SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 8 “Agency Outward” – Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective
Enneagram Type 8 or PDP Pattern A-o | Pattern of Developmental Processing
PDP A-o: Agency and Empowerment Sought Outward, Experience and Express Aversive Emotions
Enneagram Type 8: The Protector/Challenger
Motivation: Agency for Empowerment
Primary Emotion: Anger
Emotion Regulation Mode: Up-regulate (Experience and Express)
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 8 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
Vengeance vs Truth – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Vengeance
- Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Power and strength directed at control and maintaining dominance, impose self, express self, forceful, “my way” thinking, all or nothing polarities, denial of weakness.
- 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-o Pathway asserts the motivation to meet the life-and-death bodily needs out as energy into the world with a gut-drive of survival to exert the individual’s ideas and will outwardly.
Truth
- Cognitive Higher Capacity: Acts with appropriate power, a leader with compassion and understanding, senses the truth in all sides and in each individual, realizes truth flows from cosmic laws which are just.
- High Integration: Having the drive to have basic survival needs met originating from one’s own personal necessities to work out in the world can enable a differentiation of inner from relational while then linking the two as a gift to be a champion of the rights of other humans and all living beings.
Lust vs Innocence – The Emotional Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness
Lust
- Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Excessiveness, impulse goes to action, goes for stimulation, sex, aggressive and intense, big hunger, few boundaries, little counterforce.
- Low Integration: Shifts in integration downward toward rigid and chaotic states are the “emotional” reality as the PDP A-o has non-integrative states of high force directed outward without reflection and acceptance of vulnerability and respect for the inner states of others.
Innocence
- Emotional Higher Capacity: Responds freshly to environment without judgment, senses reality as it is unprejudiced by power motives or schemes, energy available for appropriate action.
- High Integration: The capacity to live life from the Plane of Possibility, to be open to experiences as they actually unfold, is a gateway to integrative states of harmony internally and interpersonally that enable the needs to be dependent on and empathically aware of others to blossom.
Enneagram Type 8 Synopsis
Brief Description
The Type 8 believes you must be strong and powerful to assure protection and regard in a tough world. Consequently, Protectors seek justice and are direct, strong and action-oriented, but also can be overly impactful, excessive and sometimes impulsive.
Key Interventions
Help Type 8s notice intensity and reduce impulsiveness, appreciate differences and vulnerability, and realize and moderate impact on others.
Somatic Profile
Type 8s like to keep a high level of bioenergetic charge in their bodies. They are attracted to intensity and get bored or impatient very quickly. This may reflect a process of self-deadening, or toughness which makes it harder to experience sensation and to feel calm or in a more relaxed state. They are quick to anger, and often have trouble with impulse control. Physical armoring (chronic patterns of muscular tension) throughout the body help them ward off softer feelings or needs, which are often present deep inside them.
Communication Style
Direct, authoritative, declarative, energetic, zestful, firm, and oriented to truth and justice. Others may perceive you as overly confrontational, intimidating, unquestionable (discounting the other) and controlling.
Behavioral Profile
Strengths: Strong and powerful, exciting, intense, determined, courageous, persistent, protective of others, just, friendly, truthful, fair, clear and straightforward, firm.
Difficulties: Too much, too soon, too loud, too long, too many – all lead to exhaustion, self-abuse, rejection, and other self-defeating behaviors; denial of fear, weakness, vulnerability, and limits; desire for control may result in a counter attack, loss, defeat of own goals, or trouble with authority, mixing up justice with revenge, sometimes with resulting self-vengeance, missing the virtues of tenderness, dependency, passivity, and sensitivity.
What Triggers Reactivity in Relationships
Deceit. Manipulation. People who won’t stand up for themselves. Indirectness or beating around the bush. Liars. People that 8s perceive as fake. People that don’t have an 8’s back. Weakness. Boundaries or rules that are too constraining. People abusing their power and that need to be put in their place. Injustice and unfairness.
Social Profile
Type 8s range from introverted to extraverted but tend to be more on the extraverted side due to their external focus. In addition, 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 Intraversion-Extraversion (I-E) spectrum. Dominance toward group survival or social focus on groups and organizations can lead to being more extraverted.
Enneagram Type 8 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood
The original truth, the truth of essence, is that we are all equal and one in the undivided state, all following a greater universal will and laws, all whole and complete in each moment, all responsive to the flow of an ample universal energy, all abiding in faith and love, and all able to travel the spectrum of consciousness in any direction to any depth. In usual circumstances, the child is born in a state of innocence sensing these essential truths in everyone and everything. As an innocent being, the young child responds freshly to each circumstance, to every situation without expectation beyond the natural rudimentary needs for protection, sustenance, and love. She senses reality as it is unprejudiced and unburdened by personal agendas, power motives, schemes, and judgments. She is gullible, credulous, guileless. We only need to observe very young children to realize this. She tries anything and everything. She is open and vulnerable, living undefended beyond the boundaries of personality.
But this child comes to experience the world as exceptionally hard, unjust, and dominated by the personal “truths” and agendas of powerful people, thus damaging her original innocence. The developing Boss child with her own big natural energy flow experiences this “truth”, in contrast to the truth of essence, as the application of excessive force for personal agendas. This imposed truth is characterized by subjectively experienced needs, feelings, and beliefs replacing objective truth. Innocence gets construed as weakness. She learns that you have to submit yourself to powerful people, to their truth, or become one of them. Since you have your own big energy, you become one of them. Strength and control become the remedies. Might becomes right.
You, as the Boss child, have your own big instinctual energy, and for survival, you begin to adopt your own version of this formula. Your goal is to assure protection and gain respect through becoming strong and powerful, asserting your own self serving version of the truth. You do have a knack for sensing at least partial truths. The original truth of essence goes into the background. Your substitute “my way or the highway” version replaces it. Your attention organizes around power and control. You sense these energetically. You develop an all or nothing style of attending to what is just or unjust. After all, truth seems to be absolute. You notice incongruities, motives, agendas. You orient to the present neither tarrying in the past nor speculating on the future. Instinctively you are ready to assert yourself now.
In the process of adopting the Boss survival strategy you fall ironically into domination by your own passionate, overriding, forceful energy, called lust. You operate largely from an instinctual sense of need and justice with little opposing counter force. Your justice is experienced as the truth and your needs and agenda as objective. If you want a man you go for him. If you desire food you go for a feast. From your standpoint, when you correct injustices, you are only exacting retribution–the just, deserved, and even unmotivated punishment for wrong doing. From the outside, others often experience this as vengeance.
To operate this way in a world experienced as hard, unjust and even abusive, you can’t be weak, vulnerable, or submissive. So operationally you develop a denial mechanism in which obvious threatening environmental factors are treated as if they didn’t exist. Denial causes rejection of or disbelief in threatening external realities. From the Boss perspective denial helps in mastering a powerful and unjust world. You denied, forgot, literally the original truth of essence as you substituted your own brand of truth, an imitation of holy truth, which you believe supports your survival. It all makes sense from an understanding of the basic proposition. You’ve forgotten the indisputable truth of essence that in the undivided world requires no control.
What Does Wholeness Look Like for Enneagram Type 8
What does greater wholeness look like when those with Type 8 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?
- Moving from a cognitive habit of my truth and retribution to a cognitive awareness that the world naturally will sense and arrive at the truth and find balance organically
- Moving from emotional intensity imposed on others/outward to more of an internal emotional feelings of innocence and unprejudiced feelings or unbiased power.
When the PDP-Ao integrates the higher capacity of truth or knowing the equality and oneness of all, emotional innocence can be experienced. The higher capacity of being aware and in touch with one’s own vulnerability is present and there is an ability to act out of a place of unbiased action, rather than out of power and control. Agency/ and sensing and self-sovereignty is balanced with Bonding feelings and compassion for self and others, and more logical, analytic and multiple option creation of the Certainty system.