Making Room for the Disavowed in the Enneagram Styles

by Jerome Wagner, Ph.D.

Paul Wachtel is an integrative theorist and psychotherapist who draws from behavioral, cognitive, existential, and psychodynamic/attachment theories. In his new book called Making Room for the Disavowed (2023), he writes about making room for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that may have been disowned and how that disavowal may have occurred.

This dovetails nicely with what I wrote about the Enneagram’s idealized self image (I AM) and the corresponding area of avoidance or shadow (I AM NOT) in my Nine Lenses book. (Wagner, 2010)

Wachtel quotes John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, who says:

The therapist’s most essential task entails sanctioning the patient to think thoughts that his parents have discouraged or forbidden him to think, to experience feelings his parents have discouraged or forbidden him to experience, and to consider actions his parents have discouraged or forbidden him to contemplate. (1985)

The role of the therapist, coach, spiritual director, Enneagram endorser is to make room for thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and desires that, over the course of development, the person has come to experience as dangerous or shameful, helping the person to regain access to vital parts of himself from which he has retreated as a result of anxiety, guilt, and shame.

How did this parceling out of the self get started? Here are some quotes from Wachtel about the origins of the idealized self image:

The make-room for perspective is rooted in a critical implication of the uniquely prolonged vulnerability and dependency that characterizes human infancy and childhood. Because of that dependency, we learn early, as best we can, to be who our key attachment figures need us to be – to be the kind of baby and then the kind of child that can elicit whatever nurturance and responsiveness they are capable of offering. To a substantial degree, we learn to bend our thoughts, feelings, desires, perceptions, and very sense of self in directions most likely to elicit attuned responsiveness from our caretakers and to avoid eliciting disapproval, rejection, neglect, or other painful or deleterious responses.

We learn how to adapt to these (usually unstated and often unacknowledged) parental preferences. We learn to put forward and develop certain of our qualities and to place others deep in the background, less called upon, developed, or experienced; and, over time, we essentially come to define ourselves in a way that reflects this self-editing.

We learn early to ignore, suppress, turn away from the feelings and inclinations that do not seem to be registered or responded to by our significant others and to behave in ways that do elicit such responsiveness. This is a form of self-erasure.

It is in the context of our early attachment relationships that we first come to be comfortable with certain feelings, aims, and ways of acting and to shrink away from others, and, thus, almost inevitably, to build our sense of self and our way of being in the world on only a portion of who we fully are.

Wachtel quotes David Wallin (2007), an attachment theorist and therapist.

The expressions of the child’s self that evoke the attachment figure’s attuned responsiveness can be integrated, while those that evoke dismissive, unpredictable, or frightening responses (or no responses at all) will be defensively excluded or distorted. What is integrated can then enjoy a healthy maturational trajectory; what is not tends to remain undeveloped.

To sum up:

(Our)adaptation to the emotional signals of the attachment relationship leads to selective access to only a portion of the potential repertoire of thoughts, feelings, and ways of interacting that we might bring to bear in living our lives, and on how the unconscious and automatic self-restrictions this entails affect our further development and interactions with the world.

So, that’s how our idealized self-image got started. How we have a nine-cylinder engine but only use one cylinder – and only a part of that!

How, then, do we maintain in the present this truncated version of ourselves? Again, Wachtel:

The perceptions (and perceptual restrictions) that are initiated in our early attachment relationships become part of our way of life. The pattern is extended over time as our habits and expectations elicit responses from others that tend to perpetuate those very habits and expectations.

We utilize the time-honored practice of self-fulfilling prophecy. In order to maintain our image of who we think we are, we unconsciously elicit feedback and reactions from others to confirm our self image.

In another of his books, Wachtel (1997) explores the dynamics of “cyclical psychodynamics.”

The kind of experiences we have early in life, and our way of dealing with these experiences, strongly influences what further experiences we will encounter, as well as how we perceive those experiences and how we deal with them.

How (other people) behave toward us is very much influenced by how we behave toward them, and hence by how we initially perceive them. Thus, our initial (in a sense distorted) picture of another person can end up being a fairly accurate predictor of how he or she will act toward us; because, based on our expectation that that person will be hostile, or accepting, or sexual, we are likely to act in such a way as to eventually draw such behavior from the person and thus have our (initially inaccurate) perception “confirmed.” Our tendency to enter the next relationship with the same assumption and perceptual bias is then strengthened, and the whole process likely to be repeated again.

We unconsciously solicit people to participate in our narrative with its pre-prepared plot and denouement.

We are motivated to shield ourselves from being humiliated, hurt, frightened, etc. the way we were when we were young. Our Enneagram defensive strategies are designed to protect us.

The irony is our strategy brings about the very state of affairs we are trying to avoid. Our defenses protect us from anxiety but perpetuate the vulnerability they were designed to guard. What once saved us, now gets in our way. The solution becomes the problem.

For more on how our interactions with others ironically can bring about the very interactions with others and the vulnerabilities we are trying to avoid, see my article Enneagram Styles and Cyclical Psychodynamics: Irony of Ironies on my website: www.enneagramspectrum.com.

So, how does this disavowal show up in the Enneagram styles? Well, it’s one way of explaining why we highlighted and fixated on certain idealized parts of our personality while dimming and putting in the shadow other aspects of ourself that we would prefer to minimize or leave out entirely.

And where might we find these exiles? In our I AM NOT characteristics. We emigrate to our shadow those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make us anxious, guilty, ashamed, etc.

Now, the task is to welcome back home those undeveloped facets of ourselves. And we just might find them — and how to be comfortable with and use them — in the eight other ways of being in the world depicted by the Enneagram. Other people are great mirrors and exemplars of our displaced and unclaimed parts. We can learn about our underused parts from them.

We also might find potentials in ourselves that our parents were uncomfortable with or didn’t know what to do with in our “soul child.” Some authors, such as Sandra Maitri (2000), speak of the “soul child” of each Enneagram style as the part of us that we may have retired early on because he or she made our parents anxious. (For more on how our personality strategies and defenses are designed to lessen our caretakers’ anxiety, see another article on my website: The Enneagram and Harry Stack Sullivan.

The suggestion is our “soul child” contains those qualities of the style on the other end of the arrow going towards us. Think of that style as a gift coming our way. Not something to be afraid of but something to welcome.

Finally, you might find disavowed resources in yourself in those styes that you scored lowest on when you took an Enneagram inventory such as the WEPSS. They just might contain undeveloped parts of yourself.

The more of the healthy strategies of these differing ways of being in the world that we can incorporate into our own repertoire of thoughts, feelings, and actions, the more integrated and efficacious we will be. We’ll be more whole.

REFERENCES

Bowlby, J. (1985). The role of childhood experience in cognitive disturbance. In Cognition and Psychotherapy. New York: Springer

Wachtel, P. (1997). Psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, and the relational world. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Wachtel, P. (2023). Making room for the disavowed. New York: Guilford Press.

Maitri, S. (2000). The spiritual dimension of the Enneagram. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.

Wagner, J. (2010). Nine Lenses on the World: the Enneagram Perspective. Evanston, IL: Nine Lens Press.

Wallin, D. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford Press.