Nailed: Enneagram Nine
The word
attachment,
I was intrigued to learn, comes from the old French
attache,
meaning “nailed to.” According to Gerald May in
Addiction and
Grace,
attachment
nails
our will
and desire in addiction – “a state of compulsion, obsession or
preoccupation.” “Addictions,” he wrote, include “work,
performance, responsibility, intimacy, being liked, helping
others, and an almost endless list of other behaviors,” to which
I add: "Addictions also include Enneagram styles."
Years ago,
I came home from a writer’s workshop quite disappointed. “The
instructors were great,” I told myself, “I loved my roommate,
the setting was breathtaking, but more than half the writers
come year after year, and they’ve formed cliques that don’t
include me.” My reaction was to keep myself separate. I did not
try to get to know people in those groups, and spent most of my
time with my roommate or alone, deciding I wouldn’t return to
this splendid workshop the following year because I didn’t feel
sufficiently welcome.
Shortly
after my return I met with a
Nine client who said,
“I realized I’ve been separating myself from people who could
help me. I’ve said to myself, ‘Maybe I don’t fit in.’ The mirror
of his self-awareness shone my reflection back to me. I’d blamed
others at the writer’s workshop for my own decision to hold
myself apart.
More than a
year prior to that I’d worked with this client and his team, but
efforts to reschedule over a period of months never took the
form of a committed date. He admitted he’d separated himself
from me, thinking, “Maybe she doesn’t care about me.” When I
asked what would have let him know I cared, he said, “If you’d
sent an email saying you hadn’t heard from me and hoped I was
doing well.” What had I been doing instead? Carrying out a
parallel operation: “Maybe he hasn’t committed to a date because
he didn’t like what I did with his team.”
Either of us
could have made contact instead of keeping ourselves separate.
Just as I could have reached out to some writers at the workshop
who already knew each other. But my client and I were both
nailed to a Nine pattern, acting as if someone else was supposed
ito bring forth our creativity and they'd "dropped the ball."
This reinforced our story that no one cares what we have to say.
Of course, failing to initiate contact reinforced the story, so
we could say, "See, no one cares." Nines don't own this generic
pattern, by the way. Every Enneagram style, when acting
habitually, is reinforcing a story.
I’ve often
coached Nines to see potential conflict as a way to draw closer
to someone. When my client and I took the risk to tell the
truth, we opened our hearts and truly engaged with each other. I
felt full of love. He told me later when he described our
interaction to his wife, she was so caught up in his emotions
she wept.
Which brings
me to the “grace” part of
Addiction and
Grace.
Gerald May defined
grace
as a
dynamic outpouring “that flows into and through creation in an
endless self-offering of healing, love, illumination, and
reconciliation.” We can’t control grace, we can’t force those
moments of blissful awareness and unity, but “we can seek it and
try to be open to it.”
A friend
tells me the Siddha Yoga path is sometimes depicted as a bird
whose wings are
self-effort
and
grace.
Through our own steady effort, through our intention to seek the
truth, we can help ourselves and our clients stay open to grace.
