The Enneagram of Frustration and Disillusionment

Recently, I had a conversation with a fellow Enneagram enthusiast that brought me back to a defining moment in my own journey with this work: a time when I seriously considered walking away from it.

We were talking about a frustration that many people eventually encounter. The Enneagram, which can be such a profound tool for self-understanding and growth, is often used in surprisingly shallow ways. A workshop may open people into depth, reflection, and compassion, only for the dinner conversation afterward to slide into stereotyping. Someone is suddenly “such a typical One” or “such a Five,” with that familiar mix of certainty, affection, dismissal, and reduction.

Most people who have spent time around the Enneagram have seen this happen. Many of us have participated in it.

Over time, that kind of use can become deeply disillusioning.

When depth turns into reduction

My own frustration with the Enneagram began when I noticed how often it was being used to categorize people rather than to support deeper growth. It was informative, yes, but also diminishing. Something essential was being lost.

The turning point for me came when I realized that the antidote was not abandoning the Enneagram, but re-centering what had always mattered most to me within it: essence.

The personality structure of each type can be useful to study. But for me, the deepest value of the Enneagram does not lie in lists of traits. It lies in the qualities of essence each pattern both reveals and obscures. When essence is backgrounded and personality becomes the main event, the Enneagram easily turns into a system of contraction, judgment, and oversimplification.

When essence is brought back to the center, everything changes.

The frustration makes sense

I have come to think of frustration itself as meaningful. Frustration contains energy. It often tells us that something important is being violated, flattened, or misused.

In this case, the frustration many people feel with the Enneagram is not necessarily a sign that the whole system is bankrupt. It may be a sign that we are hungry for something truer than stereotype and stronger than type performance.

A superficial use of the Enneagram tends to emphasize what is most contracted in us. It invites us to describe one another through limitation rather than through the deeper qualities that each pattern is reaching toward.

An essence-first approach changes the emphasis. It does not deny personality. It places personality in a different relationship to what is more fundamental. Rather than treating type as the deepest truth of who we are, it sees personality as what emerges when we lose touch with deeper qualities of being.

That shift alone can restore dignity.

The disillusionment of rigid type identity

A second source of disillusionment arises when the Enneagram is held too rigidly. Many people begin with the hope that they will finally identify their one true type and, through that type, understand who they really are.

But human beings are more complex than that.

Over time, many people begin recognizing themselves in more than one type. They may feel embarrassed, confused, or as though they have somehow failed the model. Some start doubting their own direct experience in order to preserve a cleaner theory. Others abandon the Enneagram altogether because their lived reality no longer fits the story they were told it should.

I do not think either response serves us.

What if recognizing more than one type is not a problem, but part of growing beyond a rigid use of the system? What if our encounter with multiple types reveals something true about the layered, evolving, multifaceted nature of the self?

For me, that possibility opens the Enneagram back up.

Centering essence, embracing wholeness

When essence becomes central, the Enneagram changes from a tool of reduction into a path of nourishment. The types are no longer primarily ways of boxing ourselves or others in. They become windows into deeper qualities of being and invitations into a wider experience of wholeness.

This also changes how we understand identification. We may still have a primary pattern, but we are not limited to one room in the house. We contain many patterns, many layers, many longings, and many possible expressions of essence.

An essence-first approach does not erase complexity. It makes room for it.

This is why I continue to care so deeply about the Enneagram despite my frustrations with its more superficial forms. At its best, it is not a model for stereotyping. It is a way of understanding how personality contracts around deeper longings, and how those longings can guide us back toward what is most nourishing, dignified, and whole.

Closing

I am grateful I did not give up on the Enneagram when it became disillusioning. That disillusionment pushed me to ask better questions. It led me away from a narrow focus on type and toward an understanding of essence, embodiment, and wholeness that feels far more alive.

When the Enneagram is used only to label, it divides. When it is used to illuminate essence, it can deepen respect, self-understanding, and real empathy.

That is the Enneagram I still care about.