I’m preparing to present the second annual Enneagram Panel at my upcoming Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain), so I thought I would respond briefly to a few of the objections people have expressed about being typed.
#1: I Don’t Want to Be Boxed In
Some people strongly resist being typed. They believe they are unique and that assigning a label to them diminishes them somehow. They think typing puts them in a box. But typing doesn’t put people into boxes; it identifies aspects of the boxes we’re already in—and from which we can’t completely escape.
Each of us looks out at the world from within our own model of the world (our box), which influences what we pay attention to, how we interpret and react to events, the meaning we assign to them, and much of what we think, feel, do, and say.
Learning about your Enneagram type can provide you with a window into your personal model of the world. It can also help you understand others while developing the self-awareness that’s essential for creating positive and sustained change. Knowing your type doesn’t diminish your uniqueness. In fact, it can actually help you expand and reshape the box you’re in.
#2: Typing is Just another Term for Stereotyping
The premise is that stereotyping equals categorizing, and categorizing people is a bad thing. However, categorizing is a function of the unconscious part of your brain (System 1). You can’t stop your brain from categorizing, which means your brain (i.e. you) is already stereotyping other people. (Reacting based on stereotypes is a separate issue.)
You wouldn’t want to stop your brain from categorizing. Being able to make quick assessments is essential to your survival. If you were roaming the savanna as your distant ancestors did, you wouldn’t want to have to wait until a lion was in your face to determine whether or not it was in fact a lion. You’d want to be able to make a quick assessment based on general features, take action, and fill in the details later.
In the case of a lion, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And that’s the basic operating principle of the part of your brain that runs you. It wants you to survive and categorizing is a thinking shortcut that increases your chances of survival. The lion’s brain makes the same kinds of quick assessments. So does your cat’s or dog’s brain.
Since your brain is always categorizing anyway, wouldn’t it be preferable to have those categorizations be based on something (informed) rather than be random or arbitrary?
#3: Type Doesn’t Explain Everything about a Person
It’s absolutely true that type doesn’t explain everything. In fact, over three years ago, I published a blog post on my Enneagram website in which I wrote:
As comprehensive a tool as it is, the Enneagram can’t and doesn’t explain everything there is to know about us. It is not the personality equivalent of a Theory of Everything.
But that’s no reason to avoid it.
You have a capacity referred to as mentalization that allows you to understand your own mental states or thought processes and to attribute mental states—beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. to yourself as well as to others. You can also recognize that others have beliefs, intentions, desires, etc. that are different from yours.
Learning more about the mental states of other people actually increases your ability to understand both them and yourself. And the Enneagram is the best tool I’ve found for knowing myself at a deeper (rather than a superficial) level and for understanding where other people are coming from.
Occasionally I wonder if the real resistance some people might have to being typed is a fear of being found out—of actually being understood. But there are no good or bad types. You can be highly self-aware or pretty much asleep-at-the wheel no matter what type you are. You have to decide what you want to do with the information.
I’ve been typed as a “one-of”, not always flatteringly. For interest, I filled in a Myers-Brigg form. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, in my case, I could answer truthfully, say, question 23 by ticking a box which would normally type me as a pro-capitalist conservative and tick a box in a later question which would type me as a left-leaning anti-capitalist. I s’pose the enneagram has a similar virtue.
I am also pleasantly surprised that your and my way of thinking about the subjects you bring up are identical. So you must be right.
We all want to be right, so I’m 🙂 at your last comment. I don’t know about the political characterizations, but then I haven’t used the MBTI since I learned about the Enneagram. The Enneagram seems much more dynamic and multi-dimensional than the MBTI. We have a core type that doesn’t change, but there are many ways to “expand” or “remodel” our particular box. The test I use shows how much (or little) we have of all the other types. When my mother took the test a couple of years before she died, we learned that we each scored lowest in each other’s type, which explained why we each found the other completely incomprehensible. Fortunately we both have (in her case had) a sense of humor, so we had our moments.