hi welcome to the second session of any gram roadmap in this session we'll be looking more deeply at the center's the types and the subtypes and especially learning about what the subtypes are and why it's really important to know them if you're using the Enneagram as a tool for growth so we've seen this before in the last session this is the three centers of intelligence so this is an important structuring of the Enneagram and I like to talk about the center's first because three is easier than nine frankly so it's really important to know that the any graham is based on this idea that we have three centers of intelligence the head from you know which is the center of thinking and analysis the heart which is more about emotion and relationship and empathy and compassion and the body based types which are more about sort of being in the world exercising control over the environment more on a physical kinesthetic kind of intelligence or gut knowing so these three are really important and the whole thing behind the Enneagram is about wholeness and balance the whole point of it and so I like this quote by Cynthia Burge Oh because she talks about being balanced and poised in all three centers and that that's where we really sort of wake up and find our higher selves get in touch with our higher selves so when we're more in our personality we tend to come from one of these three centers more than the other so one of the things we can learn about ourselves is how do I tend to maybe come more from my feelings than my head and one of the interesting aspects of the Enneagram theory is the idea that one Center can kind of do the work of the wrong Center for instance this is a good example from my life when I sometimes think I'm thinking about something because I'm a heart type I can realize that I'm actually thinking with my feelings for instance if I know someone has done something and I'm talking and talking about that person and I think I'm analyzing what they did let's say I'm mad at them my thinking can be fully colored by the fact that I'm angry and that happens to me a lot as a heart type in a different way other types can do it with other centers for instance some head types can think they're having feelings when really they're thinking about it they're thinking about the emotion or the feeling they're not simply feeling it as an emotion so these are examples of the ways that our centers can kind of get disordered in a way that we're not coming from them in a clear way and especially not coming from and using all three as is optimal for our you know our being in the world so the idea of three centers is also related to the idea that we have a three-part brain and our reptilian brain is associated with the instincts or our gut knowing and the instincts is are located in the body Center as is the moving center so both the gut is both the center of moving m and instinctual reactions the heart of course is the center of feelings and it's connected to the mammalian brain or the limbic system and the head is connected to the neocortex one of the interesting things about say an instinctual or reptilian reaction to something versus an emotional versus of thinking is let's say you have a thought response and the speed of that thought is X if you have an emotional response the speed of the emotional response is 10 X if you have a instinctual response the speed of that response is a hundred X so it's really important to remember that our reptilian brain and our instinctual reactions are very quick and it's almost impossible often to bring our head in or a cognitive function to analyze or work with that instinct which is one of the reasons why the subtypes will be important because it's they talk a lot about how the instinctual reactions figure into the larger personality we'll be talking about that more in a minute so it's important here to know that this idea of having three brains and Claudian Rondo is fond of saying humans are three brained beings are not only practical to know about in terms of where we're coming from when we're you know out in the world or when we're seeking to grow but it's also increasingly being acknowledged in the scientific community that we have three brains there's this new book and braining where people talk about how you have fully complex adaptive and functional neural networks in your heart and your gut and how they're discovering there is a kind of brain in your gut and in your heart and that it can be very interesting to know about the different functions of these different kinds of intelligences and of course these are the things that support the type and the subtypes in terms of understanding the whole system so again we've seen this before I'm going to talk a bit a lot about the subtype so I want to introduce the subtypes by saying the subtypes are simply another break down into three of the type so we have three centers and each one of us is based or lives more from one Center than the other I'm a heart type I live more from the heart and again I sometimes interpret things emotionally or see things through the lens of relationship when ahead type someone else I know that's not a 2 3 or 4 someone who's a five six or seven may see it from a whole different angle not from the point of view of the emotions so there are three centers there are three types in each Center and then for each of these three types in each Center each of these nine types they are three versions of that type and this is the subtype so it's another break down into three which you know as I said threefold nough sand the law of three is one of the structuring principles of the inia gram and here we see it again so before I talk about the subtypes I just want to say a couple of things about the nine types each of the nine has its own distinct patterns of thinking feeling and behaving so we have three centers and our personality is manifest through those centers the way certain beliefs we have certain things that we tend to think about certain things we tend not to think about the kind of feelings we tend to have a lot some people tend to feel you know angry but never sad other times people might feel sad on occasion but they never get angry those are feeling patterns associated with the person given personality and also behavior patterns you know some people might tend to do certain things or not do certain things take action in a certain way maybe too much action other types might take not enough action they might sit on the fence when really they need to make a decision and move into action so one of the things about the nine types that it's really good to know is what are the patterns and how does the type show up through those patterns also as I've said before each of the nine types has a focus of attention perceptual filters and biases that they see the world through so some type one type might never want to have conflict so they may have a perceptual filter for filtering out situations that might lead to content conflict or they might see things in a certain light based on what they believe and how they feel also patterns are relating to others I mentioned this before there are certain people who you know maybe have certain patterns around friendships or or love relationships and that these can also be reflected in the personality also defense mechanisms and core values you know certain guiding principles can be associated with the types as well as particular defense mechanisms as I've alluded to before each of the nine types has its own growth trajectory that's really important because if you're using the Enneagram as a tool for growth which is what it's meant for one of the handy things about the Enneagram is that once you learn your type that's the starting point for really getting a lot of information about what are useful growth tasks for you where are you going where are you heading and how can you kind of map your journey forward knowing the biases and filters of your type and knowing how you want might want to grow beyond a kind of programming that may drive you each of the nine types brings particular value to the world has strengths and specialties and again like I said before the the only mistake we we sometimes make is by only relying on a narrow set of of specialties and strengths in other words some of the types we'll see 360 degrees of reality through a narrow slice based on what they tend to pay attention to which is associated with their personality type finally all of the types have particular blind spots and challenges and again this is one of the big strengths of the Enneagram of shedding light on you know what do you need to work on that you may not know that you need to work on just because it's in your blind spot because you just may not see it and you may not want to own it it may be something you don't want to see which can make it even harder to own so the Enneagram brings information about all of those things associated with the types so it really provides a way or a support or a guidebook forward for working with your typical habits so what are the subtypes then let's start talking a little bit about what the Enneagram subtypes are now this is an aspect of Enneagram theory that is actually not very clear even in the Enneagram world even where you get a lot of people who know the Enneagram quite quite well sometimes they just don't cover it and other times you find different teachers have different theories they use --lift different language they just teach the subtypes differently and so it's important to say that at the outset because part of my purpose in talking about the subtypes not only in describing the 27 subtypes to you but also showing how they how much they help with development is one of the primary purposes of this program so I'm very excited to bring what I think is a very clarifying approach to the whole topic of subtypes and also to defining what the subtypes are and what their individual growth paths are so what are the subtypes as I've said there are three versions of three three of the nine types based on which of three instinctual drives is most prominent in your experience so the three main instinctual drives that all humans have according to any graham theory are for self-preservation for social relationships or for one-to-one bonding or for sexual relationships and connection so these tend to go under the shorthand of self-preservation social subtype and one-to-one or sexual subtype so the idea here is that we each have all these instincts we all need all three to survive in the world however just like we tend to favor one Center and then within that Center we tend to favor one type within one personality type we tend to have one instinctual drive that's more prominent than the other two and as we'll learn it is also important what the sequence of the instinctual drives is in other words one tends to be dominant and I'm going to call that the dominant instinctual drive one tends to be kind of secondary it plays a role but less or so and the other tends to be more repressed so tends to be something that we avoid or even energetically push down or push away from our experience so these three kind of groupings of instinctual drives are very important for survival they also represent our animal wisdom so what we're talking about with subtypes is kind of like how we weave in the instinctual element of our personality which was really the animal soul or the animal part of us and again there's a good part to that which is that humans really do well when we're at our healthiest is when we tend to be in tune with our animal wisdom right but at the same time the animal wisdom can be so automatic and it can also get hijacked from the personality in terms of what we tend to pay attention to emotionally and cognitively so the main thing there is going to be noticing how these different instinctual drives play a role in your life but before I get too much more into describing the subtypes I want to spend a little bit of time saying why are the subtypes important to know and again I think this is because for me well I'll just tell you my story you know I learned the Enneagram in 1990 and you know I got trained in the Enneagram I became a teacher I hung around the Graham community I went to a lot of trainings it was a real passion and still is but I never understood the subject of subtypes for many years I would hear it talked about and I just couldn't find my subtype I couldn't identify my subtype I didn't really understand the whole topic I didn't really see how it helped you grow it seemed to me there was a lot more information about subtypes and there were about the main types I just didn't have the kind of experience that I had when I learned I was a to when I talk when I when I would learn about the subtypes and the instincts but that all changed in 2004 in 2004 cláudio neuron oh who is the pretty much one of the seminal authors I talked about before who really gave us the 9 types that we work with today he came to the International anagram Association conference in Washington DC that I attended and he did three mornings all teaching about his latest understanding of the subtypes and to me what he presented there at that conference in 2004 was revolutionary it was completely different than anything I had ever heard before about the subtypes and I learned my subtype from him and some of his colleagues who came to the conference to teach us all 350 of us the subtypes I learned that they believed that I was a self preservation to how at first I didn't know what that meant of course they asked us to write something about what subtype we thought we were and why and I had written I mean I knew I didn't really know but I thought maybe I was a sexual to a sexual subtype and because I had kind of learned it's kind of worrier the most neurotic and I was pretty neurotic around one-to-one relationships so that's what I thought but I was also pretty clear I didn't really know so I told them that but they told me we think you're a self preservation too now here's an interesting thing and something for you to watch out for the day before when cloudy or Naranjo had described all 27 subtypes in a long talk I remembered that when he talked about self preservation - he said it was a childlike - and I remember so clearly as if it was yesterday that there was like a thought bubble over my head saying well that's not me I'm not childlike right so I didn't want to think of myself it's trav like not a good image for someone who wants people to have a good image of her so I noticed that when this guy told me I was a self preservation to I got kind of defensive inside and I didn't I wanted to argue with him but luckily I'd been in therapy for a few years by then and I noticed myself getting defensive I noticed myself putting up a wall and I put down the wall and I decided I'm just gonna open up and learn what he's seeing in me and see what makes sense so I asked him I said why do you think I'm a self preservation - and what happened then was amazing he and I might get a little choked up about it because still today I can feel the power of it he said when I stand next to you I don't think you're gonna protect me I think I need to protect you and I felt it go through my whole body the energy of feeling like I needed to be protected like I wanted to hurt you with him I wanted to say no I can you know that doesn't make sense but it made sense so completely and it was really like a whole full-body sense of the rightness of that so that was a huge eye-opener experience for me understanding what a self press 2 was and it turns out a self preservation 2 is a 2 that is more fearful than many toos it's a 2 that has more trust issues it's that it's a 2 that's more ambivalent about relationships and connection and all of that really fit for me however I had kind of been repressing how afraid I was I wasn't really admitting it to myself so again another example of how the Enneagram sheds a more objective light on you and shows you things you may not be aware of I just wasn't that aware of how much fear I was walking around with until I learned about my subtype and it was funny because after that conference I went back to my therapist and I told him hey guess what I found I found out I'm really afraid much more afraid than I thought I was and he's like finally finally you caught on because he said every time he came to get me in the waiting room I looked terrified and you know on the one hand that didn't surprise me but it did surprise me that I hadn't been very aware of that so I tell you this story in part to tell you how important I think the subtypes are that experienced opened up a whole new level a whole new dimension of my own personal growth you know learning I was a to was huge you know early in the early 90s and what that meant but understanding what being a self preservation to was and how what that added to my growth path and what I needed to understand about myself was equally if not more huge so so I say that because I think I hadn't had that experience before with other sub type approaches until I learned this approach so having had such a big experience at that conference learning the subtypes in 2004 from Naranjo I got very excited I thought well now in the whole Enneagram field this subject of subtypes and instincts is going to be revolutionized but to my surprise after that after that conference everyone know nothing changed everyone just kind of went back to teaching the subtypes the way they always did and I think this happens in fields of knowledge is that people you know get used to teaching what they teach and sometimes they don't catch on to new information so I kind of went on a mission after that though because it had helped me so much I wanted to bring that same ins level of insight to other people so that's when I started researching and finding out everything I could about the subtypes and why and I go into a lot of detail here with also because a lot of people have come to know me as someone who teaches the subtypes a lot I've been invited a lot of places to teach this approach to the subtypes because there aren't a lot of people teaching this approach and that when I do teach it a lot of people find it incredibly helpful incredibly enlightening and a lot of times people say to me after they learn the approach that I'm going to teach you they say you know the Enneagram shouldn't be taught without this peace and so I'm really happy to share it with you because while the nine types gives you a lot of information and is a very important model the subtypes the three versions of each night them the nine types helps enormous Li and so to get back to the topic that I'm that I'm talking about here which is why is important to know these subtypes for one thing it helps you with typing so if you if you know the anagram even a little bit you may know that Mis typing is a big problem and finding your correct type it can be a challenge a lot of the tests out there tend to not be very accurate and so learning really finding your right type which i think is the beginning of the real work can be difficult and so I think knowing the subtypes helps a lot with finding the right type because you can kind of no more than more nuanced versions of the of the nine types and so you can have more information with which to find where people are located in addition to that and this is huge the twenty-seven subtypes that I'm going to talk to you about include types personalities that are not described in the nine types so you will not hear about some of these sub personalities these more nuanced descriptions of particular versions of the personalities if you just learned the nine types or just read about the nine types as they've been written about in many books so for instance a lot of times when I teach this workshop I have people finding their type for the first time even people who have been studying the Enneagram for a while because they didn't know there was anything such as a self preservation for and this is the top the self preservation for is really at the top of the list of types that tend to not be known if you don't know this approach to the subtypes it's a four that doesn't look like a four and some sometimes this has to do with the counter types which is which I'm going to talk about in a minute but there are one version of each of the three types that kind of don't look like what we we think that type looks like and so these are often the subtypes that get mistyped so I'm gonna highlight that to you as I go through the subtypes common Mis typings and things to look out for in case you want to confirm your type so self-preservation for social seven social 9 self-preservation 3 these are types that don't really get described in any in and up in most approaches to the nine types and so that's one big reason that I got really passionate about teaching the subtypes and why I think they're very important and now just so you can know what all the types are and not leave anyone out so another reason to know the subtypes is that a lot of times when people learn the Enneagram type they learn there any Grimm type they notice that they may differ from someone else who has the same type they may think well how can I be a 1 if that if my friend is a 1 because we're really different so people have looked understandably for reasons why people the same type can differ and I think sometimes people have gone to to talking about wings to differentiate between people the same type and while I do think wings which are the types on either side of you on the diagram play a role and they do color arts our main type I think that subtype is a much better way of describing exactly why two people the same type differ and exactly how also the subtypes help us access a deeper level of awareness kind of like with my story you know and I didn't know I was afraid I kind of knew I was ambivalent about connection that sometimes I wanted to be close to people but I was also afraid of being close to people but I didn't really know the full story around some of my relationship issues and some of the consequences of my fearfulness and other aspects of my subtype until I really understood this this approach in this description of my subtype so here we're talking about how the animal wisdom the instinctual drive mixes with the core emotional motives of the types and how that mix kind of creates an even more nuanced personality style and often some of the characteristics of behavior associated with subtypes are the most automatic the most removed from conscious awareness and so harder to manage harder to be aware of harder to use for growth and so I think the subtypes help us understand some of the patterns we have that we really don't see you know kind of like they did for me another big reason to know the Enneagram subtypes is because each of the subtypes has a distinct path of development so for instance if you're someone who works with people like as a coach or a therapist or a teacher and you you know in your work it helps to know and someone subject someone's type rather and so you can help them like I work I'm working with a4 I want to use the Enneagram map because the Enneagram map helps me as a coach understand what that person's going to need in an efficient way it'll be important for you to know that different fours need something different when they approach their development work because some of the fours can be very different for instance one for needs to learn to take less action and get more in touch with their feelings another for needs to learn to stop over identifying with their feelings to kind of get out of their feelings and take some action right so if you're someone who uses the Enneagram as a practitioner or wants to it's going to be really important to understand that the subtype the subtype personalities have an even more specific path of growth associated with their more specific more nuanced character traits finally I think that there's something really poetic and and complete about including the subtypes because as I've talked about the number three the threefold nough so the Enneagram is so central and really 27 is sort of 3 times 3 times 3 it gives us a very round number it kind of it represents a more complete picture in terms of the integrand model so now I want to break it down for you a little bit and in terms of really understanding what the subtypes are so there are nine types each type as I was as I've talked about they're associated with with different you know sets of personality patterns emotional patterns cognitive patterns but they're also associated with what we call nine passions and the passions are both psychological in nature but also they relate to spiritual development the passions are basically the central motivating and emotionally based force behind the personality and often this is unconscious interestingly each of the each type has a passion that it's associated with these passions can be equated to the seven deadly sins of the Christian tradition plus fear and deceit or fear and vanity and so there's two extra added but the seven deadly sins is a part of this now the passions are sometimes also called vices and they're also aspects that are connected to something higher to our higher self which is called the virtue so there's a passion that's sort of the vice and there's a virtue that's kind of its opposite that kind of is part of the roadmap of spiritual development in terms of if I can be really aware of the passion which is associated with my lower or personality level emotional center I can work to get in touch with the higher side of that that it's connected to for me my passion is pride and the higher side of that is humility so I'll talk much more about that later and how we can use that idea for growth but for now it's just important to know that each of the nine types has this passion that is kind of a central emotional factor that motivates a lot of behavior but is often unconscious for even for instance even fear which is the passion of type six sometimes sixes will say they didn't really know they were afraid until they met the Enneagram until they learned through the Enneagram that fear was a central issue for them I've heard people say you know I thought I was just a good girl scout I was just really good at preparing and putting things in order or I just thought that I was took action you know in certain circumstances but you know didn't understand that sometimes when I was taking action that was motivated by underlying fear so the passion of the type is kind of the central feature that's connected to the to the theory in a big way now the passion is good to know about when you're talking about subtypes because what will happen in the time in the subtypes is the passion of the type gets expressed or acted out in three different ways depending on which of the three subtypes you are so we have this passion and then we also all have these three instincts and again as humans we all have three the capacity for all three within us however one tends to dominate our experience one tends to be the go-to the one that we overdo and I'll be talking about what that means in a minute so one of these three one tends to be secondary one tends to be repressed so what is our subtype so our instinct is either for self-preservation for social relationships or for sexual relating or one-to-one bonding and when the passion kind of mixes with the dominant instinct that gives us a subtype so there are three instincts and I want to be clear about the language here because this sometimes gets confused when we're talking about the subtypes and the instincts in the Enneagram world when you mix the passion with the dominant instinct and again with the passion I'm talking about sort of the emotional patterns come along for the ride as well you get a subtype which is a totally unique personality type now it's a form of the main type it's related to the main type but it's different in some ways it's more nuanced more specific it's a subtype so one of the mistakes I see people make when they're learning the subtypes is they do a kind of addition right so let's say I'm a six and I like to join a lot of groups I must be a social six or I'm a three and I like to take a lot of supplies along with me on a trip or I like to make sure I have enough money in my bank account so I must be a self preservation three it's not exactly like that I think that's just a little bit too simplistic what I've learned is it's more complicated in that it's the subtype mixture of passion and the emotional and cognitive aspects of the type when it mixes with the dominant instincts it's more of an alchemy it's more of a multiplication it's more of an interesting mixture that yields a whole different type so this is very important to remember and especially because if you're just going by what it sounds like to be self-preservation dominated or if it's what it sounds like to be a sexual sexual have a sexual instinct that's strong maybe a little bit different than you think depending on what type you are so let's define some of our terms a little bit more just so we're really clear what we're talking about talked a little bit about passion already but the passion is the main emotional motivation that shapes the conditioned personality so this is the personality again that gets formed in childhood it's based on who we came in as so it's not completely determined by our childhood experience but it's the the personality that we kind of developed in childhood in terms of our adaptive strategies and in terms of what we've come to expect for the world and how we learn to deal with it so the emotions of the related to the passion are kind of literal and that they tend to motivate a lot of our behavior I want to give my example of pride which is my passion when I first learned the Enneagram and I learned my passion was pride I didn't really understand it and I have to say pride is a bit of a tricky passion it's a bit of a tricky motivator because it's sort of synonymous with something we think of as good right is being confident or proud of ourselves but in this sense and sometimes we have to understand some of the Enneagram terminology in terms of esoteric the esoteric meaning or the ancient wisdom or the ancient philosophy meaning and pride remember is at the pit of Dante's hell right pride was the sin of the Fallen Angel in the story of Dante and seyton sort of daring to challenge God and so falling and pride is kind of a bad thing in that sense in in any gram terms pride is a kind of self elevation so it's a kind of puffing yourself up and making yourself a little more important than maybe you really are but there's also a self deflation associated with it and when I first knew the Enneagram I really understood the self deflation because you know I like a lot of us I had been very insecure and always worried about people liking me and worried that I wasn't likable but what I learned after learning the Enneagram was also the self inflation part to sometimes feel like they can meet me everybody's needs that they can make anyone like them and so it can feel horrible for a to to get rejected or if someone doesn't like them instead of just like a normal part of everyday life and so one of the things I started realizing is how I puffed my importance up inside myself in order to feel okay about myself and once I saw that I saw pride everywhere so it's the the passion is important it's a big part of the personality system and in the Enneagram terms and it's also something that is a big part of the picture in terms of what you need to become aware of and what drives you so these just very quickly I'm gonna go back to these in the last session when we talk about growth but just to give you a sense if you're wondering now what your passion is for type 1 angers is the a passion for type 2 it's pride for type 3 it's vanity for type 4 its envy for type 5 its avarice and again I really want to emphasize don't necessarily think of these words in the normal way we tend to think of them for instance avarice isn't really greed about like wanting all the money it's more of a withholding and a fear of depletion and so a kind of holding on to and a kind of stingy 'no Surround things more like time and energy and inner reefs sources so that's just an example of how just to hear these words and recognize that they need a little unpacking at some point which will do type seven it's gluttony but again not gluttony for just food gluttony for experience similarly with type eight it's lust lust not just for sensual pleasures but for sort of more of what feels good and then for type nine its sloth and again this doesn't mean a simple kind of laziness this is a kind of psycho spiritual laziness or a laziness with regard to oneself and asserting oneself so 9s kind of go to sleep to themselves towards acting in their own best interest and they focus a lot more on helping other people and creating harmony around them and sometimes don't pay attention to what they need to do for themselves and so that's what sloth means in that sense so let's define instinct I've been talking about it a lot already but instinct in the Enneagram sense means what it generally means if you study it in the scientific world or in the psychological literature it's an enduring disposition or tendency of an organism to act in an organized and biologically adaptive manner characteristic of your species so it's automatic animal behavior oriented towards survival it's breathing it's eating when you're hungry it's the automatic things we do to ensure our survival and it's also an impulse or reaction that doesn't have reason involved right it's the head is not involved remember how I said that the instinctual reaction is a hundred times faster than a thought ten times ten times faster than an emotion so this is a very quick reaction it's the reptilian brain in action and so this is why sometimes our consciousness our cognitive or observing capability doesn't come into play it's a very automatic thing that that happens a very automatic action so let's look a little bit at these three instinctual categories that are associated with the Enneagram the first is the self-preservation instinct and this is pretty straightforward but basically this and again these are biological drives animal wisdom energies it directs energy towards safety and security concerns including having enough resources avoiding danger creating structure in your world in terms of whatever that means for a particular type so I want to say a big caveat here because it's really easy to over generalize what these are and so I want to warn you to hear this definition but remember that the definition itself can shift and change focus depending on what type we're talking about right so self-preservation is going to mean something slightly different for a one than it does for a nine than it does for a seven right so once we mix it with the type and the passion it's gonna take on a certain shape so I just say that to remind you but generally speaking there are some things we can say about self-preservation subtypes part of the reason why I come on so strongly with reminding you to not take this too far before we know what the type is is because I think with what before we had this approach there was a little bit more too much over generalization of like all self-preservation subtypes do this thing all social subtypes do this thing also sexual subtypes are like this now we can say some of that but we can't say we can't take it too far because once we mix up the type it can be very paradoxical it can even look the opposite of what we might expect right like there's like the self-preservation for actually at times makes life difficult for themselves or throws themselves into dangerous or challenging situations which is a little bit counterintuitive to what you might think of as self-preservation so I I will remind you from time to time too when you're learning about what these instincts what these these instincts look like to remember not to get too rigid a sense of what that is before we consider the IMP of type the social instinct generally directs energy toward whether or not one is included and recognized in the group or community and how one is positioned and regarded in terms of whatever that means for a particular type so this has to do with reputation it has to do with how am i regarded in the group it's I won't really want to emphasize this not necessarily meaning that you're comfortable in groups as a social subtype or that you like or enjoy being in groups it's more that you're driven to do something in relationship to the group as a matter of survival right so some of the social subtypes can actually be big introverts and I know you guys probably know a lot about introverts and and it's a common concept but some subs some social subtypes are big introverts even though it sounds like as social subtypes they might not be they might feel really comfortable in the middle of a crowd and be really outgoing and gregarious sometimes they are but sometimes they're not and it depends on a lot on the type for instance my brother is a social one and he has always felt a little bit outside the group he's always felt a little bit uncomfortable relating to groups of people now we'll talk a lot of more about what why that is and what that means for him and because I like to use them as an example but I really want to highlight the fact that being a social subtype doesn't mean that that everything is simple when it comes to social relationships and relating to groups I also want to point out that at the era of history that we're living in we may not understand as completely as they might have in previous area eras what the how the social instinct can be a survival instinct in other words if you lived in the Middle Ages and you didn't survive unless you were a man you know belonged to a village or unless you had protection from a noble you may we may not understand today in exactly the way they did and other time periods how the social in it can really be a matter of survival what I like to say though is it's kind of like getting along with the herd like if you're a deer you know that there's a way that you know you need to be oriented toward your own survival and preserving your life but getting along with the group is also a means of survival getting being one with the herd recognizing you know the people around you the group in a certain way is also has a survival or an instinctual function finally the one-to-one sometimes I call this sexual instinct and I'll probably call it sexual going forward but the one-to-one or sexual instinct is basically about creating strong bonds with individual others now there is a big component of this as actually being you know having a sexual connection but it's also more than that it's the achievement and maintenance of important one-to-one relationships and again this it's about the survival of the species in terms of reproduction of course that's an element of this but it's also more than that you know having a strong bond with an important other person is also just something for companionship and pleasure and protection so one-to-one bonding sexual fusion a kind of really being close to another person and creating that strong bond fighting off the rivals all of these things have to do with the sexual instinct okay so we've defined instinct and I really want to emphasize that the instinct when I'm talking about instinct I'm talking about one of these three categories so there are three instincts there are 27 subtypes so sometimes these these words get inter used interchangeably in part because sometimes in the Enneagram world subtype has been called instinctual variant and I mentioned that only to say that sometimes people will refer to what I'm talking about as a subtype these 27 characters that you get when you mix the type with the instinctual by with the dominant instinctual drive and they'll call that an instinctual variant and sometimes for short they'll call it the instincts or the instinct right so I just want to be really clear about my terminology so we're all in the same page going forward so a subtype is a personality type full-blown for a personality type characterized by specific patterns of thinking feeling and specific instinctual reactions right so it's a more nuanced subcategory of the main personality type in the Enneagram system it's a subcategory of each of the nine types there are three versions depending on which of the three instincts is you know dominates your experience and I'm gonna talk about what that means in a minute also so it's these 27 that represent this kind of alchemical mix between the main type and one of these three instincts and so when I'm talking about subtype it's always going to be one of 27 and it's always gonna be a subtype personality it's going to be the full-blown character type that's just has more specific more nuanced definition in the Enneagram system than the main type so where and what are the instincts want to talk about this even a little bit more so in the head center and here I'm gonna start talking about the lower center and the higher center the lower center is where we come from where we are when we're in the personality and that's most of us since most of us aren't enlightened yet we haven't really reached the point where we're living from the high side of our being we're operating in personality most of the time so and when we're in our personality the conditioned personality the lower mental center is characterized by a fixation right it's a cognitive bias that we're kind of fixed on the higher aspect of that is what we call a holy idea so just like I talked about with the passion and the virtue that there the passion reflects kind of the activity of the lower heart center again lower just meaning personality-driven when we're more in our personality and we haven't yet done the inner work to reach and fully occupy our high side we're acting from our passion we're and and part of the Enneagram inner work is getting more and more aware of the activity of the passion and the beautiful part of course of personality is it's actually a bridge on this road to learning more about your high side you know to the more you learn about your personality the more you automatically start moving toward embodying more of the high side embodying more of the virtue because the more aware I can be of pride instead of having it be something that drives me when I'm not aware of it the more I'm able to dis identify from my ego the more I'm able to be more than just my personality and its limitations so again and the lower in the lower emotional center we have the passion the lower head center we have the fixation and then there's the higher centers that we are kind of going to be growing toward and I'll talk more about that later well then in the body Center in addition to having it be the center of movement it's also where the instincts are located and so interestingly here it's not like higher lower in the way that it is with the head type and the heart type here when we're in our lower centers in our lower head center and heart center and when we're operating the personality our instincts are distorted right so the self preservation and here is also noted as conservation which is sometimes called our instincts are distorted by the passion right so what happens is I mean remember this is animal wisdom when we're healthy our instincts flow freely right so when we're hungry we eat when we need something we go get it when we have when something is threatening us in the environment we take care of it right but what happens in the personality with respect to the instincts is the instinctual energies get kind of hijacked or diverted by the conditioned personality by the personality's emotional priorities because they're kind of in charge right so it's almost like we overdo the instinct let's say I'm self-preservation like you know as a self-preservation sub types like some time I can get concerned about having enough structure or having it if I'm going to give a talk I need an outline or I can get really focused on you know what am I having for dinner and that and the problem is it gets over done right when it's because it's related to the passion of my type and the emotional you know patterns of my type it gets sort of distorted it gets sort of turned to the purposes of the personality unless instead of rather being allowed to flow freely and respond to conditions in the world as necessary right that's in the lower centers when we're operating from the personality what we're aiming for when we are doing growth of fanny Graham is for our instincts not to go from lower to higher but to be non distorted to flow freely to respond naturally instead of being kind of turned in one way or another depending on the personality for instance I'll give you a vivid example when I was first giving talks about the Enneagram and speaking in front of people I it was hard for me it was kind of scary and part of that was because you know my pride wanting to look good wanting to be all things to all people I was very concerned about what I looked like to other people and so there would be some anxiety and nervousness about okay there's all these people looking at me how is it gonna go I need them to like me and that's a tall order when there's a lot of people in the room and I'm trying to say something and so what I noticed is there were times when I would stop breathing right now breathing is a pretty automatic instinctual survival function but my might need to look good you know my passion of pride was getting involved and even curtailing that instinct to breathe and to get air and to breathe in a deep way that would really support me in that you know stressful situation so what I'm talking what I'll be talking about here is how the instincts get kind of turned in the wrong direction when we're in the personality and when we talking about health it's really about freeing them up and not getting in their way so this is really just another way of saying what I just said another way of looking at it the condition personality is when we're talking about that we're really talking about the mental or thinking patterns or fixation and Enneagram language that developed in childhood the beliefs that I learned to have that are associated with you know how I operate in the world and then the feelings center of the emotional patterns and then the instinct is based in the belly and it's really the animal wisdom and so the subtype gets expressed through when the it when the passion kind of influences and drives or hijacks or diverts the instinctual energy that's just natural to us as part of being animals so the important role of instincts I want to say a few more things about about to get even more granular and even more specific in terms of how do we understand the instincts so if an instinct becomes dominant like self-preservation is for me it may get activated even when it's not necessary it's sort of like I overdo it I overuse it you know i over I'm over concerned about you know having enough supplies or over concerned about having enough structure and over scripted or over outline right if an instinct becomes repressed and remember it's really important this the instinct sequence so my instinct sequence is self-preservation is dominant for me social is second or it's secondary and the sexual instinct is repressed in me right so when an instinct becomes repressed and it's and again this is more than a blind spot it means where I'm almost actively pushing it out of consciousness again unconsciously it may not get activated when it is necessary right so when there are opportunities to make a connect with someone one-to-one I may overlook it I may not pay attention to that I may avoid that situation because it's my repressed instinct is sort of not operating as it should the distortions of the natural flow of the instincts then generate this specific instinct in sequence for us and I'm calling it a sequence because I think it's it can be a bit you know it can't there can be movement in this but generally until we've done some inner work that this sequence tends to be relatively fixed so remember instincts mixed with passion equal subtypes or subtype and the passion is like the mask it's like our persona it's part of the condition personality when you add instinct in you get sort of what's called in some spiritual teachings the mask of the mask so we're actually even at a lower stage of development so this is why it's really important to know the subtype because when you're not aware of how your instinct is playing into all this you can kind of fall back even further like I'm driven not only by my passion but by my instinct mixing with my passion and I'm really it's almost like we're operating at the level of animals where we're not bringing in our our uniquely human capacity to self-reflect to use our ability to be mental and to study what we're doing right so there is a level at which one when our subtype is really driving us and you can see this in my story right like I didn't know I was afraid and so not knowing I'm afraid I'm gonna be operating at an even lower level of consciousness because I'm gonna be operating out of that kind of fearfulness and different aspects related to that and not realize what's going on at all so passion and fixation are the core of the condition personality structure and instinct is it adds this element of the false personality it's even a degree lower because when you're operating on from a and you're not aware of your subtype dynamics it's like you're not aware of some really important stuff you need to be aware of to make progress in terms of being work more self-aware so when I say dominant I'm going to be referring to the strongest presence of an instinct and what I'm going to say repressed I'm going to be referring to sort of the weakest or the least present instinct dominant when you have a dominant instinct you kind of compensate for a perceived lack with excess and you can't concentrate an excessive attention on it so you worry too much about self-preservation or you worry too much about social in a certain way you know depending on what type you are the secondary is kind of a tendency to be a little bit closer to normality but it's it sort of comes in second all right so I have a social second I don't think it's necessarily sort of all easy with your second instinct but it's kind of in between the dominant repressed so for me being relating more to groups being more of a social - it plays a role as we'll learn when we learn about social two's they tend to be ambitious and they want to have influence with groups and with other people and I've got some of that but it's definitely not in the lead and it's something I've had to work on when I first did a lot of group work you know first as a participant in groups and then in a and then as a facilitator it was challenging you know it wasn't something that was easy let's say but it was more accessible than to say sort of working on the challenges that I have in the sexual arena or in the one-to-one relationship arena that's been a little bit harder to access so repressed means that we compensate for perceived lack by forgetting about or depreciating it or just sort of giving up on the whole thing so again like I said sometimes I just won't even sort of see opportunities or I won't see what's going on in my life where something positive could happen around my repressed instinct it's something that's really actively sometimes avoid or have kind of given up it get given up on so a little bit more about instincts when you have the self-preservation complex so in other words when it's either dominant or repressed there's a relationship to the mother figure that's important in your development so usually people who have self-preservation dominant had some sort of problematic relationship with the mother that they're still sort of involved in and it could be still sort of looking for a good mother or still reacting against a mother relationship that wasn't so good but some sort of continuing involvement in a problematic relationship with the mother the social relates to the father right the father figure the social complex so when you're either dominant or repressed dominant meaning you're still kind of involved it's sort of there's a way that it's kind of present in your experience the problem you had your father what you didn't get from your father repressed would mean you've kind of given up on it like maybe it went well or it didn't get well or it usually wasn't as much of an issue and or you've sort of given up on that whole thing you're not really paying attention to that anymore it's not really figuring into your psychology the sexual complex again whether your sexual dominant or repressed interestingly relates to a non resolved triangulation with the mother and father figures so what does this mean this needs a little unpacking this refers to kind of the oedipal situation or the Electra situation so sometimes this might mean at first of the fact that every child you know and this is just part of being human it's part of our psychology desires on some level to create a relationship with the opposite sex parent and sort of sees the same sex parent as a rival and again this is you know in arc tipple terms right so wants to sort of have that pert that parent for themselves and wants to get rid of the other one and again it's part of being human and so sometimes you find people Oh sexual dominant was like let's say a little girl who was daddy's favorite or a little boy who had a very close relationship to his or maybe the parents didn't get along and the one of the parents actually preferred the child to their spouse or there was a divorce and in the divorce you know the child stays close to both parents and state and and has kind of a strong relationship with the opposite sex parent so you can see how it's sort of a relationship with it related to the triangle and they were kind of what we sometimes called the oedipal winner if their sexual dominant and often if their sexual repressed they were the oedipal loser right so I'm self-preservation dominant and sexual repressed and I would say in my family I was the oedipal loser I have a pretty good relationship with my father but there was a way that I didn't feel so connected to him that he was definitely more connected to my mother in a in a certain especially archetypal sense so the distortion and personality of the instinct generates behaviors profiles and potential problems that are distinct right it's like a little bit too much attention to something or a little bit not enough attention at all or it's kind of an overcompensation that is part of how the instinct plays out through the subtype many times people who look alike have the same dominant or repressed instincts or the same sequence so maybe you're a different type but you're both social subtypes and oftentimes you'll have some things in common and so that's something to pay attention to and in relationships instincts can be important factor right so if your partner it has a different type than you but has the same incident instincts or the same sequence that can mean you kind of get along in a certain way even though you're different types if you have different instincts it can provide it can represent a certain tension in your relationship that you may need to be aware of if you want to overcome that and work together more smoothly and finally and I'll keep repeating this don't analyze the instincts too much without considering the subtype so I think this is you know a trap that some people have fallen into only be we haven't until I think recently had really good really specific really full descriptions of the subtypes and so people fell back on to what instinct are you and seeing it in a bit of a more simple way so don't get too carried away with what it means to say be social dominant or self-preservation Domon or sexual dominant before you understand how that mixes or how it shows up depending on what type you are and finally people who don't know about the instincts and the subtypes I find often make typing mistakes because when you're trying to find your correct type it can be a challenging thing and I hope that people look at that as kind of a useful growth process in and of itself but when you have the instincts and the subtypes it provides a lot more clarity right so let's say you can't decide if you're a 2 or a 6 right well it just happens that there's a 2 that looks a lot like a 6 and a 6 that looks like a lot like a 2 so it sure does help to say well let me look at the 3 subtype categories of 2 & 6 and see if maybe I fit into one of those and oftentimes I find what people find is they look at one of the types and they say well none of these 3 really fits for me but then they look over at the other type and they'll say wow here's this one that totally describes me so it's really important to take this into account not only for growth but also for even finding your starting point for really getting confident that you found yourself and in the map and again the Enneagram is complex as the personality is the human personality and so I think that complexity works with us instead of against it us when we seek to understand it and respect it and and recognize that we're going to need to understand certain things in order to use it in the best possible way so one final thing about subtypes towards the end here of this session is that for each of the nine types really actually there are six possible subtypes because if we take into account what I calling the instinct sequence you have you know two different primary sync to different sequences depending on what subtype you are so I'm a self press let's take me for example I have social second and sexual as my repressed I have a really good friend who has it was also a self preservation too who has sexual second and it has social repressed interestingly were kind of different even though we're also very much alike so there are certain ways that her sequence is sort of impacts the way her type shows up in the world and to the extent that we actually are kind of different and so if you're getting really deeply into the Enneagram and you really want to seek to understand it at a deep level it may be important to recognize this and I hope you don't get too too intimidated by the number fifty four because I think oftentimes when I bring people in the anagram I want to remind them we started with three you know so we started with three centers and then we took steps step by step we got to 54 but and I think it's always important to take those step by steps into account and remember that you know once you find your subtype and your sequence the path becomes very clear and it's just important to remember that different people have their own paths and one of the things that I find people say when they learn the any gram and they learn how helpful it is and in their growth is they say that they just assumed everyone saw the world the way they do because you know of course they did we're all only in our own heads and so we often don't understand that there are such a thing as other types or other points of view until we learn the innie gram and we really see with such great clarity that there are nine different perspectives and then there's even more than that and so I think part of it is recognizing that there there are these different ones but you don't have to understand all at once and the main thing is to really be focusing on what yours is and for me noticing that I'm self-praise first then I'm social second and then I sexual repressed and that all that is in the context of being a to and understanding what a self-preservation to means and then understanding how social comes in this has given me a lot of material for my inner work it gives give us gives us a lot to focus on and in my opinion it's really the necessary first pieces of the work process with the Enneagram is understanding your Center understanding your type and understanding your subtype and so I think it's important to see what the possibilities are you know that when you once you find your type the next step is finding which of the instincts is most dominant for you and then the next step is figuring out your sequence that they'll be one that's a second and and again for some people that secondary one is a really close second they almost can't choose between the first one and the second one which one is more prominent for other people the dominant instinct is pretty clear and the second one can be a little bit more of a distant second and part of your your journey part of the part of the road map can be how do I become more aware of my dominant and also pick start to pay attention to my second one and also at some point look at your repressed and we'll be talking more about how to work with that in that way but I hope you can start to see what kind of insights are possible and what kind of growth can come out of getting really clear of what's going on inside through using these concepts so a couple more things I want to quote so the source of the subtype approach that I'm discussing is Claudia Naranjo and in some ways this the source of the nine types is is the main sources Naranjo as well but I want to use this quote from him to highlight sort of what we're doing when we work with the into the instincts and the subtypes and what he has said is in this is a view and he's talking about the Enneagram in which the true enemy in the holy war that the Fourth Way heritage and that's the girge of school the kind of ancient wisdom tradition that Gurdjieff sort of brought into the 21st century or the 20th century he says the Fourth Way heritage prescribes this holy war against the false or lower self in other words were trying to be really aware of working on confronting our ego and looking at our personality in a kind of ruthless way but the animal within the instinct is not the bad guy in the story now there's not really a bad guy because even the ego is something that helped us helped us and needs to be respected we're just trying to work with it so it doesn't dominate our experience so we can grow to two beyond that but what he says is is the lower the animal within the instinct isn't really the main issue the main issue is in the realm of the passionate drives it's more that emotional drives the lower emotional center that kind of comes in and diverts the instincts so I really want to emphasize that the our instincts are natural you know and part of problems happen when we curtail our instincts when we feel like we can't you know have our impulses and our natural instinctual expression and so part of why I'm emphasizing this is I want to say our instincts are quite healthy or animal wisdom is something to be valued and respected and appreciated but what the problem is is when the personality the condition personality the beliefs and the feelings we have of like I can't be like this or I shouldn't do that when that plays a role in limiting how our instincts can you know help us get what we need and this is another way of saying that but again I want it this I know this can be an important piece and in understanding that concepts that we're going to use going forward in understanding the specific subtypes and instincts and then using those for growth in this he kind of gives us a picture of what I'm talking this is a page from one of Claudio Naranjo spokes enniaa type structures I wanted to give this because I like the way he lays out you really get a sense of the lower centers and the higher centers the personality is associated with the lower intellectual center of the lower emotional center the realm of the fixations and the passions but then when we really work on ourselves and we manifest more of our essence or our essential self we get more into the realm of the virtues the pose emotional state and we get more into the realm of the Holy ideas the matching opposing high side aspects of the mental center but when we comes to the instinctive Center what we're really doing is not shifting from lower to higher we're shifting from distorted to non distorted this is what I said before but this is I think a graphic representation that I think gives you an example instead of having them be circles I don't you can't see it they're dull dots so it's almost like getting rid of the distortion the negative impact on the instincts of the the different passions and fixations associated with the personality and allowing our instincts to be free what I love about what Naranjo says in this quote is that he's really highlighting that when we're at our healthiest instinct is free it's free flowing it's free to meet our needs in whatever way our animal wisdom directs us so as he says while in personality instinct is bound up through the operation of the passions in essence or in the essential mode instinct is free flowing so that's what we're really going for when it comes to the instincts is releasing them from some of the rigidity of our emotional and mental patterns so what a couple more things I need to say about subtypes just to give you the full picture of the theory here and what we're talking about when we work with the subtypes we need to talk about the concept of counter type so what is a counter type so it's the idea that for every point on the Enneagram there are two subtypes three subtypes total of course two subtypes that flow with the energy of the type and one that's kind of upside down one that goes counter to the main flow of the type one that expresses the passion or goes against the passion in a way that you might not expect so there's almost like a little bit of a counter move even within the this model of three types associated with each of the nine types so for each point on the Enneagram for each of the nine types there are two that are kind of what you might expect flowing with the energy one that goes counter now sometimes people are surprised at this but the interesting thing is there's this thing called a counter phobic sex that a lot of people who even have a limited familiarity with the anagram of heard of so a counter phobic six is simply a six that goes against fear so a lot of people understand that the six is kind of the fear type but there are two at least two kinds of sixes one that we sometimes refer to as the phobic six a six that's it kind of it kind of is patterned on fight-or-flight so the flight six the six that's actively fearful and sort of moves away from something that's that's fear inducing is the phobic six someone who's more actively fearful the counter phobic six is the six that goes against fear with strength that moves against and sort of comes out almost from a position of strength or intimidation to present a kind of strong front in the face of fear so this is the idea that the best defense is a good offense and so counter phobic sixes seek to be strong and look strong almost to keep the threat at bay or they can be real risk takers they can go out and you know jump out of an airplane or do something dangerous rock-climb because they almost feel most alive when they're engaging with their fear or coming out to meet it in a strong way in a way that they really bring a lot of their energy to bear so the idea is with the counter types is that all of the nine types have something like a counter phobic six all of the nine types have one of the three subtypes that goes against the main flow and this is really important to know because as we go through we'll be seeing a lot of these counter types that often get mistyped because I think if you don't know this approach to the subtypes sometimes you don't even know that this type really exists and like I said I think there's a lot of unfortunate lack of clarity around the three subtypes of each of the types such that sometimes people get this type sometimes people don't really get you know that nuanced away that a particular type can show up depending on subtype so we'll be talking more about counter types and there'll be a lot of really interesting stuff to say about that finally I just want to again highlight the fact that one of the reasons why it's so important to understand the twenty-seven subtype personalities is because they each have their own distinct growth paths and we'll be talking a lot more about growth and how to use the Enneagram for growth and this is the subtype is a big piece of that because you get a level of detailed information about your personality type that gives you a lot to work with and a lot to work on in terms of being more conscious about areas that you might not be so aware of so I'll be highlighting the growth paths in a later section of this and I'll look forward to saying more about this later but for now I just wanted to highlight that this is one of the most important features of the subtype teaching so that completes the introductory portion of this program of Enneagram roadmap and we've talked a lot about theory and concepts and a lot of what you need to know to really understand the types and subtypes and next we're gonna really dive into learning a lot about the types of the subtypes so I hope you'll join me there to learn a lot more about this fascinating system [Applause] [Music]