Enneagram Type 2 Personality and Wholeness in Therapy By Dan Siegel, M.D.

SUMMARY
Enneagram Type 2 “Bonding Outward” — Personality and Wholeness in Therapy
Affective Neuroscience Perspective

Enneagram Type 2 or PDP Pattern B-o | Pattern of Developmental Processing

PDP B-o: Bonding and Connection Sought Outward, Reframe and Redirect Aversive Emotions

Enneagram Type 2: The Giver/Helper

Motivation: Bonding for Connection

Primary Emotion: Separation-Distress/Sadness

Emotion Regulation Mode: Shift (Reframe and Redirect)

Enneagram Center of Intelligence and Knowing: Leads with Heart or Feeling Intuition, Knowing, and Perception

Anatomical Location of Initial Energy Flow: Heart/Solar Plexus

Enneagram Type 2 Core Dynamics in Therapy

Growth, integration and wholeness from habitual and reactive patterns to higher human capacities as a result of:

  1. relaxing the pattern
  2. renewed aspirational intentions
  3. moving from reactivity to pause/deep breath

Flattery vs Will/Freedom – The Cognitive Dynamic, Growth, and Wholeness

Flattery

  • Cognitive Preoccupations and Habitual Narratives: Pleasing and praising often excessively. Flattering the needs of significant others to make them feel special and attended to (in order to get). Manipulating with emotion. Repression of own needs.
    • Low Integration:  The outward Attendency of the Bonding Vector can make an individual vulnerable to lower states of functioning in which the inner needs for connection are driving an outward effort to attain that interpersonal bond without being aware of the inner feeling of a need. The adaptive strategy can then be to “figure out what others need and then meet those needs” in order to be needed and assure lasting connection.  This outward energy can then be intense and the inner needs for personal states being seen by others missing, driving that outward energy even more powerfully with the Shift mode of emotion regulation that reframes and redirects—this is for you, not for me (or my needs). This can be understood as not differentiating one’s inner needs from the inner needs of others in the face of intense external behaviors to assure connection.

Will/Freedom

  • Cognitive Higher Capacity: Truly giving that which actually is needed. Unconditional love free to operate without attachment to the needs of self or others. Neither my will nor yours, but flowing with the will of universal law which provides.
    • High Integration:  By differentiating the individual’s own inner needs from those of others and then linking from a place of sufficiency and clarity, relationships can be established with a rich sensitivity to those with a B-o offer in interpersonal communication and awareness.  By ensuring this differentiation and linkage balance, the FACES flow, flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable, begins to fill the relational space with a sense of harmony that is not on the edge of the edge of chaos or rigidity that marks moments of being unseen or under appreciated in low integrated functions.  In some informal observations, the capacity for mirroring and empathy seemed especially high in those of this PDP Pathway; and this then can become a strength if the non-integrated states of merger are then transformed with the cultivation of differentiation that does not compromise linkage.

Pride vs Humility – Emotional Dynamic

Pride

  • Emotional Drive, Tone and Reactivity: Energy is reactive. Anger neutralized or opposed. Body energy out, dispersed and/or merging with the other.
    • Low Integration: The external drive to connect that underlies the B-o energy is a heart centered source about relational connections; but the feelings when such bonding is not acknowledged can become reactive with a “pride” experience of resenting someone not accepting a bid for meeting their needs.  Naturally, the give-and-take of any relationship would make this asymmetry filled with the propensity toward a chaotic or rigid pattern, signs of low integration.

Humility

  • Moving from a cognitive preoccupation that others need me and I need to give to them to a cognitive awareness that the world naturally gives and takes
  • Moving from emotional pride with others to an internal emotional humility
  • Emotional Higher Capacity:  Sense of what is appropriate to give and take. Thus not being indispensable. Giving and accepting equally without pride. Realizing the limits of giving. Knowing the position of humans in the larger cosmic sense. of self or others. Neither my will nor yours, but flowing with the will of universal law which provides.
    • High Integration:  When an Attendency of outward can be balanced with a focus inward, within the individual, the feelings of one’s own needs and the deeper receptive awareness of the Plane of Possibility enable a larger perspective to emerge.  This movement entails the Shift mode of emotion regulation yielding to feeling the authentic feelings of need, of a longing to belong, that then can open relationships to a more flexible way of unfolding in the more symmetric sharing that is the basis of relational harmony.

Enneagram Type 2 Synopsis

Brief Description

Type 2 believes you must give fully to others to be loved. Consequently, Type 2s are caring, helpful, supportive and relationship-oriented, but also can be prideful, overly intrusive and demanding.

Key Interventions

Help Type 2s develop, integrate and own the true separate self, and overcome the addiction to meeting the needs of others as a way to be cared for and loved.

Somatic Profile

As feeling types, Type 2s experience a buildup of energy, and sometimes tension around their chest, diaphragm and shoulders. Very empathic and attuned to others, they may restrict or suspend their breathing while waiting for other people’s responses. Although full of energy and expressive in their upper bodies, it can be hard for them to sense their lower bodies and stay grounded. They tend to “spill over” and discharge their anxiety or uncontained emotional energy through talking and relating. It’s not uncommon for them to “somatize” or convert unacknowledged feelings into physical symptoms.

Communication Style

Friendly, open, other-focused and full of advice. Others may perceive you as intrusive, overly helpful, nagging or controlling.

Behavioral Profile

Strengths: Giving and generous, helpful, romantic, sensitive to others’ feelings, appreciative, supportive, energetic and exuberant, willing.

Difficulties: Overemphasis on relationships, especially challenging ones; making yourself vulnerable to rejection and loss, repression and indirect expression of your own real needs, which may lead to eruption of anger and emotion, manipulating others to get your own needs met, allowing your feelings to grow and overwhelm you (feelings such as hysteria, distress, and somatic complaints), repressing questions regarding your real self  (e.g. who am I, really?), feeling controlled by others who have developed dependency issues, and longing for freedom.

Social Profile

Type 2’s range from introverted to extraverted, but tend to be more on the extraverted side due to their external focus. In addition, their social disposition is impacted by the three relational sub-patterns.  Dominance toward self-survival or self-preservation is a relational focus based on me first (or put your life jacket on first, before attending to others) can lead to being more introverted. Dominance toward bonding survival or one-on-one focused relationships tend to fall in the middle of the I-E spectrum.  Dominance toward group survival or social focus on groups and organizations can lead to being more extraverted.

Enneagram Type 2 Basic Proposition and Loss of Wholeness in Childhood

Holy Freedom is that original state wherein needs are met by the greater universal will.  That provides for us.  Ultimately the entire mechanism of energy production upon which fulfillment of needs depends operates independently of human beings and rests upon universal laws.  When we come to realize that real needs are provided for by this universal energy, sometimes called the “Grace of God,” we come to know the proper position and limited power of the individual human will in this large cosmic context.  The mother naturally provides for the infant in accordance with the gift of universal will.  And we all depend on the planet to supply the resources for life.  In essence energy for provisions doesn’t come and go and all needs are met according to the same principle of universal will.  When we realize this, giving and receiving occur without pride according to real worth and capacities.  It is neither my will nor yours that provides but the greater will.  When we grasp the relationship of the small individual will to the greater universal will, we obtain humility.  We sense what is appropriate to give and take, giving and taking what is needed and no more.  We have freedom–freedom to operate without attachment to the needs of self or other.

The original state of freedom wherein needs are met by the greater universal will.  This understanding or truth is negated in the life of the Giver child.  Someone’s will impressed itself on your inner space saying this is a world based on to get love and approval you must fulfill my needs, my will.  To survive, you as a Giver, had to forget your own rudimentary ability to respond to the higher will of essence.   In its place you came to serve the will of others through your own little will.  Consequently your original humility got replaced by a prideful energy wherein you fulfill the personal needs of important others through your own will.  You become indispensable to them;  with your prideful energy you know what they want and need.  As a compensation, you become attached to fulfilling these needs in hopes that others will give back fulfilling your needs. You fall into a “need governed world” in which your own needs and wants get repressed, go into the background.

In the process you have replaced holy will with your own personal will.  You now provide for others, fulfill needs.  Your will does it, not “God’s will.”  Your personality mimics original essence in the never ending effort to meet the needs of others so that you believe your own needs will be met and you will become free.  In order to do this your attention naturally goes to focusing selectively on wants and needs of others, especially key others.  And there is no dearth (shortage) of needs to fulfill!  You must feel and respond to the emotional state of others, stay in connection with them, alter your own emotional state and behavior to match to their needs and will.  You have an open heart that spills out the energy of active force in the present situation.  How else could pride operate successfully?  You are in control.  You reference yourself to others, not to yourself.  You gain the love and approval of others and repress your separate self and needs.  In order to keep connection and love, you become dependent on others being dependent upon you.  And so it goes.

What Wholeness Looks Like for Enneagram Type

What does greater wholeness look like when those with Enneagram Type 2 make their way on the journey of self-study and growth?

  • Moving from a cognitive preoccupation that others need me and I need to give to them to a cognitive awareness that the world naturally gives and takes 
  • Moving from emotional pride with others to an internal emotional humility
Integrating the higher capacity of being aware and in touch with oneself as an independent individual and the existential freedom associated with it becomes a theme of therapy and a daily practice (rather than the trapped existence of being at the beck and call of every person’s need that comes up). There is an ability to experience living in emotional humility with a knowing that there is a natural giving and receiving and we are all part of that, not just me. The Bonding system is balanced with a grounded Agency sensing of self-sovereignty and the ability to lean into Certainty higher capacities of thinking ways of perceiving the world, especially when emotional pride takes over the internal experience.