Personality Styles
Each Enneagram personality number tends to pay attention to different aspects of the environment and has particular habitual ways of thinking, feeling (emotion) and acting in the world.
We display aspects of all nine Enneagram styles, and different contexts or environments may draw out certain behaviours that are not usually characteristic of us. For example, our behaviour often changes when we’re feeling particularly stressed relative to when we’re relaxed.
Each of these nine personality styles in the model is connected to two other styles by lines which indicate how our behaviour can change under certain conditions.
How you got your Enneagram
Probably as a result of genetic predisposition combined with significant early childhood experiences, at an early age, we adopt one of the nine Enneagram styles as a dominant feature as a safety mechanism; this mechanism works so well that we continue to unconsciously exhibit the dominant Enneagram style personality throughout childhood and into adulthood.
We tend to display our dominant number, or behavioural pattern more frequently than the patterns associated with the other eight enneagram styles, and it’s likely to be particularly prominent when we are under stress and more reactive.
Our dominant Enneagram style powerfully affects the way we interpret events and people and makes us particularly sensitive to specific circumstances and conditions.
Each of us has access to all nine Enneagram styles which we use either more or less frequently depending partly on how fixated, or stuck, we are in our dominant style, and also on the context that we find ourselves in.
The Nine Enneagram Personality Avoidances
Enneagram 1 Avoidant of Criticism
Enneagram 2 Avoidant of Own Needs/Feeling selfish
Enneagram 3 Avoidant of Failure/Feeling incompetent
Enneagram 4 Avoidant of Meaninglessness
Enneagram 5 Avoidant of Feeling Socially & Intellectually inept
Enneagram 6 Avoidant of Risk & Danger
Enneagram 7 Avoidant of Emotional pain, Constraints and Negativity
Enneagram 8 Avoidant of Vulnerability or appearing weak
Enneagram 9 Avoidant of Conflict and Loss of relationship