Healing Through Inquiry, Compassion, and the Enneagram
Margaret Mead once observed that the earliest sign of civilization is not a tool or weapon, but a healed femur. In the wild, a broken leg means certain death. A healed one means someone stayed behind, tended to, carried, and cared for them until the bone mended. It is a sign not just of survival, but of compassion—the root of human community.
This image does more than illuminate anthropology; it serves as a profound metaphor for the inner life. Civilization, after all, is not only external but internal. The question becomes: what is the healed femur of the psyche? As Austin Kleon’s notebook-like post reminds us, the stories we share also tend to become signs of civilization within.
The Broken Leg of Personality
In the language of the Diamond Approach®, the “constructed self” is the splint we fashion to adapt to and manage our early environment—abandonment, rejection, shame, or fear. Like a broken femur left untended, these wounds immobilize us. The personality steps in, a clever brace of strategies and defenses that allow us to hobble along, but at the cost of freedom, intimacy, and truth.
The Enneagram describes these splints with astonishing precision. Each type is a particular way of tending to an unhealed break:
- The perfectionist holds the fracture together with control.
- The helper binds the wound by serving others.
- The achiever hides the limp with relentless forward motion.
- The individualist dramatizes the pain as a badge of identity.
- The investigator withdraws, avoiding the risk of re-injury.
- The loyalist secures safety in bonds of allegiance.
- The enthusiast leaps past pain with distraction and pleasure.
- The challenger armors the wound with defiance.
- The peacemaker numbs the ache in resignation.
Each pattern arises from compassion toward the wound, yet each also traps us in immobility. To live only from personality is to live like the animal left with its broken leg—managing, surviving, but never truly free.
Inquiry as Inner Tending
The Diamond Approach offers a radical alternative: inquiry. To inquire into experience is to become our inner caregiver, the one who stays with the injured part until healing begins. Inquiry is not fixing, not overlaying more splints, but sitting with the brokenness and asking: What is this pain? What am I protecting? What is being longed for here?
This practice transforms the inner landscape. Instead of abandoning our wound to habit, we accompany it with curiosity and compassion. Like the companion who sat with the fallen hunter until bone fused back to bone, we become the presence that makes inner civilization possible.
Healing as Integration
A healed femur is not the same as an unbroken bone. It carries its history. It is stronger in the break, but also marked. Likewise, healing in the psyche does not erase wounds—it integrates them. The perfectionist still values order, but without rigidity. The helper still loves to give, but without self-erasure. Each type loosens, and what emerges is not a perfected personality but a more whole, embodied human being.
The Sign of True Civilization
The healed femur reminds us that civilization began not with weapons, but with care. In the same way, inner civilization begins not with conquest over the self, but with compassion for the broken parts. The true sign of psychological and spiritual maturity is not the absence of wounds, but the presence of integration—the capacity to tend, to heal, and to live from the wholeness that arises when the broken bone of the self is mended by love.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to rediscover the soul beneath behavior. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.