Enneagram

Healthy: Empathetic, compassionate, feeling for others. Caring and concerned about their needs. Thoughtful, warm-hearted, forgiving and sincere. / Encouraging and appreciative, able to see the good in others. Service is important, but takes care of self too: they are nurturing, generous, and giving — a truly loving person. At Their Best: Become deeply unselfish, humble, and altruistic: giving unconditional love to self and others. Feel it is a privilege to be in their lives of others.

Average: Want to be closer to others, so start “people pleasing”, becoming overly friendly, emotionally demonstrative, and full of “good intentions” about everything. Give seductive attention: approval, “strokes,” flattery. Love their supreme value, and they talk about it constantly. / Become overly intimate and intrusive: they need to be needed, so they hover, meddle, and control in the name of love. Want others to depend on them: give, but expect a return: send double messages. Enveloping and possessive: the codependent, self-sacrificial person who cannot do enough for others — wearing themselves out for everyone, creating needs for themselves to fulfill. / Increasingly self-important and self-satisfied, feel they are indispensable, although they overrate their efforts in others’ behalf. Hypochondria, becoming a “martyr” for others. Overbearing, patronizing, presumptuous.

Unhealthy: Can be manipulative and self-serving, instilling guilt by telling others how much they owe them and make them suffer. Abuse food and medication to “stuff feelings” and get sympathy. Undermine people, making belittling, disparaging remarks. Extremely self-deceptive about their motives and how aggressive and/or selfish their behavior is. / Domineering and coercive: feel entitled to get anything they want from others: the repayment of old debts, money, sexual favors. / Able to excuse and rationalize what they do since they feel abused and victimized by others and are bitterly resentful and angry. Somatization of their aggressions result in chronic health problems as they vindicate themselves by “falling apart” and burdening others.

Key Motivations: Want to be loved, to express their feelings for others, to be needed and appreciated, to get others to respond to them, to vindicate their claims about themselves.

Examples: Mother Teresa, Barbara Bush, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leo Buscaglia, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Cosby, Barry Manilow, Lionel Ritchie, Kenny G., Luciano Pavarotti, Lillian Carter, Sammy Davis, Jr., Martin Sheen, Robert Fulghum, Alan Alda, Richard Thomas, Jack Paar, Sally Jessy Raphael, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Ann Landers, “Melanie Hamilton” (Gone With the Wind). and “Dr. McCoy” (Star Trek).