Enneagram Instincts & Subtypes in Marriage
Are our Enneagram Instincts Driving Us Away From One Another?
Individuals and couples call or email my Enneagram and Marriage team just about every day, many of them near despair.
Help my partner to care for me again. We used to be best friends and the most passionate of lovers. Now we can barely stand the sight of each other. Help us to get it back.
Bewildered, they wonder what happened. In the past two years, they actually know the answer to part of this question. Blurred lines with work hours, concerns of illness, unplanned expenses of gas, housing, and inflation issues, are partly to blame. Of course, loss of community has also hurt relationships since couples thrive with others spending time with them, especially here in the South where retirees depend on their social groups for connection. Worries of being criticized for sharing unpopular views about anything are rampant and people are distrustful, sometimes even of their own spouse. Is it any wonder couples therapists and helpers are struggling to handle all the influx?
One of the ways many of us are handling this is podcasting our services out, hitting the masses with blasts of encouragement and tools. While the standard of Gottman’s brilliant love lab and Sue Johnson’s emotionally focused couples work, some just need more. One of the best tools I’ve found to feature on my podcast is the Enneagram personality typing system.
Over the last few years, the Enneagram has been rising in popularity, and for good reason. In fact, Truity.com now tests over one million Enneagram test-takers a month and the efficiency of the numeral system is quite breathtaking for a couples therapist, not unlike a fully-loaded Tesla for an automotive engineer. Countless Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Y Instagram users (including me!) love to talk about their Enneagram types in relationships and in popular culture as well. How do you best love a type 5 on the Enneagram? Is Michael Scott from The Office a 2 or a 7? I still haven’t claimed him as a 7 but the writing is on the wall lol!
Though you may well know your numerical Enneagram type by now (and if you don’t, head over to our Find Our Types article, one of the most important concepts in this robust personality system is awareness of the three instincts in the Enneagram personality typing system and how they influence us in our relationships
Whatever your personality on Enneagram (or DISC or MBTI for that matter), you also have an instinctual preference, and trust me, your instincts matter in your relationship issues.
We all have these three instincts and we all use each of them to some degree. So what are these instincts specifically? They are the self--preserving instinct, the social instinct, and the sexual instinct. Each one helps us to both survive in the world as well as to connect healthily in the world. Though we all favor one of them! In the world of relationships, it’s also important to note that each of these instincts also help us to pair up, often with someone of a different instinct and survival strategy.
At the beginning of a dating or marriage relationship, our partner’s differing instinctual responses thrill us. It’s fun to be with someone so caring and thoughtful (self-preserving types) , passionate and fiery (sexual or one-to-one types) or friendly and justice-oriented (social types).
After the honeymoon wears off, however, we find that instead of being excited to be around someone who is different and who helped us to access different sides of ourselves in exciting ways, we get touched by a trauma or a difficult experience and we often race back to our first defense system. Exciting is exhausting and we want comfort.
As we rush back to our first loves, our own ways of surviving, one person re-finds their love of self-care, whether it be saving money, playing chess for hours at a time, working on a project, or simply checking out in a video game every night for hours.
Another person finds solace in one-to-one friendships and pushes the spouse aggressively for all of their time. They may take jealousy to an extreme level or start a micro affair right from the other side of the bed.
Yet another person will find their solace in their political or religious club, a circle of friends they’ve known since childhood, or a work or interest group they've become a part of over time.
When we see these polarizations in one another, it causes us to complain about each other.
I can't believe you never want to rest.
All you do is hoard resources!
I’m sick of you dominating what we do.
It takes a mature partnership for both individuals to acknowledge their own propensities and shortcomings as well as to allow their partner to balance them. It’s far easier to polarize both ourselves and them and sometimes even to sort ourselves out of a relationship.
However, this instinctual recoiling of sorts into our lower brain defensive shadow areas does everyone a disservice. The truth is, we need our partners and community to help us to use all three of these instincts.
It’s so important to get daily reuptake of self-care practices. If you don’t work, nothing else does.
It’s also so important to share in the intimate dynamic of one-to-one bonding either sexually or otherwise intimately.
And equally so, it’s important for us to band together in the collective process for justice-fighting and for meaning-making in communities.
All three of these instincts have been helping us since the beginning of time and every healthy individual and couple needs them all until the end of our days.
Conceivably, when we learn to balance with our partner’s instinct, we get farther in the world in the long run, shining brightly in the glow of our mutual gifts.
So how does one achieve a balance when it comes to these instincts?
First, it’s so helpful to consider which one of these instincts is being overused in your life to the exclusion of one or both of the others. It’s easiest to start here, drawing back into asking yourself if you really need to use this one so much and finding little ways you can scale back, step by step.
Next, it’s helpful to bring forward the next instinct you’re comfortable in with intention. If you’re first self-preserving inclined, next you’re one-to-one inclined), and last socially inclined, make sure you’re adding in the one-to-one fun and meaningful time with your partner and/or friends or family so you can really be sure you're adding it into the mix. Enneagram scholars have noted that the secondary instinct can get forgotten sometimes because we tend to overrate our healthy usage of it, just as we tend to overrate ourselves in the relationship in general with the fundamental attribution error.
Lastly, we approach the underused or the repressed instinct. This instinct needs maturing and a tangible, regular reminder from your more developed frontal brain that balance is a good thing. It’s just not intuitive
Though the other part of your instinctual defense system has helped you to a point obviously, the balance of all the healthy human survival strategies is and will always be best. Intentionally adding this kind of experience to your weekly plans will help you to find aspects of your life that truly often bring the missing or Jungian shadow pieces of yourself back to you, arguably back to all of us for the first time ever since we all benefit when each part of the human system is healthier and in balance.
Whichever you start with in balancing your instinctual sequencing here as an individual or as a couple balancing together, let me remind you of something. Balancing your instincts is a worthy practice when you’re trying to get your goals met and secure strong bonds for the long haul, whether in family, friendship, work, or marriage!
To help with intentional balance, you can use the Glow Planner, where I give couples weekly coaching tips for working on this all year long! I also have a podcast, freebies on instinct balance, pairing guides for each pairing, and deep dives on every type. We grow and glow so much brighter together as we help one another to balance!
