Integrating Enneagram Theory in Depth Therapy
The Enneagram isn’t just a personality typing tool, it’s a map of the psyche that offers rich insight into core emotional wounds, unconscious motivations, and the protective patterns we’ve developed in response to early life experiences. When brought into the therapeutic space, it becomes a powerful companion to healing work, helping us understand not just who we are, but why we are that way, and how we can grow beyond it.
A Bridge Between Pattern and Possibility
Each Enneagram type reflects a specific set of survival strategies: ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that once served to protect us, but over time may have calcified into rigidity, self-criticism, or disconnection. By exploring the Enneagram in therapy, clients begin to recognize the automatic scripts they've internalized, scripts that often align with deep-seated schemas, attachment wounds, or unmet emotional needs.
Rather than boxing clients into labels, the Enneagram invites compassionate curiosity. It illuminates our blind spots while also pointing toward our gifts. It helps us track reactivity and learn what drives our inner critic, our relational patterns, our coping mechanisms. In this way, it can be seamlessly integrated with the therapeutic modalities I use, such as:
- Schema Therapy & Psychoanalytic Therapy – illuminate the connection between your Enneagram core fears, attachment style, and early maladaptive schemas
- Emotion-Focused Therapy – increase emotional intelligence. Bring awareness to emotional avoidance and reactivity patterns specific to your type
- Depth and Jungian Work – use the Enneagram as a map to both the archetypal shadow and potential
- Mindfulness and Parts Work – learn to observe, rather than fuse with, your habitual personality structure
Why Bring the Enneagram Into Therapy?
- Deepens self-awareness and self-compassion
- Clarifies internal conflict and decision-making struggles
- Improves relational understanding and communication
- Highlights paths of growth and transformation
- Supports individuation by working with (not against) the self’s natural blueprint
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:
The Enneagram and Attachment Styles
Discover how your Enneagram type may influence how you bond with others, how you respond to closeness, and what helps you build secure connections.
The Enneagram and Personal Change
Understand how self-awareness, compassion, and type-specific growth practices can help you move beyond automatic patterns.
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.
Bringing the Enneagram to Life in the Therapy Room
While books, workshops, and online resources can provide helpful Enneagram insights, real transformation happens when those insights are lived and felt, not just understood intellectually. In therapy, we slow down enough to notice when your type patterns are present in real time. This might mean pausing during a story you’re telling to identify the emotional undercurrent, or gently observing the protective strategies that surface in moments of vulnerability.
Because the Enneagram maps both your strengths and your blind spots, it becomes a guiding framework during our work together. We might use it to explore how your type’s core fear is influencing your boundaries, how your stress point emerges under pressure, or how your growth point offers a doorway to more freedom. These patterns often overlap with unconscious dynamics explored in depth therapy, such as your mood experiences, shadow material, or archetypal themes.
Unlike self-guided Enneagram study, therapy provides a safe and attuned space to work through the resistance, grief, and uncertainty that can arise when loosening long-standing defenses. By pairing the Enneagram with modalities like Emotion-Focused Therapy, Schema Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, and Jungian approaches, we can connect your personalit type to your lived emotional landscape, directly connecting the Enneagram to your therapeutic goals.
Over time, clients often notice greater compassion for themselves and others, a clearer understanding of what drives them, and the capacity to respond rather than react. The Enneagram isn’t about becoming a “better” version of your type, it’s about seeing through the lens you’ve been looking through your whole life, and working with your type's tendencies to create the shifts you are looking for in your life.
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.