The Enneagram is a personality framework based on underlying motivations and defense mechanisms.

It is a tool for self-awareness, empathy, and growth. In studying the Enneagram, I began to notice my compulsions, listen to my body, and live more in the present moment. The language it provided also helped me understand others and how they operate differently. Work with the Enneagram is not always easy. It is shadow-work: focused on parts of ourselves that we don’t notice… or try to hide.

Each Enneagram number (or type) references an archetypal set of defense mechanisms. How do these develop? Enneagram theory proposes that at some point in early childhood, every person received the same wound: the realization that the world does not love us unconditionally. This wound was incredibly painful, so we “bandaged” it with various defenses. Each Enneagram type is a particular kind of bandage — a network of available strategies. These strategies are all available to everyone, yet most commonly, as a child, we realized we were particularly good at one of them. Since that strategy worked, we kept at it, and it became habitual and compulsive, sinking deep into our subconscious. While it is possible for someone to be fairly evenly straddled between multiple Enneagram types, most find they have predominantly dug themselves deep into one — with of course a few scattered elements of others.

The Enneagram provides descriptions of the nine most common sets of defense mechanisms, and manages to be quite a comprehensive and elegant system. Not only does it provide information about each type, but it provides life lessons through the shapes, the conflict styles, the centers of intelligence, and more. The Enneagram is not just one tool, but a whole library of resources unified under a shared schema. It provides a powerful “latticework of mental models” which afford understanding through categorization, yet at the same time invites transcendence of those very categories! The Enneagram’s strength is not in rigidity, but in diversity of associations, which allows it to be applied in manifold situations.

If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models. —Charlie Munger