Discovering Self and Others through the Enneagram by Kiley Distelrath
Humans try to understand themselves — how they think, how they relate to people, why they react the way they do — but this understanding doesn’t come easily. Enter the Enneagram — a model of nine interconnected personality types with ancient roots that brings people a sense of self-understanding and an awareness of how others process the world. “I feel like the Enneagram is really cool because it helps people accept themselves and be seen that they are accepted and they are known as their own unique self and that’s OK,” Rachael Murdock, a junior and a type Nine, said. What is the Enneagram? The Enneagram is a system of personality types that helps people understand their core motivations, attitudes and behaviors — both the positives and the negatives. It doesn’t stop there: The model also teaches people empathy for how other humans operate. The Enneagram Institute, a company devoted to teaching the Enneagram, asserts Oscar Ichazo created the typing system in the 1960s, though official origins are debated. The symbol, however, carries roots from multiple religions, like mystical Christianity and Islam, and ancient Greek philosophy. There are nine personality types which fit into the eclectic — yet intentional — symbol of the Enneagram. Type descriptions merely summarize instead of fully illustrate the personality. Each individual person has an innate basic type that never changes, although people can find characteristics of themselves in each type.
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The model’s shape is crucial to understanding how the types connect. The model uses a type’s core motivation to divide each into three centers: the Instinctive Center (Eight, Nine, One), the Feeling Center (Two, Three, Four) and the Thinking Center (Five, Six, Seven). Further, each center has a dominant emotion they feel when they lose their self-understanding, according to The Enneagram Institute. The Instinctive Center reacts with anger; the Feeling Center feels shame; the Thinking Center deals with fear. The Enneagram exploded with popularity in 2017, according to a Los Angeles Times article examining Google searches. It gained momentum on Pepperdine’s campus as well, as students and professors said they found it unique compared to traditional personality tests. “I think in some ways [it] gives a lot of language to something that doesn’t always have a lot of language ‘cause it’s just like your internal thought processes, which I think is what differentiates it from other personality systems,” Emily McNutt, a junior and type One, said. The Enneagram focuses on people’s “internal drives” versus their “external presentations,” as traditional psychology tests do, McNutt said. Because of this, Alicia Yu, a junior and type Four, said the Enneagram feels more personal. “It’s different from other personality tests — and I’ve done my fair share of personality tests,” said Yu, once an avid Myers-Briggs test-taker. “... Myers-Briggs or other personality tests which I still — I like them — but those focus a lot more on your behavior and I feel like that’s not really a way we can categorize ourselves because
