The Enneagram is based on the assumption that each of us develops various compulsive, defensive approaches to life in our early years. One writer explains it this way: “A person retains the purity of essence for a short time. It is lost between four and six years of age when the child begins to imitate the parents, tells lies, and pretends. A contradiction develops between the inner feeling of the child and the outer social reality to which the child must conform.”

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.

The basic idea of the Enneagram is that there are NINE ways of adjusting to life, nine basic life strategies, and therefore nine different types of people. This way of understanding ourselves helps us appreciate our distortions – and the gift that has been distorted. It is only by acceptance of the distortion that we come to that particular giftedness to which we are called. Some might say this approach is negative: the Enneagram would rather call it realistic. So we are invited to free ourselves from this distortion, this wound, and become more of a whole person.

If your fundamental psychological orientation is towards FEELING, the emotions, your personality type could be:

FEELING TYPES:

TWO: encouraging, possessive, manipulative,

THREE: ambitious, pragmatic, narcissistic, status seek

FOUR: artist, sensitive, introverted, depressive

THINKING TYPES:

FIVE: thinker, perceptive, analytic, reductionistic, removed, distant

SIX: loyalist, committed, dutiful, passive-aggressive, fearful, doubting, imaging worst case scenarios

SEVEN: generalist, sophisticated, hyperactive, excessive, eternally youthful

RELATING, INSTINCTIVE TYPES:

EIGHT: leader, self-confident, aggressive, confrontational

NINE: peacemaker, receptive, easygoing, complacent, passive-aggressive

ONE: reformer, rational, orderly, perfectionistic

Remember, these describe your basic, essential self, and the “wings” of the types adjacent on the diagram.

Source Unknown

(Found somewhere on the Web).