What we avoid controls us
Finding freedom from Enneagram avoidances
“We must understand that it is not so much that we do anything to move up the Levels, as that as we let go of old behaviours and no longer “do” our personality: old habits fall away, our state changes, and we are different, sometimes in small ways, often in dramatic ways.
- Enneagram Personality Types, 2023
But how do we “let go”, and how do we support clients to “let go?”
The most important part of the answer is not demonising the ego.
This is tempting, of course, since we can all see how self-defeating the vices and fixations are.
Look at the Right-hand boxes to see the avoidances and how they can lead us in search of temporary relief from our fears:
The Avoidances help us understand how each Type once really worked as a defensive strategy.
Our Type may be (usually is) causing a lot of suffering and havoc, but what we know from trauma, science, the Enneagram itself, and all of the most effective modalities, those ego strategies and patterns were and still are protective, have an inner logic, and making them bad only shames the client.
What then, if not trying to change the patterns?
When we feel safe, the strategy can begin to loosen, ease, soften.
Healing and true change is about embodied state change. When we feel safe and connected we don’t need to overdo our defensive strategies.
We are able to relax and be here and now, in connection with ourselves and others and our world. We are no longer caught up in the full-time job of fear and avoidance.
These are the fruits of healing..(the top table describes Attitudes and Behaviours at Level 1. The lower table describes Attitudes and Behaviours at Level 6.
The Merkabah and human being in the middle are another topic!
Source of tables: Joyce Stenstrom poster, Enneagram Institute.
So how do we learn to relax?
It isn’t just “relaxing” as a practice, like breathing or mindfulness help us to do. It is a relaxation of the whole embodied trauma-based stance and strategy of habitual responses held in our bodies, in our restricted mindset (fixations), in our distorted instinctual preoccupations, and in our emotional reactivity.
It is about learning to experience, and tolerate, safety and connection.
Intra-personally: within ourselves, between the different parts of ourselves
Interpersonally: in relationship with others
In the here and now: in time and place, in our living, breathing, moving bodies.
Healing and change happen through the slow and careful work of
Unshaming validation
Attunement
Connection
Streaming the client’s awareness into the here and now, and to their embodied experience.
As we feel more grounded and embodied self-trust in safe connection with another, old habits fall away because we don’t need them to help us avoid our fears anymore.
The Enneagram is a fantastic map, but you will notice that there is no Ennea-analysis and technical Type interpretation involved in becoming safely embodied …
It takes befriending our Inner Parts and building inner “scaffolding” for our soul to come home and live inside us.
There are many modalities, tools and techniques to support this process. ACT, IFS, DBT, Yoga, Tai Chi, Breathwork, Mindfulness, psychedelic therapies, movement practices, dance, art therapy, and many many more..
But how do we bring these to the Enneagram in a trauma-informed way?
That is my core mission.
If you want to learn to facilitate integration using the Enneagram, and help clients to build the capacity for integration and thereby be less controlled by what they are avoiding, consider joining my next 11-month long 5D Trauma-informed Enneagram coaching Programme. It integrates a number of wonderful modalities, practices and tools with the Enneagram.
It is starting on 22 Oct. SAST 9AM and SAST 6PM classes.
It looks like this:
