When Insight Becomes a Cage Instead of a Key
“I can’t help it—I’m an 8.” “I overthink everything. It’s because I’m a 6.” “I disappear when things get hard. That’s how 9s cope.” Yada yada yada.
When did the Enneagram become a justification for maintaining one’s personality?
Originally a map of liberation, it’s too often used like a hall pass from growth. We cling to our type like a favorite old outfit: worn-in, predictable, and increasingly mistaken for our actual selves.
It’s a bit like someone dressed head-to-toe in black—shirt, jeans, belt, socks, shoes—declaring, “This is just who I am. I am my clothes. There’s nothing I can do about it.” But clothing isn’t the person. And personality isn’t identity.
Your Enneagram type is not who you are. It’s who you became. It’s the scaffolding that allowed you to navigate the world, to feel safe, seen, or significant. It’s brilliant in its design. And limited in its capacity.
The tragedy isn’t that we wear the pattern. The tragedy is that we forget it’s optional.
But we don’t stop with ourselves. We turn this same patterned thinking outward: “She’s a 3—of course she’s performing.” “He’s such a 5—totally unavailable.” “She’s a 2, so she has to help.” In one breath, we reduce a lifetime of nuance to a type label. In another, we let ourselves off the hook for how we show up, hiding behind a number like a spiritual alibi.
What began as revelation becomes resignation. What began as clarity becomes caricature. What began as a path of self-liberation becomes a cul-de-sac of self-confirmation.
This is not the work.
The Enneagram is not about becoming a better 4, or a more functional 1. It’s not about making peace with your fixation. It’s about seeing through the fixation.
It’s about loosening the identification with who you think you are and remembering who you were before you had to become all that.
The real invitation—perhaps even the sacred duty—is this: To stop using our type to explain ourselves, and start using it to undo ourselves. To hold up the mirror not to admire the mask, but to question it. To support one another in shedding the old garments, not reinforcing them with stitching made of clever Enneagram lingo.
We don’t need more people who know their type. We need more people who are curious beyond it. Who see the type as a doorway—not a destination.
So next time you hear yourself say, “That’s just how I am,” Pause. And ask:
- Who would I be without that story?
- What am I protecting with that explanation?
- Am I using the Enneagram to wake up, or to stay comfortably asleep?
Your type is not the truth. It’s the trailhead.
And the trail? It leads straight into the wild unknown—where you’re no longer just a number, but something vast, alive, and beautifully free.