What right with me?
Healing vs. Self-judgement
The Enneagram can create inner vulnerability through an excessive focus on what is wrong with us. Guess what? Most of our clients arrive with this form of core suffering (self-judgement and self-analysis) already well established.
Trauma-informed Enneagram work is a guiding perspective that acknowledges all of the negative Type patterns and their consequences while prioritising something else.
I summarise what it is prioritising as three forms of healing:
Healing identity and worth (Heart) from histories of diagnosis, shame, judgement, invalidating interpretation or victim-blaming through validating the client’s lived experience.
Healing the instincts, agency and connection with the life force (Gut) through honouring the client’s inherent dignity, autonomy and sovereignty, always offering choice and respecting ‘resistance’.
Healing the client’s deep inner knowing by uncovering and amplifying their wisdom and inner authority.
Being un-traumatising
The aim is to create environments and therapeutic interactions that actively undo the shame, autonomy wounds, and the destabilisation of inner security that are at the core of our Type formation. We un-traumatise by deeply acknowledging that people’s responses to stress are not defects, but adaptations, and from this foundation we support clients in rebuilding a sense of self, worth, and belonging with us, here, now, in the room.
They feel a form of connection that is validating, respectful and safe, often for the very first time. This feeling becomes a resource they begin to use in all areas of their life.
This also highlights a key misunderstanding I have encountered many times in training a trauma-informed use of the Enneagram.
Trauma-informed Enneagram coaching is not about regressing clients, making them cry, or exploring every painful memory.
Trauma-informed practice emphasises restoring identity and connection in the now rather than labeling or excavating the past.
A client reliving the past or breaking down is not a goal or an achievement.
Trauma-informed work centres on facilitating a stable sense of self (autonomy and worth), building up reliable and predictable inner and outer resources supports, and enabling the client, practicing on us, to create safe and more meaningful relationships in their life.
Connection is our deepest desire and greatest fear
By prioritising empowerment and validation in the therapeutic relationship, natural relational rupture and repair cycles begin to feel safe. This is what heals most. In this healing relational medium, people reconnect with their deep innate capacities for connection, embodied agency and belonging.
With inner deepening and consolidation in small steps, rather than superego-driven efforting, clients begin to know, feel, trust and live from their true Self.
The beautiful higher qualities of their Type and TriType® are a side-effect, not the result of striving and self-judgement based on knowing what is wrong with me.
To learn to work in a trauma-informed way with the Enneagram in your therapy or coaching practice, explore the IEA-Accredited 5D® trauma-informed coaching certificate programme. Next start date: 18th June.
Chat about it: https://calendly.com/takdir-ingrid-hurwitz/30min
Try one today..
Sourced from: Enneagram Transformations: Releases and Affirmations for Healing Your Personality Type, by Don Richard Riso.
With love and gratitude for your interest in this work,
Ingrid