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Benefits of Using the Enneagram for Counselors in Clinical Practice
While there are several different ways to approach a course of therapy, I have found the Enneagram can provide deep insights into a client’s personality and serve as one of the most empowering ways for a counselor to quickly understand a client’s wounding, fears, motivations, challenges, and innate gifts.
Typing Tips for Counselors Using the Enneagram in Therapy – Part I
The Enneagram can be useful to counselors for case conceptualization, treatment planning, and organizing a relevant approach to therapy. It does this by quickly clarifying the client’s issues, patterns, and strengths as well as by suggesting key themes, interventions, and paths to positive outcomes in therapy.
Typing Tips for Counselors Using the Enneagram in Therapy – Part 2
In addition to each Type’s visible patterns of behavior and insights gleaned from typing strategies mentioned in Part I on Typing, this article offers a few more ways, albeit less popular and a bit more subtle, that can be used to narrow down a client’s Enneagram type in clinical practice.
Working with Ones in Therapy
The Perfectionist is characterized by a strong sense of right and wrong, having high personal standards, doing things “the right way”, and being driven by a deep desire for improvement. The goals of therapy should include encouraging Ones to enjoy more pleasure and play, accept others and inadequacies, tolerate differences, be curious, and cultivate more compassion for themselves and others.
Working with Twos in Therapy
The Helper tends to derive their sense of worth and meet their personal needs by being good and serving others, pleasing others, being outwardly attuned, and denying their own needs. The goals of therapy should include helping Twos question their pattern of people-pleasing, acknowledge their own needs, cultivate self-love, set boundaries, and feel worthy of love outside of helping others.
Working with Threes in Therapy
The Achiever tends to struggle with an overidentification with success, performance, and recognition. The goals of therapy should include helping Threes take time to slow down, diversify their focus beyond work or getting things done, reflect on their true identity, desires, and feelings, and allow themselves to realize that love comes because of who they are, not their image or accomplishments.
Working with Fours in Therapy
The Individualist tends to long for the ideal and experience disconnection, which leads them to believe that something important is missing and seek to reclaim it by being unique. The goals of therapy should include encouraging Fours to not be overrun by their emotions, appreciate what they already have and what is positive in the present, embrace ordinariness, and embody their real-life experience.
Working with Fives in Therapy
The Observer is introspective, curious, self-sufficient, and knowledge-driven but struggles with emotional detachment, social withdrawal, withholding resources, being overly private, and overthinking before taking action. The goals of therapy should include helping Fives express their feelings in real-time, loosen control of their resources, trust in abundance, connect with others, and take action.
Working with Sixes in Therapy
The Loyalist is a security-oriented individual who often demonstrates an ability to bring people together, yet struggles with anxiety and self-doubt and has a deep desire for safety and support. The goals of therapy should include encouraging them to consider the potential for positive outcomes, manage worry, trust in their own authority, face their fears, regulate their emotions, and take courageous action.
Working with Sevens in Therapy
The Enthusiast is optimistic, enthusiastic, spontaneous, future-oriented, and adventurous but may struggle with avoidance of pain, overindulgence, or show a pattern of staying overly busy and seeking constant stimulation to stay “up”. The goals of therapy should help Sevens become more present, face negative and painful situations, and follow-through on their commitments to reap real rewards.
Working with Eights in Therapy
The Challenger is characterized by a strong, assertive personality that has a desire for control and power and often expresses an aversion to weakness and vulnerability in themselves and others. The goals of therapy should include helping Eights acknowledge their own needs and vulnerability, express themselves with sensitivity and containment, and harness their energy in effective ways.
Working with Nines in Therapy
The Peacemaker is characterized by a desire for harmony, avoidance of discomfort, and tendency to merge with others’ agendas as well as a pattern of self-forgetting. The goals of therapy should include helping Nines become self-aware and assertive, set and follow their own agenda for life, respond to their anger in healthy ways, take action, and integrate harmony with conflict in relationship.
Types in Stress and Growth
In therapy, clients can present as a different type than their true type because they are in stress. To help identify the correct type, I’ve summarized each Type’s patterns in Stress (disintegration) and Growth (integration). Positive change is indicated when clients consistently display the high-functioning aspects of their core type and embody the healthy aspects of their Growth type.
Clarifying Type Using Wings and Subtype
In therapy, it’s the influence of the dominant wing and the instinctual variant or subtype (how security is sought) that can make settling on a client’s true Enneagram type a bit more elusive. This article offers a description of each Type and Wing combination in good health as well as a brief description of how each of the 3 subtypes – Self-Preservation, Social, and One-on-One – show up for each of the 9 types.
