Discovery 3: How Each Other’s Pressures Can Go Out of Balance

The Inner Enneagram

Gaining Comprehensive Self-Awareness
of Each Other’s Personality

III. Discovering Where You Tend to Go Out of Balance in Your Personality

In the sessions with couples this Third Dynamic became clear — that people of the same personality type typically shared the same inner pressures and specific patterns of how they would tend to go out of balance in their personality.

Most people are not aware of how their insecurities will generate pressures and imbalances in their personality. Lacking this self-awareness, it is the partner in the couples’ sessions who is acutely aware of where the other tends to go out of balance in their personality, and in the relationship!

We all have imbalances in our personality, particularly when we are triggered or under stress. However, while it is human to have them, it sure can be difficult to live with someone who is completely unaware of them and who acts them out freely.

Of course, most of us do not tend to see any imbalances in our personality. So imbedded and attached they are in our own filtered reality, we each feel that our world is, and should be, the norm.

So no wonder partners create tensions in the relationship and are not be able to recognize it. And then become righteous and defend themselves whenever they are called on it. This is what an argument is, isn’t it?

The Inner Enneagram is a record of what people of the same personality types discovered as the specific patterns of imbalances that tend to show up in their personality. This enables partners to immediately recognize their inner pressures and patterns as they emerge. So they can catch it.

And with the tools we teach, they can learn to safely resolve those pressures together rather than act them out or argue about them. In doing so, they increasingly free themselves of the binding hold these sensitivities have on them.

Couples discovered that each gaining this awareness was important and a positive experience for each of them. Just like learning about a physical problem that is causing distress. This is when you want to know what it is about so you can do something about it and free yourself. And grow closer together.

“Let me say, with no exaggeration, that your work has changed my life. I truly believe that what you’re creating is something that will be a close companion for my entire life.

I’ve already used it myself to help understand better not only why I have done many things, but also why I am “acting out” in certain ways during the actual moments in which these emotions and feelings are arising. It’s helped me so much to “monitor” myself, in a meditative sort of way, where as I see these tendencies begin to percolate in me, I acknowledge them, similar to sitting at a train station and watching the trains come and go, the passengers arriving and leaving, and so forth. What this has done for my peace of mind is remarkable.” – McMillion.

The books on this site describe these dynamics for each personality type. To get an idea, you can read the samples for free. They provide an invaluable roadmap of each other’s inner world and how to become a healthier expression of who you are. So your relationship together is more harmonious and fulfilling.

Now on to what makes this process holistic, and even more powerful, is the understanding and experience of this from a different dimension. And this is the domain of the Spiritual Enneagram in the next section.

Continue to Discovery 4:

The Spiritual Enneagram