The Enneagram of the Body
An Interview with Alan Sheets
by Jerome Freedman, Ph. D.
©Alan Sheets & Barbara Tovey 1995
REPRINTED FROM THE ENNEAGRAM MONTHLY AUGUST - NOVEMBER 1995
PART II
TYPES 8, 4 & 2
This is Part II of the "Enneagram of the Body", a series of articles about the inherently different bodily expression in each of the enneagram types. Barbara Tovey and I have been working together on this hypothesis. We have cataloged how this bodily expression indicates a unique type-specific ability to take in and process information about the world. In this article we will be discussing types 8, 4 and 2. The energy for these three types originates in the abdominal region. The skill and strength for each of these types involves a process which deals directly with people. The strengths and skills for the other six types does not directly involve people.
THE OBSERVATION
We have observed that when a person is guided into his or her strongest stance, that stance will invariably be one of nine postures which can be correlated with an enneagram type. This stance not only has an identifiable posture, but also an energetic component: energy will emanate from areas within the abdomen, the sternum, or the brain.
THE EXPLANATION
We think this body-based differentiation is basic to the enneagram types. Each type has a different part of the body more activated. This makes each type more proficient at one specific aspect of functioning in the world. We can only marvel at this seemingly incredible nine-part distribution of talents among people!
A NOTE ABOUT HOW WE DIVIDED THE 9 TYPES
We have noticed that the part of the body that is energetically active for the nine types falls into the following configuration: 8, 4 and 2/ ABDOMEN; 6, 3 and 9/STERNUM; and 1, 7 and 5/BRAIN. We understand that these locations do not agree with the conventional divisions of 8, 9, and 1 for the gut; 2, 3 and 4 for the heart; and 5, 6 and 7 for the head. At this time we do not have an explanation for this difference. We think this is an area worthy of further exploration and would invite anyone who is interested to contact us.
THE INTERVIEW (continued)
Jerome Freedman: What I am really fascinated by is this: you talk about people coming to you with a certain relationship with their own body energy and they also come to you with an emotional and mental preoccupation. These are all tied together in some way and the fixation and the passion line up, somehow, with their body mechanics. You are able to tune into the body mechanics in order to bring out their fixation. Even though the fixation is mental and emotional, you are able to bring it out in a physical way.
Alan Sheets: I actually look at it slightly differently. I do understand what you are saying; it is the conventional wisdom of the enneagram. I'm really looking at the enneagram as an identification of a physical energetic process which differentiates how people take in and process information. Our work does not identify the state of mental or emotional health.
4
Let's use 4 as an example of how this might work. 4 is energetically receptive and is about making a connection with someone in a way that allows emotional information to flow. We talk about that as feelings. So you could understand that if a person is an unhealthy 4, he or she might be able to use this emotional connection to manipulate people, or to vent their feelings on somebody else. However, you leave a conversation with a healthy 4 and think, "Wow! That felt good!" because you had a nice emotional interchange.
I once had a girlfriend who was a 4. We got into a heated exchange about our relationship that seemed, to me, to last forever, but was perhaps only an hour long. When I, a type 5, had "had enough" and told her that I had to leave, her immediate reply, in an expectant, anticipating tone of voice was, "...To be continued." At that point I realized that she had enjoyed our encounter and that it probably had not been stressful for her. She knew how to deal with feelings and emotions, so it was not a big deal for her. This is not to say that 4s have either more or deeper emotions and feelings than the rest of us, but that the other types do not have as sophisticated a mechanism for connecting with another person. Unless someone's a 4, they've have had to devise survival mechanisms around feelings and emotions which frequently involve suppression, avoidance or finding ways of dealing with them alone. It would be nice to add the skill of the 4 to our repertoires.
JF: So you're referring to qualities of essence that exist within a given point whether or not they are fixated, whether or not they are healthy or denigrated...they have some other essential quality that is not the holy ideas nor the holy virtues; it is something different.
AS: That's right! I'll continue by going around in the order of the arrows.
2
The next point is 2, which has both a receptive and pro-active component. As the 4 is skilled at making a strong emotional connection, the 2 is skilled at connecting on a current-time mental level, which we could look at in terms of words; in terms of communicating. The 2 functions in the present with very little emphasis on the past or the future. The 2 takes in information about a person with their upper abdomen and then uses their eyes to facilitate the ensuing communication. The 2's eyes are a focusing device. The 2s, along with the 1s and the 3s, are the only people who look me directly in the eye in order to get into their enneagram posture of strength. However, for the 2, it's not because he or she is a "brain" number; it's because their eyes are the medium. So you characteristically see the 2 as the "bright-eyed" number.
When I asked a 2 acquaintance about what she does when she enters a room, she said that she makes a very quick connection with everyone in the room so that she will know who wants to talk to her without even looking at them. She likened it to having a little silver thread attached to each person. This is the very pro-active aspect of the 2. Anyone who is within the 2's vision, whether or not they desire it, has one of these "thread-like" connections attached to them. This connection allows the 2 to monitor how the other person is doing during a conversation so they can structure their end of the conversation to minimize the anxiety level of the other person. The 2's assessment skill about how the other person is receiving what they are saying is so quick that they can begin a sentence with one idea and end it with another. This does not mean that the 2 says things they do not believe, it only means they say things in such a way to keep the interchange alive.
One of the 2s I know says that if she happens to say something that the other person does not like, she finds a way to soften it until she feels the other person's anxiety level decrease. Her sister, who thinks Johnny Mathis is a wonderful singer, took her to one of his concerts. She made the mistake of saying she thought Johnny Mathis was "old fashioned." She said her sister's anxiety level went "off the scale". She lowered her sister's anxiety level by talking about some of the good songs he would be singing during the show. The 2s skill is not to always say the perfectly appropriate thing but rather to be able to recover from saying inappropriate things. They are able to do this because of the connection they have already established with the other person.
8
8 is the third type whose energy emanates from the lower abdomen. As the 4 is receptive and the 2 is both receptive and pro-active, the 8 is a strictly pro-active type and is the quickest reacting of all the types. 8s do something very interesting. They send out bursts of energy from their lower abdomen in order to see how people react. This burst can take the form of words or gestures. Based on the reaction they get from the energy that they send out, they know what the person they're dealing with is "really made of"; how that person can be expected to behave when pushed. In other words, they figure out what the limits and parameters of safety are.
The bursts of energy can be subtle, and the female 8 will generally be more subtle than the male 8. When the male 8 wants to check out a room he is about to enter, one of the ways we have seen him do it is by opening the door with a flourish and entering like he was driven by the wind. Needless to say, everyone reacts. The female 8 might throw out a provocative statement. One of the female 8s I know has been known to say, "I'm having my period" in the middle of a conversation. That is a statement that everybody reacts to, and it's just like a little explosion. So, how people react to that statement is telling for the 8.
The 8, most of the time, is so aware of the environment that he or she is less likely than someone of another type to get caught in a confrontational situation. They are more likely to be the one who walks into a bar, takes one look, and turns around and walks out because he or she has determined it is not safe. The rest of us have a greater likelihood of staying due to our poor ability to recognize a dangerous situation, and consequently a much higher probability of getting into trouble.
I would like to give an example where an 8 felt it was necessary to push the limits. I sold an unregistered car to someone who made the mistake of parking it on the street before taking care of the necessary paperwork. It was spotted by a police officer who began the process of ticketing it and arranging to have it towed. I came out of the house and argued with him for five or ten minutes and got absolutely nowhere. I went back in the house just as Barbara, my 8 wife, was getting out of the shower. She quickly assessed the situation by sending 8 energy bursts my way: she focused all of her 8' energy on me and repeatedly asked me what had happened, forcing me to talk, because I was close to speechless and claiming it was hopeless. (At that point I felt horribly harassed by Barbara, even though I later understood why she did it.) Then, with soaking wet hair and dressed in a towel, she took up the challenge of convincing this police officer that he should neither ticket nor tow the car. It was quite a sight to see a big, tall, 200+ pound police officer trying to deal with an animated and dripping wet 115 pound woman in the middle of the street. Afterwards I asked her why she handled it this way. She of course said that it was all instinctual, but when she analyzed what she had done she said that she had known that this police officer was not going to listen to reason because she knew me and knew I would have already tried that approach. So, based on that and on my hopeless and distressed reaction to him, she knew her only hope to salvage the situation for me was to try something extreme to throw him off balance and therefore possibly get him to respond in what, for him, would be a non-typical manner (i.e., not ticket or tow the car). She figured that her current state of wet hair and a towel, in the middle of the street, was about as extreme as she could arrange on short notice, so she went for it. A critically important thing, she said, was that she knew she would be absolutely safe. She knew, even without having seen or met the officer, that he was tough, rigid and determined, and strictly followed regulations. Therefore, she knew there was nothing that the police officer would publicly do to someone who looked so vulnerable. He literally could not touch her without creating a scene that she knew he would not want.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jerome Freedman, Ph. D., Certified Teacher of the Enneagram in the Oral Tradition with Helen Palmer, practices in Marin County, California. In addition to enneagram work, mind stories, and Buddhist meditation, he is a highly trained and experienced computer consultant with many clients in Fortune 500 companies. Questions and comments are welcome.
email - jerome@enneagram-instrument.org
phone - 415-461-6476
mail - PO Box 665
Larkspur, CA 94977
Alan Sheets & Barbara Tovey
email - AlanS31416@AOL.COM
phone - 415-459-6796
mail - 1330 Lincoln Ave., Ste. 202
San Rafael, CA 94901
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When we reprinted these articles, we updated them to reflect our current understanding of this work. We made every effort to keep the flavor, the integrity and the flow the same as it was in the originals.
Alan Sheets and Barbara Tovey
11-96