David and I chatted with Nick Barr, whose outstanding dive into Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram texts lost him a third of his subscribers: some people can’t handle the truth! We discuss the origins of the Enneagram and touch on the claim that it’s Satanic, but mostly get into applying it to our marriages, friendships, colleagues, and ourselves, in particular making use of an excellent framing Nick attributes to Naranjo himself: the idea that your type should really be thought of as you solving for the tensions of your adjacent types.
For example: as a 9, I’m really trying to resolve the tensions between the 8 and the 1: I am in part a reactive, pugilistic challenger-critic, but I have a very strong and black-white moral worldview which precludes “being mean” or “making mistakes” or just chaotically taking shots at people / ideas, so I settle on a diplomatic peacekeeping role to avoid the pitfalls of either (which then brings its own issues and costs).
As ever, Nick was a delight to chat with and I hope he comes back again, and I can’t recommend his Substack highly enough.
Notes
I’m in the midst of quitting vaping (again), so apologies for even worse thinking than usual; I am wearing two maximum strength-nicotine patches!
If you have any Enneagram questions —or any other questions, I suppose— let us know in the comments and I’ll see if we can persuade Nick to come back and chat about them!
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