Do our personalities change?

Brad at Enneagram Book kindly asked me to be a guest writer on his blog, so I’m cross-posting here what I wrote for him.

When people first start learning the Enneagram, two questions always come up:

1. Isn’t this just putting me in a box?
2. Can our underlying personalities actually change?

I usually deal with the first question by observing that we’re already in a box, the Enneagram shows us how to lift the lid and maybe climb out.

The second is more complex, because sometimes yes it can look as if our personalities change completely. Read these two descriptions:

Vindictive, attempts to ruin others’ happiness. Relentless, obsessive about destroying whatever reminds them of their own shortcomings and failures. Becomes psychopathic and murderous.

Self-accepting, inner-directed and authentic, everything they seem to be. Modest and charitable, self-deprecatory humour and a fullness of heart emerge. Gentle and benevolent.

These are both descriptions of the same personality: the Enneagram Three, my own personality type. (I’m glad to say that the first description is not true of me, and sorry that the second isn’t either!)

When we first start the difficult inner work that serious Enneagram study demands, we find ourselves slipping and sliding, some days feeling that we are making progress, other days quite the opposite.

It’s only by being consistently and calmly aware of ourselves and our reactions that we will change (and if you are Christian you would add by the grace of God). It’s a bit like turning round an ocean liner: as it dips through the waves there will be moments when it goes a bit faster, but overall it takes a long time and a lot of concentration by the captain and crew.

But when it’s finally facing in the opposite direction is it a different ship?

It’s around this question of possible personality change that I believe Don Riso and Russ Hudson (my teachers) have done some of their most valuable work.

You may well be familiar with the Levels of Development that they have formulated. If not, then here is a very brief description: each personality type, depending on its level of psychological health, will either be at the very bottom of the unhealthy scale (example one above) or at the very top of the healthy scale (example two above).

There are three distinct demarcations in each of the healthy, average and unhealthy states (and the stereotypical views we sometimes hold of the different Enneagram types tend to correspond with the average states). The diagrams on the Enneagram Institute website are extremely helpful in understanding this.

Don and Russ teach that we each have a kind of set point at which we operate – perhaps it might be in the middle of the average range. Now as we all know, bad stuff happens! And on a short-term basis we might run up and down the healthy and unhealthy scales, reacting to what has happened to us day-by-day. But we wind up back at our set point.

It takes a lot of inner work, OR occasionally a radical transformation experience, to move us up the scale permanently – to move our set point.

And when we move to a healthier expression of our personality type, it can be a really profound experience. It can appear so different as to seem like a fundamental change in our personality, when it is in fact a flowering of what we are called to be.

(With acknowledgement and thanks to Don Riso and Russ Hudson for the type descriptions quoted above)