Integrating Enneagram Theory in Depth-Oriented 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
Read my blog on the enneagram here to learn more about therapeutic work using the enneagram.
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.