Are You Tired of Reacting the Same Way? Discover the Enneagram.
Does increasing your emotional control sound good?
How about greater psychological health?
Do you feel hopeless or helpless as you cycle through the same type of problems over and over?
Have you promised yourself you won’t lose it this time only to find yourself reacting again?
Are you tired of feeling that familiar rush of energy in your chest when you feel angry and the pit in your stomach when you feel guilty?
Do you feel like YOUR reactivity is really THEIR fault?
Want to stop beating yourself up for this cycle of reactivity?
What does it mean to be reactive?
Feeling reactive means feeling like we have no choice in how we respond in a situation. It’s like a knee jerk reaction. Wanting to defend or be right overpowers our desire to connect. It’s easy to feel hopeless or helpless when we find ourselves in the same cycle over and over. We desperately want it to be different, but we get stuck.
You can free yourself from this reactivity. All you need is YOUR operating manual and the right tools to optimize your psychological health.
You can:
• Take others less personally and yourself less seriously
• Feel greater ease in your relationships
• Experience more peace and emotional control
• Stop believing the negative thoughts that create suffering
• Be more connected to what you feel
• Have fun while you learn about yourself and others
• Learn the language of your heart, mind and body
• Develop compassion for yourself and others
A lot of us get stuck in these cycles of reactivity and feel badly about ourselves. You know you’re an intelligent person and feel frustrated that these same problems keep happening to you. This is a common human experience. The truth is, you need to learn how this happens and what you can do about it. You need to stop hoping for different results while doing the same thing. You need a good operating manual for how you work!
The Enneagram is Your Operating Manual
The Enneagram provides an operating manual for how you and others “work.” Haven’t you always wanted a manual on how we humans operate? Instead of being confused by others responses, wouldn’t you like to understand how they see things that way. Especially when it’s so different from you! And wouldn’t you like that manual to be pretty easy to understand and to have fun while you’re exploring it?
Learning about the Enneagram is a fun exploration. It describes our habitual way of seeing the world and the patterns associated with our view. This is the first huge step in expanding the range of our potential responses. If you want to upgrade your operating system, it’s helpful to know how your current system works! Our habitual patterns of response make sense but they limit our choice. There is nothing wrong with you, but you need a bigger perspective of what’s possible.
But I feel so stuck!
You can’t help but feel like there’s something wrong or that you’re stuck since you find yourself having the same reactions again and again. The good news is that we don’t have to keep learning the same thing over and over. Our learning, which means our reactions too, is encoded in neural pathways in the brain. The more these reactions are practiced, the stronger these pathways become. We keep having the same reactions because we keep going down the same pathway!
There is a familiarity in your current operating system. You are used to it but there’s not as much power or flexibility as you would like. You need to understand its benefits and its limitations so you can upgrade you system. Maybe you can imagine the ways you’d like to respond, so you’re partly there in the upgrade. But it takes some effort to learn the new system. Practicing a new behavior becomes very difficult since there’s no associated neural pathway, so we tend to react the same way.
I still don’t see how the Enneagram can help!
The first step in changing your reactions is to become AWARE of the dominant pattern of those reactions. Awareness is the primary tool for transforming your life. You must first SEE how the system of reactivity operates. Your habitual reactions are part of how you’ve learned to survive, to protect yourself and to navigate the world. You found a system that makes sense to you. But it also causes frustration. The Enneagram can help because it gives you the codes to your operating system. It can help turn the lights on to how you and others work!
There are many ways to learn about yourself these days.
We live in fortunate times that there are so many possibilities and breakthroughs in understanding. From discoveries in how the human brain works to technology so elaborate that still fits on a fingernail, these are amazing times. And it can be overwhelming in knowing which way to go. The Enneagram is a system that stands on it’s own and can be networked with most other psychological, physiological and/or spiritual orientations. It links understandings from many perspectives that you may already know and have an interest in. It encourages curiosity.
The purpose of this website
I’ve been studying and working in the field of psychology and spirituality for fifteen years. When I discovered the Enneagram, a gift from a friend of a set of audiotapes by Helen Palmer in 1995, I was blown away. I was sure someone had been following me around! At that point I had finished graduate school and was working as a psychotherapist. I had learned many theories and been given many tools. Yet, I felt like I’d been given a gift beyond measure. And it truly has been so much fun!
Understanding through the lens of the Enneagram is a passion for me. I want to share this passion through this website, in the form of FREE online articles and newsletters, and the other avenues for learning that I share including:
• Workshops and classes
• Individual sessions
• Tele-conference classes
• Networking to other Enneagram resources
If you want to know more, subscribe NOW!
My primary goal is to help you help yourself. I want to give you the tools to be your own best helper or resource. The Enneagram gives you the keys to you.