I outgrew the enneagram

It was all the rage in college. At least, it was all the rage at my small, Christian college. In Father Richard Rohr’s hands, the enneagram had undergone a baptism, and Christians flocked to it as a tool for self-discernment. (It’s possible Fr Rohr was not the original source of said baptism, but he was the one I heard cited most often.) 

I liked it. I thought I was a 5 for a couple of years—emotionally reserved, intellectually curious, self-sufficient—and then I underwent a crisis (I listened to a podcast) that shook me to the core of my identity (I realized I was a 3). Maybe. 

It’s difficult to look back on now—not emotionally difficult, but difficult like peering through thick fog to read a street sign. The writing’s there, but it’s been obscured. I think I liked the enneagram for how it helped me see myself (and I don’t intend to mock anyone who still likes it for that reason). I thought it was a mirror that helped me perceive myself more clearly.

When I thought I was a 5, it made me feel proud of myself: unique, insightful, special.  

When I thought I was a 3, I mostly felt embarrassed. All the memes about 3s portray them as attention-seeking, overcommitting, high strung nightmares. But still, I could see myself if I read between the lines. I didn’t want everyone’s approval—I just craved it from a few choice authority figures. I didn’t like being the center of attention—but I sure got a rush afterwards. I didn’t think I needed to be successful to be loved—I just felt like failure might be the end of my personal world and I’d worry my stomach into knots about falling short of my own arbitrarily high standards. 

I think I liked the enneagram because it helped me put my own flaws and unhealthy tendencies into words. There were things I’d never been able to articulate about myself before, and in those burgeoning years of young adulthood, it felt powerful to admit some of the icky stuff: I’m anxious; I think I might die if I get a C in class; I internalize shame over things I know are small in my head but feel heavy in my heart. 

Emma, you might be thinking, these all sound like the kinds of things you should bring up in therapy. 

You, dear reader, are correct.

I went to therapy. That’s probably a post of its own, so we’ll save it for another day. But the long-and-short of it is this: I went to therapy to process a crushing personal loss and ended up processing a whole lot more than I’d bargained for. 

I rediscovered the character of God. That’s also a post of its own, but I’ll do my best to summarize. Somewhere along the way, I’d started to believe that God was always looking at me with arms crossed and lips pursed in disappointment. In my therapy-mandated reading, the simple assertion that God was pleased with me made me shake my head and scoff—there was no way he was pleased with me. I was a mess. 

So I started sitting in the sunlight for hours at a time, closing my eyes, sometimes praying quietly and sometimes resting in silence. The warmth of the sun on my skin was the warmth of my God’s love towards me. I didn’t have to do a thing for him to share that bone-warming light; it was his joy to wrap me in his kindness.

My heart had endured a chilling, frost-bitten winter, but in that sunlight, I began to thaw. More than that—I began to bloom again.  

I don’t mean to imply that the enneagram is the reason I needed therapy, or the reason my perception of God had gotten so tangled up. But when I began to work on the mess my heart had become, I found that I no longer needed it. All those memes that once made me laugh and say, “that’s so me!” now left me confused. All those helpful tips started to feel like ill-fitting shoes.

I’m not here to tell anyone else what to do, but for me, the enneagram outgrew its usefulness the moment I became too familiar with it. The more I understood it, the more I began thinking in its terms, and the more I started to put myself in a box. I started to think of myself in terms of my 3-ness instead of my Emma-ness. 

It also—let’s be honest here—made me think about myself far too often. And as it turns out, the solution to depression and anxiety and a host of personal issues is not self-rumination. Crazy how that works. 

I remember a college friend of mine staunchly refusing to engage with the enneagram, claiming that it was just self-confirming personality mumbo jumbo. I thought he was a killjoy. Maybe I’m the killjoy now. 

But maybe not. I outgrew the box, that’s all. I learned to bask in the warm rays of a God who delights in how he made me. And he isn’t just the one who made me, but also the Great Physician who heals me daily. I drink deeply of that healing, and I fix my eyes on him—not a mirror—and each day, in his mercy, my roots stretch deeper into the soil of this life we all share, and I bloom.