Wednesday, February 16, 2011

My big S Self

One of the most valuable concepts for me about the Enneagram is the idea of personality and essence. Personality is the strategy we adopt in our family of origin to adapt to the limited acceptance we experience. We place this strategy over all of who we are and squish our bigness into our personality box. After many years of practice this strategy becomes who we think we are. The enneagram is a map of nine personality strategies. Studying this map and learning more about being mindful of our main strategies and the strategies of those we love leads to increased compassion for self and others. Mindfulness is observation without judgement. By bringing mindfulness to the ways we've learned to defend ourselves when feeling our feelings and being emotionally vulnerable wasn't safe, we can begin to move beyond those defenses to more authentic contact with self and others. Defensive postures are a response to fear when responding authentically doesn't feel safe. The idea of three main defensive postures was originally developed by Karen Horney and has been used by several Enneagram teachers. The three postures are aggression, compliance and withdrawal. Three of the enneagram types lead with each one of these. Twos, sixes and ones lead with compliance. When they are afraid and feel the need to defend themselves they are more apt to placate and please. Fours, fives and nines tend to withdraw and pull back into themselves when threatened. Threes, eights and sevens often lead with aggression getting big and using anger to protect themselves. This is not to say that this is always true. It is only a useful tool to be able to show up for ourselves, recognizing the defensive posture as part of our strategy. All people have all three options and can use them all. I am a four and when I notice I want to pull back into myself and run away, I can ask myself what I am afraid of rather than running away. I can soothe the little girl inside me who had no other choice but to shrink and get small and blame herself in the face of my mom's anger. I can let her know that she is safe with me and that I protect her now. Together we are learning that it is safe to be powerful and to find our voice. By bringing compassion to ourselves when we notice our defensive postures and seeing them as vehicles for us to learn to show up for ourselves in our fear, we open to more and more of all of who we are. Fear creates our strategies. Showing up for ourselves in our fear allows us to heal. What we heal into is the big beautiful essence of all that we are. Essence is all of who we are. It includes our personality strategies and our defensive postures. Opening to essense is the process of reclaiming all we gave up to become who we thought we needed to be to survive in our family of origin. It means making conscious choices about what we want to keep about our strategies and what we are ready to release. The Enneagram is a powerful map to begin to explore this reclaiming process. You could also think of personality as self with a small s and essence as Self with a big S. Learning to trust in Self helps us to know ourselves as more than our strategies. Learning to listen to the still small voice of the Self within us guiding us home creates the pathways for more authentic connections with ourselves and others. I think of it as learning to listen to my big S self. My new affirmation is I trust in my big S Self. May you also learn to trust in your big
S Self. Would it be useful to set aside some time to listen?

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