I have hesitated writing about enneagram because I think it’s taken me awhile to walk around the complete circle and examine it thoughtfully. It’s a huge can of worms to crack open–one that, if I’m being honest, I don’t care to plumb the depths because it gets pretty dark.
But it begs for attention, and I’ve been fascinated having studied it for quite some time.
A couple years ago I read The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre.
I pulled it off the library bookshelf because I’d been studying homeschooling methods and one expert had recommended first finding out a child’s personality before attempting to teach them in a one-size-fits-all approach.
The idea was this: if you could understand how a child learns best, you could tailor her education to meet her goals. Therefore, if you knew your child were Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Judging (INTJ), a stay-at-home, immersive, Charlotte Mason-approach approach might be a good fit. But if you had an Extraverted, Sensing, Feeling, and Perceiving (ESFP) child, you might choose to reward finished worksheets with community acting classes.
Myers-Briggs took the world by storm. Massive businesses and schools invested in the testing materials, all sold on the tailored, fit-like-a-glove, psychoanalytic theory-turned methodology. It seemed scientific enough, yet fun enough to talk about at a dinner party.
In The Personality Brokers, the story of mother and daughter team Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers is revealed–quirky ladies who were devout disciples of Carl Jung, committed to developing a test that might indicate and reveal deep psychological differences in people, then sold their idea door-to-door. The downright obsessiveness of these ladies is astounding, and according to Emre, the details were hidden for a good reason.
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst they so admired, came up with individuation–an idea expressed in tapping the unconscious thoughts of patients (including, but not limited to dreams and sexual fantasies) in order to become more themselves and achieve a higher sense of satisfaction. He differed from Freud on only a few notes, but like Freud, Jung wasn’t above seducing his own patients.
Jung was the Briggs’ savior, the promise for two housewives that they might escape the doldrums and make bank by spreading a personality-identifying gospel.
Anecdotally–I am mostly intrigued how Myers-Briggs became a useful tool in the hands of Sally Clarkson, a professing Christian who wrote Educating the WholeHearted Child–the book I read recommending personality testing of children.
If Clarkson unknowingly fell into a Carl Jung trap, who is to say Enneagram won’t be equally as sticky for those of us facing it today as a “helpful” tool?
Here is how I caught the Enneagram bug: I remember sitting at my parents’ house and making my dad do an internet quiz on my phone to find out his personality type. We all sat there and laughed because it asked questions like, when confronted with a mistake, are you most likely to avoid the conversation, defend your innocence, change the topic, or confess your mistake?
He was utterly wounded when we suggested he would totally “defend innocence” while he swore he was more the type who’d confess he’d made a mistake.
I was so intrigued by this self-discovery game that I immediately spent the next few months reading all I could on Enneagram. (Diving into rabbit holes also seems to be a personality trait of my own, if you haven’t figured out by now. ha!)
Typing is fascinating because it gives us a peek into the inner world of the individual, the actual motivation behind one’s behavior. Enter Enneagram, the personality-typing method that claims to reveal inner reasoning for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. There are nine numbers, one for each “type”.
These numbers are placed in a circle, and each personality is fluid, constantly moving toward another number either in health or disintegration, flanked by “wing” numbers that add nuance and insight.
It pegs individuals with striking accuracy.
Do you disappear in conflict, secretly blame others for your malcontent, love snuggling on the couch, and hate when people interrupt you while you’re talking? Enneagram 9, wing 8, moving to the behavior of a low 6.
You’re a rule-abiding perfectionist who can’t sit down until all the bills are paid because you live with a constant inner critic–but you’re taking the kids to the park because you have a free hour? Enneagram 1, wing 2, moving toward 7.
You are hosting Christmas because you want to be the grandma who makes the best cinnamon rolls and lives on in nostalgia forever–but you hold a secret grudge against your family when they can’t reciprocate? Enneagram 2, wing 3, moving toward 8.
See, the Enneagram is cake for folks in the market of self-help. Like Myers-Briggs, it’s logical enough to insert into practical life but fun enough to be a party game.Unlike Myers-Briggs, it gives you the key motivational factors to unlock personality mysteries and speculate one’s future.
So for a few years, I followed the carousel fun.
But I’ve since tried to exit the carousel.
Do you know how at Sonic there are nearly 170,000 flavor combinations? Well, it turns out Enneagram doesn’t just boil down to nine handy numbers. If a person is constantly moving in a direction of a different number based on health or disintegration, with an emphasis on the stances of thinking, feeling, or doing, compounded by their self-preservation, sexual, or social instinct–are you getting weary of reading yet?
And so, it isn’t as revealing and intuitive as we humans would like it to be. There are actually more flavors of people than Sonic slushies. (Don’t check my math, but you get the point.)
The Enneagram is one of those awful pinball machines that keeps pinging you to the next subtype, each nuance adding layers that tentatively change under each new circumstance.
Here are a few things I have noticed about the Enneagram that arouse my suspicion concerning it as a valid tool for self-help for the Christian:
The first thing to note is just how prolific Enneagram wisdom has become. This ought to be a red flag, for we are warned “be not conformed to this world” (Rom 12:2). The surest way to spot conformity to this world is to ask, is everyone else doing it? If the answer is yes, you’ve got a problem.
Enneagram teaching has filtered into big businesses and even into many churches. It is used as a method to understand individuals and, like Sally Clarkson tried with Myers-Briggs–to tailor-fit academics and employment and to maximize productivity. This is fine and good, but it begins to veer off path when it marks itself as a path to wholeness, or worse–forsakes solid scripture in favor of personality testing.
Paul pleaded with his Corinthian friends:
I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. (2Cor.11:3)
Here is the real concern today–that young believers will be seduced by the “cake” and miss the true meal.
One thing all personalities have in common is this: the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can understand it? (Jer.17:9)
Do you understand what this means? It means we are forever moving in the direction of disintegration, left to our own devices. There is no self-growth apart from us becoming, like Paul says, “crucified with Christ–it is no longer I, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Enneagram “godmother,” Suzanne Stabile encourages students to “do their work” and advises everyone to “have a therapist and a spiritual guide”. Via her ministry, Life in the Trinity, she hosts workshops, sessions, and has a podcast devoted to spreading the “wisdom of the enneagram”. I listened to her show for years because she has such a soft-spoken knack for understanding people and gently peeling back the layers of their self, revealing the deeper motives for their actions. But I began to take note when she mentioned things like, “I’ve found Christians don’t have a good grasp on ‘forgiveness’”–and recommended reading Buddhist literature.
I’ve also noticed that many modern Christian-enneagram philosophers use their perceived wisdom to polish up scripture where they think it has gone errant, especially in the area of homosexuality and gender fluidity.
These are not gurus who are spreading any kind of wisdom that parallels a life devoted to Jesus. We as believers, sheep among wolves, are to be “shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt.10:16)–so ask yourself thoughtfully, have I let enneagram take the place of God’s word?
One pillar the enneagram experts (and Carl Jung and Freud) love to erect is the idea that we were fundamentally damaged as children. Surely you’ve heard parents joke many times over the past few years, “my kids are gonna need therapy for this someday!” It is one of the most pathetic phrases I think I’ve ever heard uttered, both for the parent who is excusing their poor behavior and the child who is learning their mom and dad won’t take responsibility for their actions. But enneagram loves to dig into the superego.
How was I damaged in childhood? Is the bread and butter of the enneagram. It identifies a core hurt as a kid that is now viewed from a victim’s perspective as an adult and validated by the adult as a gaping wound. The perception we’ve attached, year after year, to a childhood incident or so-called trauma grows exponentially worse as the years go on, and we rely on nothing but memory to serve as witness. It could be nothing more than a nitpicking father or a slobby mother, but the way the grown child has attached it to their self-worth could be the difference between brokenness and wholeness (I am exaggerating, but enneagram does not). This forms an individual’s core number on the enneagram circle, so it is crucial to the self-discovery of the learner. However, how was I damaged in childhood? is the wrong question.
We should rather ask, who was I as a child? This question puts the whole person in context, from the perspective of a mature adult of the self as a child, with an open-ended, logical conclusion. For instance, I know my father as an adult now. I no longer see him as the Dad he was when I was a child, because I have grown up and out of that sized version of me. Scripture corroborates this: when I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. (1Cor.13:11)
Without doubt, we are damaged humans, but not more so because of someone else (I am not speaking of incidental abuse, physical or mental). It is because we are fundamentally sinners from birth. Searching for greater meaning through finding fault in how we were raised is humanistic at best and nihilistic at worst. Where is the hope for us as parents if parents are the root cause for our grown children’s despair?
Let’s not poke that lion over and over.
Finally, the enneagram and other personality typing systems fool us into believing we’ve bitten the sacred fruit–knowledge of good and evil–and that we’ve gained superior wisdom.
We ought to be a little scared if, by applying the “sacred wisdom of the enneagram”, we think we can understand and solve the issues in the world around us or in the people we love. But I’ve noticed we do exactly that–and proudly! There are entire social media accounts and youtube channels devoted to meshing godly wisdom and enneagram wisdom. This is truly something we need to evaluate more critically.
Paul distinguishes how we as Jesus-followers are to think versus how the world thinks:
The natural person does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. It sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for spiritual things can only be discerned by the Spirit. (1Cor. 2:14)
I’ll be the one to say it: pray for discernment before opening the next enneagram book or listening to the next podcast. Are you accepting the things that come from the Spirit of God or does it sound like foolishness to you? (God has laid out quite the personality test of His own!)
Personality typing is still personality typing, a means to an end. While it could be argued it is for self-understanding, it is equally a pro-manipulation tool, of which we should be wary. It is flesh-wisdom, not Spirit-wisdom. Personally, I have found this enneagram fruit sweet but entirely unsatisfying. I say it because I know my enneagram number, studied it completely, and it has sort of become a thorn in my side. What was once a party game has paved an unfortunate path in my mind, where I trace all my motivation and energy. I let my “five-ness” excuse my bad habits and poor behavior on occasion. Sometimes enneagram “wisdom” pops into my head and I find I have to chase it away with God’s word. To my shame, I could carry on a very enlightened conversation about any number, stance, and instinct–but I do not know much of God’s word by heart.
I wish I’d never opened the Enneagram can o’ worms, because they’re hard to finagle back into the can.
We were having an interesting discussion, my kids and I, about the UFO that Nasa’s had its eye on for awhile. The object has been emitting flashes of light from a thousand light years away at a steady pace. Scientists have raised the question to the religious crowd: How would you feel about extraterrestrial beings trying to contact earth?
We discussed the science-fiction elements of it, then we came to a higher, bigger thought: What if God himself were trying to get in contact with us?!
And the most interesting answer settled into our lap: He is.
God, The God, He is in contact with us. Not Karl Jung. No door-knocking moms selling us a personality test. No need for numbers on a circle or inner work, or therapists. No self-help books or “godmothers” of theology.
God himself, revealed in His Word and throughout history. We are invited to “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matt.7:7-8).
Where are you knocking?
