIEF): Head/Cerebral


Enneagram Type 7 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.

Planning vs Work – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness

Planning

  • Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Keeping life up, open, pleasureful with positive options and by rationalizing negatives. Narcissistic. I am entitled.
    • Low Integration:  Levels of differentiation are high with lower linkage.  In particular, uncomfortable thoughts in the present are deflected and transformed into positive plans about the individual’s needs and activities in the future.

Work

  • Cognitive Higher Capacity: Accomplishing through effort and dedication for its own sake. Commitment to a course of action. Living fully and working happily in the moment, not the future.
    • High Integration: Differentiation now accompanied by linkage as connection to the present moment process of life, embracing all thoughts that arise without needing to project into the future and feel disconnected from the present.

Gluttony vs Sobriety – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness

Gluttony

  • Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Craving excitement and experience. Wanting stimulation, pleasure, and play.
    • Low Integration:  Excessive differentiation of comforting emotions and engaging excitement at the exclusion of a wider range of emotional states.

Sobriety

  • Emotional Higher Capacity: Appreciating simplicity and slowing down to focus and deepen. Accepting the present, both pain and pleasure. Body grounded in the moment, taking just what is needed.
    • High Integration: Cultivation of linkage as a state of receptivity in the present with curiosity, openness, acceptance and love to a wide range of emotional experience.

Enneagram Type 7 Synopsis

Brief Description

The Type 7 believes you must keep life up and open to assure a good life. Consequently, Epicures seek possibilities and pleasure, and are optimistic, upbeat and adventurous, but also avoid pain and can be uncommitted and self-serving.

Key Interventions

Help Type 7 recognize the excesses of future planning and experience, make lasting commitments and accept all of life: pain, fear, boredom and limits as well as pleasure, joy, excitement and options.

Somatic Profile

For Type 7, energy and attention tend to go “up and out” rather than “down and in.” In contrast to the Fives, bio-energy moves to the periphery of the body and away from the core. Sevens tend to stay over-stimulated with ideas, substances, or adventures depending on their body type. They are often quite physically loose and flexible. Their body armor is less about physical tension and more about patterns of avoidance as seen in the “held up” upper chest and shoulders. They “go away” from sad or painful feelings into their minds. Their challenge is to “be in” their bodies and get grounded.

Communication Style

Exuberant, fast paced, spontaneous, analytic, and idea- and possibility-oriented. Others may perceive you as quickly shifting topics, making excuses, changeable, self-oriented and indifferent to others’ input.

Behavioral Profile

Strengths: Loving of life, optimistic and thinking positively, playful, enjoyable, inventive and imaginative, energetic, helpful, spontaneous, open to and seeing possibilities.

Difficulties: Short-term gain may lead to long-term pain (“no pain, no gain”), various losses resulting from trying to keep life up and escape the “traps” of limits, overload from trying to keep excitement going (gluttony), trying to do more may lead to loss of purpose, then anxiety and depression, distraction and diversion from deeper purposes and commitments, repeating the same mistakes, equalizing authority creates conflict.

What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships

Constraints or limits that prevent us from getting, or from doing, what we want. People that get stuck, are unhappy, depressed, or other-blaming. Debbie-downer attitudes and those who lay trips on us. Feeling trapped. Feeling restricted. Felling beholden to others when we want to take off and be free. Getting bored. Things that are too tedious or a total hassle. Being told what to do. Being told, “You can’t…”

Social Profile

Type 7’s range from introverted to extraverted, yet tend to be more extraverted due to their externally directed attention.


Enneagram Type 7 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood

In the original state of essence, the limits that occur in the realm of ordinary, physical or material reality do not exist.  We all have had moments of extraordinary focus in which personal thoughts and feelings disappear in the absorption of presence.  In the beginning the young child shows a natural ability to experience absorption in present moment.  she can focus attention deeply and freely beyond the limits of thought and emotion over the spectrum of life, at least in a rudimentary way.  The ability to focus and shift attention at will over the full spectrum of consciousness in spiritual life (traditions) is called holy work.  Doing this work requires that the body be grounded or stabilized in the present moment, taking only what is needed, called sobriety.  Observation of infants and young children reveals this potential for groundness in the present moment:  unrequited hunger that disappears with satiation; total immersion in an object such as a leaf, a toy, a sound;  the singular concentration required to take her first steps.  Small children experience each moment for what it presents, both pleasure and pain.  As adults we often yearn for the simplicity of early childhood, the delight in life as it is, unburdened by the dictates of personality and “real” world responsibilities.

As the child develops, the environment begins to impose limits on her as it must for the sake of her survival in the material domain.  The physical world imposes limits from daily cycles of light and dark to gravity itself.  Parents and others impose values and requirements.  She must learn to fit into the fabric of her social system.  Frustration and pain, it seems, comes from all directions as a child gets mobile and literally can run into danger.

But, as an Epicure child, you also learn that you can evade environmental constraints and protect yourself by escaping into imagining many fascinating future possibilities and engaging in pleasurable activities.  She comes to combat limitations and pain through a gluttony of the mind for interesting ideas and plans and through a craving for excitement and experience.  This gluttony is “aided and abetted” by an environment that often alternately either indulges you or inflicts threats and pain on you, setting up a pattern for escape from limitation.  Doesn’t it make sense that if you learn to indulge (gratify) yourself in positives that you can escape the negatives?  In this way you can keep life up.

To support this point of view, attention gets organized around self-referencing to what is pleasureful and positive, to future opportunities and options, and to interconnecting and interrelating these pleasureful possibilities so that there always will be options and opportunities.  So, as an Epicure, your energy goes into your active imagination, into engaging and experiencing the “fullness” of life, and into a sense of entitlement or privilege (since keeping life up requires a sense of deservingness).

And of course there is plenty of data out in the world to support this position.  You select in pleasureful, positive possibilities and select out the painful, negative ones.  You get rid of the negatives by reframing them into positives through the mechanism called rationalization.  In effect, you turn lemons into lemonade, painful events into learning experiences, excuses for failed commitments into good reasons.  You don’t realize that you have replaced the original limitless potential for deep focused attention in all directions to all levels gained through groundedness in the present moment with the seemingly limitless substitutes or mimic — the escape into imagination, multiple future plans, and a craving for pleasurable experiences.  The limitlessness of essence which requires the work of focused concentration and returning to taking each moment for what it is goes far away from consciousness, but from the standpoint of the basic proposition, you don’t feel crushed by an environment that endlessly can frustrate you and can cause you pain.


What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type 7

What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 7 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?

  • Moving from a cognitive preoccupation of a pleasant future to a cognitive awareness that the here and now work is just as good
  •  Moving from emotional gluttony for external excitement to an inner knowing that I can bring in what is actually needed, both pleasure and pain

Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with discipline, focus and commitment, rather than the world of ever evolving opportunities, becomes possible with awareness and practice. There is an ability for an emotional groundedness without flee, freeze or faint, sometimes called emotional sobriety, the capacity of just being in the here and now. The Certainty system is balanced with a grounded Agency and sensing of self-sovereignty and the ability to lean into Bonding and the heartfelt feelings of human connections and the acceptance of inevitable human relationship ruptures or even loss. When well-integrated we see an imaginative, inventive, inspiring, optimistic, and resourceful character full of life, and attuned to sharing all that with others to help them and the world in general be a better place.


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