What Is the Enneagram?
If you’ve heard of the Enneagram, you may have heard it referenced along with other personality typing tools, like the Myers-Briggs or DISC personality assessment. But the Enneagram is so much more than just a personality test. It’s a three-dimensional map of the psyche, rich with insight into core emotional wounds, unconscious motivations, and the protective patterns we develop through our early life experiences. While personality tests focus on behavior tendencies, the Enneagram goes deeper, emphasizing the motivations, fears, and longings behind behaviors.
When we bring the Enneagram into the therapeutic space, this intricate soul-map serves as a powerful guide for your healing journey. Enneagram therapy will help you understand not just who you are, but why you are that way, and how you can evolve to reach your highest potential.
Nine Pictures of the Psyche
There are nine Enneagram types, known by numbers. Various theorists have used different titles for each of the nine types. The titles below come from Riso & Hudson’s work at the Enneagram Institute.
Type One – The Reformer
Sometimes called The Perfectionist, Ones are idealistic, justice-oriented, and self-controlled, but can also be judgmental and self-critical.
Type Two – The Helper
Twos are warm, caring, and generous, natural caregivers and nurturers who may also be people-pleasers who neglect themselves.
Type Three – The Achiever
Sometimes called Performers, Threes are charming, driven, and success-oriented, but may be image-conscious and focused on external validation.
Type Four – The Individualist
Also known as Romantics, Fours are sensitive, emotionally expressive, and creative, but can also be self-absorbed and consumed by their feelings.
Type Five – The Investigator
Fives are keen observers, perceptive, cerebral, and innovative, but may be isolated, closed off, and have difficulty opening up.
Type Six – The Loyalist
Sixes thrive on security, and are committed, responsible, and socially engaged, though they can be fearful and controlled by their anxiety.
Type Seven – The Enthusiast
Sevens are curious and energetic, enjoying spontaneity, high stimulation, and fun, but they can be scattered, and find pain and routine difficult to bear.
Type Eight – The Challenger
Eights are dominant figures, strong and confidence, but may have an aggressive and confrontational approach to life to avoid appearing weak.
Type Nine – The Peacemaker
Nines are easy-going, agreeable, and naturally humble, but may have a complacent approach to life focused on avoiding conflict to maintain peace.
It’s okay if you don’t know your type. Internet tests aren’t always accurate; they tend to focus on behavior, but are less effective at assessing motivations for behaviors, which is what the Enneagram is all about. Enneagram-based therapy will include analysis to help you discover your type before we take a deep-dive into how you express your type’s traits.
How Does Enneagram-Based Therapy Work?
There are no “good types” or “bad types.” It can be more helpful to view each Enneagram type as a different survival strategy that evolved from our life experience—particularly experiences in childhood, when we had the least control over our environment and relationships. These patterned ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving formed to protect us. But over time, once-useful strategies can calcify, leading to rigidity, disconnection, and stagnated growth.
By exploring the Enneagram in therapy, you’ll begin to recognize the schemas—automatic scripts, beliefs, or templates—you’ve internalized. Because the Enneagram highlights how our styles of thinking, feeling, and behaving arise from attachment wounds and unmet emotional needs, it can be a powerful framework for healing. Rather than slapping labels and limitations on us, the Enneagram invites compassionate curiosity. It illuminates our blind spots, points us toward our gifts, and offers us a path to wholeness and psychological health.
Enneagram therapy can shed light on how you show up in relationships. As you begin to understand your default assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors, you’ll expand your options for you relate to others and increase access to healthier connection. Enneagram therapy will help you understand yourself more deeply, give you a vision of what your next steps for growth could be, and help you identify what you need to thrive.
The Enneagram is a rich resource. Through Enneagram therapy, you’ll be able to identify if you are a head type, heart type, or gut type, as well as your relationship to other numbers, including the strengths you can access through your “wings,” and how to use your directions of stress and security. Enneagram therapy can be particularly helpful for guiding self-care and naming personal needs.
What does Enneagram-based therapy treat?
Enneagram therapy can help you with:
- Relationship difficulties
- Challenges in work or social settings
- Improving self-care
- Managing anxiety
- Emotional regulation
- Increasing comfort with vulnerability
- Processing attachment issues
- Communication
- Conflict resolution
- Discovering your strengths
Enneagram therapy can also be a good companion for other therapy modalities, including:
- Schema Therapy & Psychoanalytic Therapy
- Integrating these modalities can illuminate the connections between your Enneagram core fears, attachment style, and early maladaptive schemas.
- Emotion-Focused Therapy
- The Enneagram can bring awareness to the patterns of emotional avoidance and reactivity specific to your type and increase your emotional intelligence.
- Depth Therapy & Jungian Work
- We can use the Enneagram as a map of the archetypal shadow self and as a window to glimpse the full potential towards which you’re working.
- Mindfulness & Parts Work
- The Enneagram can help you learn to observe, accept, and release the tendencies of your type rather than fusing with your habitual personality structure and staying stuck.
For Clients Who Want to Go Deeper
Whether you’re new to the Enneagram or have already explored your type in other settings, therapy can be a space to make sense of how your type plays out in real time. We explore:
- The “inner terrain” of your type: not just the behaviors on the surface, but the emotions underneath
- The longing of your type's greatest desire
- Your type's shadow- including the core fear it experiences
- How your type is manifesting within you in a particularly unique way
- How your type impacts your relationships with others
- Your type's relationship to coping with stress
Working with the Enneagram therapeutically is not about self-improvement just for the sake of performance, it's about making peace with who you’ve been, understanding what shaped you, and reclaiming your capacity for choice, presence, and change.
Deepen Your Enneagram Journey Through My Blog
Therapy sessions can be the heart of your transformation, but sometimes the mind needs space to reflect, explore, and take in new perspectives between sessions. That’s where my blog comes in. I’ve written a range of articles that take you deeper into the intersection of the Enneagram, attachment styles, coping strategies, and personal growth—so you can better understand your patterns and open new possibilities for change.
Recommended Reading:
Discover how your Enneagram type may influence how you bond with others, how you respond to closeness, and what helps you build secure connections.
Understand how self-awareness, compassion, and type-specific growth practices can help you move beyond automatic patterns.
Explore how each Enneagram type understands loss, change, and existential fear, with therapeutic insights and tools for finding meaning and resilience.
These posts are designed to meet you where you are, whether you’re just discovering your type or you’ve been studying the Enneagram for years. They combine psychological insight with practical reflection prompts so you can start applying what you learn to real-life situations.
Visit the Blog to start exploring more about the Enneagram, your unique growth path, and how therapy can help you live with greater choice, presence, and authenticity.
FAQs About Enneagram Therapy
Unlike personality tests that focus on surface traits, the Enneagram goes deeper: it's about your underlying motivations, emotional patterns, and how early experiences shaped your way of being in the world. In therapy, this makes it more than just a "label"; it's a map for self-understanding and growth.
Yes. While the Enneagram isn't a diagnostic tool, it can help you understand the patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating that contribute to symptoms. For example, certain types may be more prone to perfectionism, self-doubt, or emotional suppression. Therapy integrates this awareness with evidence-based approaches to address the roots of distress.
The Enneagram is not a clinical assessment, but it is widely respected in both psychological and spiritual growth communities for its depth and accuracy in mapping personality patterns. In therapy, it works best as a framework for self-reflection and relational insight.
No. We can explore your type together through conversation, observation, and reflective exercises. Many clients discover their type as part of our therapeutic process.
We use your type's patterns as a starting point for deeper exploration: looking at early emotional wounds, attachment history, and core fears. This work connects directly with modalities like Schema Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, and Jungian analysis.
No. Your type is just one lens. We also look at your life story, current challenges, relationships, dreams, and goals. The Enneagram can serve as a guide, but you are far more complex than a single type.
Absolutely. Many clients find that understanding their type (and the types of people close to them) helps reduce conflict, increase empathy, and improve communication.
This varies from person to person. Some clients notice shifts within a few sessions as they gain awareness, while others work over months to integrate deeper emotional and relational changes.
Yes. If you've done prior therapy and feel stuck or curious about deeper self-understanding, the Enneagram can offer fresh insights and illuminate blind spots that other approaches may not have addressed.
