Understanding Enneagram Type Structures as a Corset

Our Enneagram type reveals the type structure that has grown around who we were innately created to be as humans. Our “essence” is who we truly are underneath defense systems, personality traits, coping mechanisms, and unconscious needs and motivations. This type structure is protective and made surviving as children in an unkind world possible. We experimented with what worked to get our needs met or to shield ourselves from violation or suffering, and the things that made us feel loved or safe or autonomous became a part of our type structure’s tactics. These are not essentially “bad” things; some of them are even strengths and gifts. The trouble comes in our overreliance on these strengths and gifts, overplaying them to the point of weaknesses and liabilities, which fortify our structure and creates blind spots and unawareness.

I like to describe our type structure through the metaphor of a corset. With my background in theatre, I have worn more than my fair share of these torture chambers! A corset is made of four basic elements: the cloth that wraps the body; the stays or ribs that provide the stiff structure and rigidity; the hooks in front that lock it in place; and the ties in back that tighten, compress, and create the shape. Wearing a corset allowed a person to cultivate the shape and impression that was acceptable to society, but it also limited their movement, restricted their breathing, and permanently impacted their body. Their organs would rearrange within the constrained space, their limited breathing would cause fainting spells, their ribs (their own, natural inner structure) would crack and break, and their life-filled wombs would be compressed, causing difficulties and even death. That’s alot of trouble for the perfect figure!

Our type structure operates in a similar way. Our vice/passion/deadly sin is the cloth that wraps around us, lulling us into a false sense of comfort brought on by habitual patterns. Our motivations act as the stays, creating a framework for how and why we operate. Our focus of attention creates the hooks in front, locking the structure in place, ensuring that our motivations will be properly supported and achieved. Our defense system acts as the ties in the back, tightening our reactions, compressing our fears, and shaping an external armor in the image of our idealization. When we are operating from this place of rigidity, automatic habit, self-protection, and unawareness, we are also limiting our movement within relationships with others and ourselves, restricting the free flow of breath and connection to all three centers of intelligence, and impacting the life-giving nature of being human. There is a sense in which unconsciously living locked in our type structure causes death to the very things to which we wish to be alive and use to create our legacy. That’s also a lot of trouble for the perfect (Type 1), worthy (2), successful (3), unique (4), competent (5), etc, etc, life!

We talk a lot about the work of the Enneagram, but what is it? Our “work” is to become aware of how this type structure isn’t who we are but something we have put on, how restricting it is, and how we can loosen the life-draining tightness it locks us into. We aren’t aiming to discard the type altogether; there are plenty of strengths and gifts within the structure – including support and structure itself! Instead, our aim is to examine what wraps us, loosen the ties, unlock the hooks, and create flexibility in the stays, allowing our natural, inner structure to operate with freedom, our breath to expand our awareness, our movements to be uninhibited by habit and pattern, and our growth to be limitless.

An example: As someone who leads with Three, I see this type structure wrapping self-deceit and vanity around my natural, inner structure of hope and truth, fueling the desperate need to be successful, and turning natural productivity and accomplishment into a rigid method of achieving my motivation. This structure is locked in place by my focus on tasks, goals, and what needs to get done. It locks out access to feelings, deep relationships, and rest. The structure is tightened by idealizing myself as a successful person, compressed by avoiding failure, and shaped by my defense mechanism of Identification (finding my identity in the work I do and the roles I play). My breath gets caught in my throat as my chest contracts around my repressed, frozen heart, and the longing for the life of “loved for who I am” dies in the constraints of “person who works hard all the time and looks good doing it.”

In loosening this type structure, I first confront the vice that this “corset” is – an armor made of self-deceit and vanity built to protect myself from the fear that I will not be loved for who I am. I drop in and down and listen for the motivations that have built the structure, and then listen some more for the truth that is under the desires and fears: I am loved and valued for who I am. Period. I unlock my focus of attention on tasks and goals and look around at what those blinders cause me to miss, and then consciously choose where my attention goes and allow my energy to follow. I loosen the strings that Identification has gripped, pulled, and knotted, and befriend the person beneath the masks and roles. And then, with structure loosened, my breath begins to flow as my mind, heart, and body begin to sync, and I can rest and relax into the fundamental truth that everything will get done naturally and as it should without me killing myself to make it happen. Beneath the structure, I find life, truth, and the essence of who I am in a free, expanded, life-giving, life-sustaining way.