I have come to see there are three main stages in life, and the Enneagram has a very different role to play in each.
I recently finished reading Falling Upward by Richard Rohr. In the book he talks about the first half of life being about “surviving successfully.” That our task for this stage is to “establish an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community and security, and build a proper platform for our life.”
He describes the second half starting when we begin to question what we’ve been so intensely chasing. When we start asking ourselves what our life is really meant to be about.
Like Rohr, I don’t believe these two halves are defined by age. I’ve spoken to people who’ve started the second half in their teens. I’ve met older adults who may never enter it.
Instead, the transition is usually triggered by something that takes us, as Rohr puts it, to the “edge of our own private resources.” It does not happen through willpower, skill, knowledge, self-improvement, a wish to be closer to God, or a desire to be at one with the universe.
It happens by realising that our personalty’s survival strategy isn’t really working anymore.
For me, I reached the edge of my private resources while trying to heal chronic illness and pain and find a career I loved. I’d tried everything I could think of to be free of physical, emotional and creative pain.
As a Self-Preservation Seven, I had a lot of strategies up my sleeve, and I’d spent over a decade trying them all. Until one day I was completely spent. I opened my ego’s toolkit and it was empty. There was nothing left to do but turn towards the box marked “pain and suffering.”
In incrementally moving towards my pain, I discovered something unexpected. That I had more inner resources than my ego could have imagined for me.
We each have to be pushed to our ego’s limits before we’ll seriously consider alternatives. Sometimes that happens slowly, and sometimes it happens all at once. For some it’s a lost job, lost fortune or reputation. For others it can be a divorce, a death, a permanent injury, a natural disaster, or being given more responsibility that we believe we’re ready for.
Basically, life gets very hard.
But this is where I depart slightly from the idea of two halves of life.
I don’t believe we instantly enter the second half the moment our lives turn upside down. I believe there’s a crucial stage between the two.
What I’m calling The Crucible of Midlife.
Rather than two halves of life, I see three distinct developmental stages:
The First Half of Life.
The Crucible of Midlife.
The Second Half of Life.
And I believe the Enneagram has a different role to play in each.
In the first half, it works as a toolkit.
In the crucible, it becomes a compass.
And in the second half, we need it as a multidimensional map.
As our lives become more complex, the way we use the Enneagram needs to evolve too.
The First Half of Life: The Enneagram As a Toolkit
In the first half of life, our unconscious aim is to build a sense of security, certainty and predictability by creating supportive structures outside ourselves.
We can do that through the work we do, the skills we build, the friends we make, the person we partner with, the family we build, the communities we belong to, the clothes we wear, the house we buy, or what we spend our money on.
It’s all part of building a sense of self that can be seen by others.
Whether someone is bright and colourful or doesn’t care about their appearance, both can be unconscious strategies for creating security, certainty and predictability.
According to Rohr, in the first half of life we’re trying to confidently answer questions such as:
- What makes me significant?
- How can I support myself?
- Who will go with me?
Which I think boils down to:
- What will I do?
- Who will I be?
- Who will I do it with?
Much of this pursuit is unconscious. We’re unaware that we’re often pursuing something very specific.
We’re seeking what our personality defines as successful, within the culture we grew up in.
For example, our career choices are influenced by our family’s beliefs, our life experiences and our cultural programming. But they’re also influenced by the inner resources we rely on.
This is one reason we can sometimes see patterns in the kinds of work different Enneagram types are drawn towards. In the teams I’ve worked with, for example, I’ve noticed more Eights, Nines and Ones in work involving quality control, operations and maintenance; more Twos, Threes and Fours in sales, marketing and design; and more Fives, Sixes and Sevens in research, innovation and safety.
Of course, you’ll find every Enneagram type in every industry. But whatever work we choose, our career becomes one of the ways we attempt to “survive successfully” in the first half of life.
Beyond influencing our choices, the Enneagram can help us achieve those first-half goals by helping us understand the people we’re trying to achieve them with and through.
It helps us answer questions like:
- How can I have a better relationship with my partner?
- How can I be a more effective leader at work?
- How can I best parent my children?
- How can I support my team or community?
We reach for the Enneagram to reduce our frustrations with the people at work, home and in the other groups we spend time in. It can help us better understand ourselves and others, improving our interactions and relationships.
Here I see the Enneagram as a toolkit.
We reach into the box hoping for tips, tools and strategies to resolve conflict, give feedback, delegate effectively, be more influential, build trust and reduce stress.
When I first reached for the Enneagram, it wasn’t to heal my chronic pain. It was to understand my relationship.
I was confused about why we were arguing all the time. I wasn’t trying to grow. I didn’t care about my strengths. I just wanted to feel like a team again.
I hoped this personality system would help me understand where we’d gotten stuck and how to find our way back.
Through learning about our Enneagram types, I developed more empathy for myself, for him, and for us. I discovered why he hated being interrupted, and why I couldn’t stop interrupting him. I learnt why he hated feeling excluded, and why I took so long to feel full-body commitment.
When we use the Enneagram as a toolkit, whatever problem we’re trying to solve, it can help us become kinder to ourselves and others. By investing time to understand the people we care about beneath the surface, we develop more empathy and emotional intelligence.
That’s a key part of our development in the first half of life.
But eventually we realise it’s not the whole story.
We might get everything we ever wanted and still not feel loved, safe, or a sense of belonging. Or we realise we can’t get what we’ve been seeking.
To move into the next stage, we have to realise that relying on our personality’s survival strategy will never fully satusfy us, as it’s also focused on what we lack.
To see this bind, most of us need to be pushed to the edge of our private resources.
The Crucible of Midlife: The Enneagram as a Compass
Many people believe midlife starts on our 40th or 50th birthday, or at another significant age-related milestone.
I believe it starts with a moment.
A moment that shifts our inner life on its axis.
As Rohr says, there is no “practical or compelling reason” to leave our comfort zone unless we lose something. A loss that pushes us to the “edge of our own private resources.”
That can come on slowly or happen all at once. But it brings with it the dawning realisation that the way we’ve been living, what we’ve valued, the principles, desires and drives that have shaped our choices, no longer matters in the way we thought it did.
Our life splits into a Before and an After.
In the Before, everything made sense. Our lives circled around status, security and intimacy.
In the After, we’re confused, disorientated and lost. All we know is that what drove us before no longer holds the same meaning.
I call this The Crucible of Midlife.
We’re not yet ready to rise like a phoenix. We’ve simply entered the frying pan.
If we let it, the crucible can strip away what’s false and shine a light on what’s truly essential.
But being there is challenging.
In a culture devoted to first-half-of-life goals, living inside the disorientation and confusion of the crucible is hard. Family, friends, co-workers and others who have known us for a long time may find our choices and experiments unsettling.
But if we can accept that the crucible is where we need to be, and accept that our life has irrevocably changed, we can begin to surrender to the uncertainty of taking a new path.
We can trust that even though we are lost, we may be travelling in the right direction.
Once we do that we’re free to wrestle with the grief, frustration and yearning that emerge as we shake off an old identity and build a new one.
We start sitting with questions like:
- What matters to me now?
- What will make my life meaningful?
- What values or beliefs do I want to orient my life around?
This is not an easy process. We are asked to confront painful truths about ourselves and the world we live in.
Which is why many people turn back, trying to return to the certainty of the Before while living with the painful knowledge that the After exists.
For those who stay, the Enneagram acts as a compass.
Rather than helping us become more successful within our existing life, it helps us question the foundations that our life was built upon.
It asks:
- What roles do I want to stop playing?
- What part is me and what part is performance?
- What is my core value now?
- How can I live in alignment with that?
As a compass, the Enneagram helps us step back and look at our life as a whole. To see our patterns over years and decades, rather than weeks or months.
This starts with knowing our type’s core motivation and core fear.
Being able to name what we’ve spent our life striving to achieve, and why, despite our hard work and best efforts, we’ve never been able to fully achieve it, begins to reorientate our compass.
Because we eventually discover that we cannot satisfy our core motivation without tending to our core fear.
Our axis begins to find new ground.
I entered midlife when I quit a job I thought would be my forever career because I was burned out and resentful. I had no plans except to sleep and figure out what was next.
During this time I did Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead values exercise. I took up her challenge to choose just one value.
For me, it was creativity.
I spent the next several years trying to honour my need to be creative. I tried several part-time options so I’d have time for creativity outside work, but I was always too exhausted to find my flow.
Eventually I realised I couldn’t be creative part of the time. It had to be full time.
That terrified me.
I’d always been told that having a creative career would be a disaster.
This is where the Enneagram helped me realise I’d spent the first half of my life searching for a feeling of safety, from a job where I wouldn’t have to feel the underlying, unrecognised terror I carried about being creative.
Seeing this core pattern was a revelation.
I realised no job could ever free me of that fear. That could only come from within me.
Until we see our own constant drive to avoid our core fear across the course of our life, our inner compass isn’t free to point us towards our essential values.
This is the purpose of The Crucible of Midlife. To strip away the stories we’ve been hiding behind, so we can be honest about what we really value.
So when we finally step out of the crucible, a process that can last months or years, we emerge with a clear set of priorities.
We’ve clarified what matters most.
By this stage, success is no longer defined primarily by our culture, family, peer group, industry or personal expectations. Increasingly, it is defined by something deeper within us.
But despite this newfound clarity, we have yet to learn how to embody those values every day.
(I’ve talked more about this period of my life, and pain being my spiritual teacher, here.)
The Second Half of Life: The Enneagram as a Multidimensional Map
It’s easy to assume that once our compass is pointing in the right direction, the rest of the journey is smooth sailing.
In reality, we’re entering choppy waters.
To continue the sailing metaphor, in the second half of life we’re taking a boat designed for calmer, protected waters out onto the open ocean.
It isn’t yet built for bigger waves, strong winds and rougher seas. But it can be.
The boat represents our inner resources.
In the first half of life, we didn’t need a bigger boat. We simply needed a boat capable of sailing away from our core fear as quickly as possible.
In the second half of life, we need a boat capable of sailing towards our core fear.
To do that, we have to build a bigger boat, one capacity of handling more emotions, more complexity, more uncertainty.
That looks different for every Enneagram type.
For example, Threes, Sevens and Eights, may need to learn to slow their pace and listen more attentively to others without becoming frustrated that things are moving too slowly.
Ones, Twos and Nines may need to learn to rest and prioritise their own needs or agenda without feeling guilty, unproductive or selfish.
Fours, Fives and Sixes may need to take practical action to bring their creativity or vision to life before the plan feels authentic, complete or safe.
All of this requires us to increase our capacity to stay with feelings, thoughts and sensations that scare the pants off our ego.
But here’s the rub: as we start to upgrade our boat and expand our inner resources, we encounter inner resistance.
Anything that moves us towards our core fear, our ego considers dangerous.
Until we teach our ego to differentiate between real and imagined threats, it reaches for its defensive weapons to protect us.
Even from ourselves.
You might call some of this procrastination, but inner resistance takes many forms:
- Criticising ourselves or others
- Not sharing our emerging creative work
- Working ourselves to exhaustion again
- Becoming skeptical or judgmental of people, groups or systems
- Intensely feeling that we’re not enough
- Not fully committing to something we want
Inner resistance can be tricky to work with.
But learning how is a key part of upgrading our boat.
This is one of the primary reasons I use the Enneagram. It is one of the only tools I’ve found that offers enough nuance to help us understand where our resistance is coming from, what development is asking of us, and how change needs to happen.
This is what I mean by using the Enneagram as a multidimensional map.
Instead of seeing our inner resistance or ego’s defences as the enemy, we can acknowledge that they’re protecting us for a reason, even when we don’t yet know what that reason is.
In doing so, we can develop a deeper relationship with ourselves, our grief, our frustration and our fear — and through that, perhaps a deeper relationship with the divine (or what Rohr calls the Mystery and I call the Cosmos.)
Through this non-linear process, our defences can gradually evolve from something that slows us down or holds us back into something that supports us to live in alignment with our essential values – somatically, psychologically and spiritually.
I see three particular ways the Enneagram helps us do that.
First, as a diagnostic framework.
Inner resistance can come from different parts of our psyche, each with different drives and needs.
Within the Enneagram, we might understand that through subtype, dominant or repressed instinct, centre, passion or another aspect of the personality structure.
Some parts need a somatic approach. Others need an emotional, mental or spiritual approach.
The Enneagram helps us identify which part of the personality is seeking our attention so we can respond with more nuance.
Second, as a developmental map.
The Enneagram describes the potential each type can grow into somatically, psychologically and spiritually.
It cannot make us do that work. Nor will knowing our type prevent us from bypassing difficult truths.
But if we’re willing to develop greater compassion for what is true, rather than simply trying to escape what hurts, the Enneagram can show us what maturation might look like.
Third, as a map of change itself.
The Enneagram Process Diagram describes how dynamic systems change and transform: where a process loses energy, where it gets stuck, what restores movement, and what is needed to complete the cycle.
Applied to ourselves, it can help us recognise the part of the change process we’re struggling to accept and guide us into it.
Once I’d finally committed to having a creative career and being creative all the time, life didn’t suddenly fall into place.
I had to wrangle with deeper fears of criticism and judgement, of not knowing enough, and of somehow being both too much and too little.
Those fears were trying to protect me from living in a way my ego’s defences considered a liability, but which was actually core to my essential self.
Knowing I was a Self-Preservation Seven helped me begin to recognise when I was making, or avoiding, decisions based on fear rather than my essential values.
Following that guidance, I was able to dedicate myself to an expectation-free creative practice. Over time, that strengthened the inner resources I needed to do the kind of creative work only my more mature self could do.
Whether we’re using the Enneagram diagnostically, developmentally, or as a map of change, the underlying purpose is the same:
To expand our inner boat so we can embody what matters most in the second half of life.
A Map For All Seasons
As our lives become more complex, the tools and resources we use to guide ourselves need to become more complex too.
They need to meet us where we are and continue to support us as we change.
I’m thankful that the Enneagram can do just that.
It is a powerful and deep self-developmental system that can support people at very different stages of life and development.
In the first half of life, the Enneagram acts as a toolkit, helping us better understand ourselves and others as we build lives designed around security, certainty and predictability.
In The Crucible of Midlife, the Enneagram becomes a compass, helping us recognise the patterns that have shaped our lives and reorientate ourselves towards what matters now.
And in the second half of life, it becomes a multidimensional map, helping us understand our resistance, expand our inner resources and learn to embody those essential values in the way we actually live.
The Enneagram doesn’t change.
But what we need from it does.
And perhaps one of the signs that we’re developing is that the questions we bring to it change too.
If you’ve realised you’re struggling to reorientate your compass or expand your boat in the second half of life, I guide and support people through parts of this journey. If you’d like to know more, book a time to chat with me here.