Here are some methods where you fully accept your Enneagram style, embody your experience of the low side, cast around for the unconscious motives that drive your unwanted reactions and explore the deeper and more important needs a problem fulfills.
These can include:
- Coming up with 3 good reasons to keep your problem.
- Identifying the positive intentions behind Enneagram behavior.
- Identifying deeper and more important intentions.
- What does your Enneagram part want that is even more important?
- Accepting uncomfortable emotions until they turn into something else.
- Befriending your critical voice.
- Fully identifying with and intensely embodying your Enneagram style.
Finally, discover how your Enneagram style gives you:
- a sense of control,
- an identity and familiar role,
- love in the terms of your history,
- protection from others,
- a way to manage wounds
- protection from being overwhelmed.
Possible exercises:
- Ones – Make a list of 5 negative critical statements. Practice saying them out loud at 20% of your normal speaking tempo.
- Twos – Buy a tablet of invoices, make out an invoice for every relationship past and present. Don’t send them.
- Threes – Write a letter to your Enneagram part expressing everything you resent about its behavior and then everything you appreciate about it.
- Fours – Create an hour long recording of all your complaints large and small. Listen back through them four times.
- Fives – Get invited to a party. Hand out little cards saying “I have laryngitis.” Spend the evening unable to talk.
- Sixes– Schedule worry sessions: write about your worries and fears while sitting in an empty bathtub or shower.
- Sevens – Use your imagination to travel into the future and imagine being on your death bed thinking back on what you have left unfinished.
- Eights – Be deliberately rude to a waitress then apologize profusely and leave a big tip.
- Nines – Make a list each day with two columns: “What I said” and “What I wanted to say.”
