Episode 18: Understanding Enneagram Types pt. 1 – Your Personal Road to Recovery and Growth

Episode 18:
Understanding Enneagram Types pt. 1
Your Personal Road to Recovery and Growth

There’s only one you. You’re unique. You have unique gifts, talents, insights, and potentials…hopes and dreams…fears and traumas…and no one else is, or will be ever be, exactly like you.

Most of us have known others like us. Kindred spirits, whether friends, teachers, or fictional characters, who seem to understand and process the world in a way we understand. Yet some, even those who share the same interests and values, don’t resonate with us in the same way. Others, still, are downright baffling. And when these people are our friends, family members, our partners, our coworkers, the lack of understanding and mismatch of communication styles, values, needs, and drives, can cause a significant amount of turbulence.

Why?

How can we understand, empathize, lead, help, appreciate, or guide them…and ourselves?

The fifth and final major dimension of the AQAL map, typology, offers a clue.

The study of personality types, or typology, offers a particularly useful lens to view and gain insight into our behavior, our relationships, and our challenges. Understanding our typography can illuminate our desires and fears, making it a powerful tool for our personal and spiritual development. By shining a light on what drives us, we can gain some insight into the deeper psychological reasons for our addiction, and more importantly, the unique path that leads to growth and recovery.

In this week’s episode of the Journey of Integral Recovery, we begin our exploration of one of the richest psychoactive dimensions of Integral Recovery: The Enneagram.

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Take the test — Discover your Enneagram type
Full Version — Enneagram Institute
Free Version — 9types

Episode Resources:
The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types
The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions-More Inclusive, More Comprehensive, More Complete
Stealing Flow: Complete Brainwave Suite for Flow State Mastery (by iAwake Technologies and Douglas Prater)
Integral Recovery: A Revolutionary Approach to the Treatment of Alcoholism and Addiction (SUNY series in Integral Theory)
Deep Recovery – a guided meditation from iAwake Technologies

In this episode:

[1:28] Why is it important to focus on all five components of the AQAL map for our recovery and personal growth?
[3:06] The systems of personality types, including Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Ocean, and more
[3:33] The origins and applications of the Ennegram system, and why focusing on the spiritual challenges of our types is critical to successful recovery from addiction and creating our best selves
[8:30] Type 1 – the reformer, the perfectionist, the judge and their tendencies and obstacles. What are the characteristics of an unhealthy enneagram type 1 and what are the gifts of a healthy type 1
[10:30] Adopting the enneagram types of our parents, often as unconscious shadow material
[11:14] How using different typologies can inform our understanding of ourselves and the world
[12:34] Adopting the expectations and habits of other types, and why leaning in towards our natural modes and strengths, as well as understanding the modes, strengths, and needs of others can harmonize our lives and our relationships
[14:48] Masculine and Feminine as an aspect of typology
[16:40] Integrating our Jungian “contrasexual opposite”, whether thinking/feeling or masculine/feminine for wholeness and healing
[18:45] Using substances as a means to access our inferior function and why integration is essential to recovery to ease the psychic pain of non-integration
[21:02] Introduction to Enneagram Type 2 – the Helper – what are their strengths, gifts, and pathologies?
[23:02] The helper’s path of integration and balancing agency and communion through the integration of opposites and balancing polarities
[25:31] Are we born with our typologies, or are they influenced by our culture and upbringing?
[26:45] Introduction to Enneagram Type 3 – The Achiever – What are their strengths, gifts, challenges, and pathologies?
[28:42] The psychoactive nature of studying the Enneagram, and how understanding the shorthand can help us make sense of our lives, our addictions, our relationships, and our recovery, as well as healing our shame and helping us develop self-compassion
[30:30] The type-A personality, compulsion, workaholism, and the realization of existential emptiness in an unhealthy three. How our typology influences and informs our substance use and our path to recovery.
[32:17] Introduction to Enneagram Type 4 – The Individualist, The Romantic – what are the challenges and gifts of the four? How can the four’s greatest strength and emotional depth become their greatest weakness?
[36:00] The myth of Narcissis – thinking too much of ourselves, or not thinking enough of ourselves?
[38:02] Developing a healthy sense of self and the balancing of masculine and feminine energies
[42:10] The gifts of the different typology systems, and how they illuminate different aspects of ourselves and path. The non-overlapping intersection of Myers-Briggs and the Ennegram
[43:24] The difference between healthy narcissism, which is important to personal development, and pathological narcissism, which is an inability to take perspectives
[47:10] We offer coaching and counseling – contact us to learn more.

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06/23/2017, 49.31, 34.0 mb (Audio)