You are More than Your Emotional Habit – Though it Can Rule You

In this series, we’ve been exploring the elements of Enneagram type structure that unconsciously constrain and/or move us, using the Enneagram as a map to trace the patterns of our personal territories so we can live more freely and fully.

At the literal heart of our type structures is what some teachers call the Passion, Vice, Driving Emotion, Deadly Sin, or Compulsion. I resonate most with the perspective of one of my favorite teachers, Peter O’Hanrahan, who calls it the Habit of Emotion or Emotional Habit.

The Emotional Habit underlies and energizes our motivations from the heart (or feeling) center. It is the emotion that sparks first when we are triggered to react rather than respond and causes a tightening or contraction around our hearts. We are often not aware of how it operates because it’s been a subtle companion for so long and disguises itself well, and yet it has the capacity to greatly alter our perspective and reception of people, situations, thoughts, and other emotions.

The Emotional Habit is the filter through which we receive external experiences and the driver for how we feel internally.

You are more than your Emotional Habit, but it will rule you if you allow it to run the show.

For some, identifying their Emotional Habit comes easily as it is prominent and familiar. For others, while it clearly operates, it is difficult to come to terms with as it seemingly contradicts their desires and idealizations. Whether welcomed or rejected, the Emotional Habit rules the emotions, influences thoughts, and decides actions until we become aware of its power.

The Emotional Habit thinks it is helping us by keeping us on track. It brings up a familiar feeling whenever we are getting too close to our fear or are about to lose our desire. Fight, flight, or freeze activates, and this driving emotion takes over the autopilot. Even just thinking about it creates that familiar contraction in my chest.

When we lead with the Emotional Habit, our thinking center is clouded, and our body center goes off-line. We feel fuzzy and disembodied, knowing only that what our feelings are saying must be the truth. And generally the conclusion is that we will never indeed be fully known or fully loved so we must figure it out on our own.

The work here is to get under the Emotional Habit and release the contraction. What is triggering it? What are the true feelings that are being covered up in the process? What is the body saying?

Pause a moment. When you breathe, where does your breath go? Where does it stop? Where might it be caught? What happens when you continue to follow your breath and reconnect with your body? How does getting back into your body release the hold the Emotional Habit has on you?

When we observe ourselves relentlessly returning to our Emotional Habit, we can catch it in action and release it gently. When we see it operate and fan the flame of our motivations, we can choose to be curious and explore what might be underneath this habitual emotional pattern. We can receive what comes up and give ourselves grace and compassion, and then grow in the opportunity to make a conscious choice about the direction we go.

Our Emotional Habit does not have to rule us.

-

Emotional Habit* (and what it feels like) by Enneagram Type

One: Anger – feels like irritation, frustration, righteous indignation, criticism, judgement, and annoyance

Two: Pride – feels like high self-regard, deep self-pity, and simultaneous feelings of deserving and worthlessness

Three: Deceit/Self-Deception – feels like avoidance, self-glorification, performance pressure, self-consciousness, and self-inflation

Four: Envy – feels like disappointment, frustration, melancholy, lack, self-loathing, and apathy

Five: Avarice/Guardedness - feels like greed, scarcity, fear, tension, self-protection, cynicism, and desperation

Six: Fear – feels like anxiety, doubt, paranoia, worry, uncertainty, and suspicion

Seven: Gluttony/Insatiability – feels like hunger, craving, desperation, fear, emptiness, and discontent

Eight: Lust/Excess Anger – feels like hard-heartedness, cynicism, vengeance, rage, fury, antagonism, and aggravation

Nine: Sloth/Stubborn Neglectfulness – feels like unwillingness, lack of energy, low grade rage, ignoring, feeling ignored, intentional blindness, passive-aggression, and indecision

There are so many tactics and strategies that these Emotional Habits generate. While you may not see your Emotional Habit exercised in the same way another person of your type, it will always come back to feeling __________ in order to serve our motivations.

Keep observing. Keep asking why. And then ask yourself, “Is this really what it will take for me to be fully known and fully loved?” The more we sit with it, the more we feel the Emotional Habit’s grip loosen.

One step closer to freedom.

*This list reflects traditional Enneagram language as well as personally updated language highly influenced by Peter O’Hanrahan and The Narrative Enneagram’s work.