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[Traditional Enneagram] A little confusion(Traits vs motivations)

Yuurei

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I'm a bit curious about something. I've been told that enneagram is about motivation more than traits. So what if your traits go against your type, but not your motivations? On here I got typed as 7, although some people said 9. But I don't really relate to being spotaneous, very extroverted, optimistic, and bubbly. It could easily be a stereoptype, but still. I definitely can be goofy and playful, but I'm also quiet, introspective, compromising and mellow like a 9. I just like variety, learning lots, experience and exploring the unique like a 7. I care a lot about peace too though.

Any insights I guess?


This is perfectly normal and is why Enneagram is far more practical and reliable than MBTI.

I actually get this a LOT " You're an Eight but you're not very aggressive." right, because control Being overly aggressive to me is like being controlled by anger and I refuse to do that.
 

Peter Deadpan

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I'm a bit curious about something. I've been told that enneagram is about motivation more than traits. So what if your traits go against your type, but not your motivations? On here I got typed as 7, although some people said 9. But I don't really relate to being spotaneous, very extroverted, optimistic, and bubbly. It could easily be a stereoptype, but still. I definitely can be goofy and playful, but I'm also quiet, introspective, compromising and mellow like a 9. I just like variety, learning lots, experience and exploring the unique like a 7. I care a lot about peace too though.

Any insights I guess?

Both types avoid painful situations, but in different ways.

When something feels uncomfortable or threatening, do you numb out and begin to exist passively, or do you avoid slowing down and try to experience/do more? What makes you more uncomfortable and stressed out? Feeling tied down, or feeling unimportant and disconnected?
 

Saturnal Snowqueen

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[MENTION=31348]Peter Deadpan[/MENTION]

I chose the latter for both of those.
 

Peter Deadpan

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I chose the latter for both of those.

Well you selected one of each for 7 and 9.

This stuff should take you a long time to figure out if you're doing it right because you have to dig beneath your ego, so I wouldn't worry much about not figuring it out yet.
 

Saturnal Snowqueen

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[MENTION=31348]Peter Deadpan[/MENTION]

I see! But maybe the latter in number 1 could be narcotization for me? I read nines do more too, but in a more repetitive/comforting way. Music is a big coping mechanism for me, and I listen to music repetitively under stress.
 

Peter Deadpan

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[MENTION=31348]Peter Deadpan[/MENTION]

I see! But maybe the latter in number 1 could be narcotization for me? I read nines do more too, but in a more repetitive/comforting way. Music is a big coping mechanism for me, and I listen to music repetitively under stress.

I meant "doing more" as in getting out of oneself and one's situation impulsively as a way of avoiding stagnation or introspection. It's a very outward movement, which isn't really what the 9 necessarily does (although they do focus on their relationship to what they value and want to connect with externally). 9s numb out under stress and merging with something gives them a sense of being.
 

Chad of the OttomanEmpire

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I'm a bit curious about something. I've been told that enneagram is about motivation more than traits.

This is true. I cannot emphasize this enough. I have seen so many people either mistyped, or else permanently confused about their type (or else unable to accurately recognize types in others) because they're basing their understanding of the enneagram on "traits". We start off memorizing lists of adjectives and superficial characteristics, because those are building blocks that help us understand deeper qualities.

Another way to think of this is that the types are psychological patterns. They're not about what you do, they're about your way of seeing the world, your defense mechanisms, etc. I literally just wrote about this exact thing elsewhere:

It's best to think of the types as psychological patterns. Throw out every piece of feedback you've ever gotten. Forget what they've said about you. People are liars, and they lack insight into others. It might also help to read some published authors--I wouldn't be anywhere if I hadn't MASSIVELY examined what various thinkers had to say about the enneagram. Find out how you see the world, listen to your own most heart felt rants about life, look deeply into your values, ask yourself about the places you avoid psychologically. These are better indicators of type than being "well-liked by your peers".

Some (like many of the original teachers) would go even farther than that and insist that the enneagram is actually a spiritual tool designed to realign us with the cosmos. For most people, seeing it as a psychological tool is the most practical.

So what if your traits go against your type, but not your motivations?
I can tell you about not exhibiting traits. I have gotten feedback all my life about being the exact opposite of how my type is typically described. Consequently, I spent 15 years of looking at behaviours and thinking I wasn't "good enough" to be my type, or any other for that matter. I always felt insufficient to actually belong on the enneagram.

All I can say is that you actually might exhibit stereotypical behaviors in ways that others haven't pointed out, that you haven't picked up on yourself, or that you just aren't thinking about. It's best not to worry about that, but instead look at what absolutely motivates you ("motivations" being a condensed word for your fears, avoidances, longings, self-image, superego messages, values system, defense mechanisms, private thoughts about the world, core triggers, etc.)

On here I got typed as 7, although some people said 9. But I don't really relate to being spotaneous, very extroverted, optimistic, and bubbly. It could easily be a stereotype, but still. I definitely can be goofy and playful, but I'm also quiet, introspective, compromising and mellow like a 9. I just like variety, learning lots, experience and exploring the unique like a 7. I care a lot about peace too though.
See, these are stereotypes. I've spoken to any number of 7s who insist they're quiet and relatively serious. Especially Thinking 7s don't always fit the stereotype of the bubbly, people-oriented ditz--I once went out with an ESTP 7w6 former-classmate of mine who hardly said anything--he was often abrasive and depressive and had a "morbid" sense of humor. Likewise, caring about peace doesn't necessarily make you a 9--I'd say that was another trait rather than a motivation.

The difference between 7 and 9 is the difference between wanting to keep moving (7) and wanting to stay settled (9); wanting to get "up" versus wanting to remain "even"; seeking excitement vs seeking to tamp down excitement; avoiding stagnation vs embracing it; mercuriality vs steadiness; quickness vs slowness. You'll probably see yourself more oriented toward one or the other. Probably both are in your tritype.

You know yourself better than anyone else here; the important thing is what's happening inside your mind. Not the traits you/people think you're exhibiting. Best of luck.
 

NatureChaser

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To add to this post, probably not unlike most people have, motivations definitely play a bigger role than behavior, especially when certain types resemble each other at a superficial/purely behavioral level. Using myself as an example, behaviorally, I could easily be typed (and have mistyped for a long period of time) as a 9(w1) core because I'm not incredibly assertive, withdrawn, excessively pleasant/agreeable around others, and more moved by others agendas at times than my own. I am also not necessarily reactive in a way that's super obvious to others in the way that the stereotypical 6 and I wouldn't consider myself loyal either. However, if you look into my motivations, I am strongly motivated by my fear, I don't fear being lost or separated from others, and I'm far too willing to throw away my peace of mind to get things done and maintain control. I also have no issue with sloth. This confusion makes sense, as sp 6 strongly resembles 9s as a whole (without the presence of sx at least) behaviorally and description wise if you ignore motivations.

THAT'S why I mistyped as 9w1 too. But after I look deeperfor my fear I fear of without support and guidance more. I look back on my childhood my mom was too overprotective to me so I see the world as dangerous and untrustworthy, and I'm being dependent of my mom, I let my mom become the support and guidance for me. I'm afraid of losing my mom because who's gonna give me guidance if it's not my mom?
 

neko 4

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I wouldn't listen to what people at a forum think I am. They've never met you.
 

Brains

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To say that traits and behaviors are extraneous to the types and to dismiss them as "superficial" isn't really correct. Enneagram tries, in the first place, to outline stable differences between individuals, to highlight how different two people can be and how differently they can experience the world, and to challenge ourselves to notice when our automatic habits don't really help and to develop ourselves from that habit of observation. When Enneagram was created in the 1950s-1970s, the heritability of personality wasn't much of a topic for research, and the general idea was more on the side of nearly everything being learned through life experience. As people clearly are very different from each other, there has to be something that made them so, right? People aren't different for no reason.

To get at where the Enneagram goes wrong, one huge thing is what it considers to be the root of personality structure and differences between people. Most takes posit that people have some kind of fundamental experience that leads to the formation of a motivation that then over time results in the construction of an ego structure, and these motivations relate to over- or underexpressing three key emotions. But is that really how it goes?

Just on the face of it, if you really think every human's personality is fundamentally driven by anger, shame or fear, I've a bridge to sell you. Good condition, inland, nowhere near a body of water.

The motivations themselves suffer from a similar problem: They're just too specific and narrow to really characterize human personality as a whole. You can find some of them in most people, to be sure, but that doesn't mean they're the fundamental building block of those people's character. To claim so would require pretty extraordinary evidence. Furthermore, those motivations have to come from somewhere, and that's where things get interesting.

As far as behaviors go, the detractors are right when they say just focusing on behavior doesn't quite work, but "looking at the motivations", yeah. We still have that bridge in stock. The problem with looking at behaviors is the same as with the motivations: Where do they come from, since eg. lashing out at someone rudely can be born of many different things.

Fundamentally, humans - any creatures - need reasons, causes for acting the way they do. Any creature only takes action because the rewards seem to outweigh the costs, and the systems that gauge how profitable or enjoyable rewarding signals are differ naturally between people - give someone with a high reward sensitivity the same set of inputs as someone low in reward sensitivity, and one will see a world abundant in opportunity to be seized and joy from things acquired, while for the other the rewards seem lower, and thus the costs seem higher in comparison, and he will see more of the world as a drain or a drag, more trouble than it's worth. There will still be things that filled their heart with joy and they'd totally end up doing those things, but their sphere of concerns would inevitably be smaller than that of the reward sensitive person, all else being equal. This is just a simple consequence of both perceiving similar costs but one sees things as more rewarding than the other - what those specific things are is of course very personal, but a highly reward sensitive person's sphere of interests will be wider, on average and they will exhibit more positive emotions since wanting things and liking things is what drives us to pursue rewards in the first place.

The above is the true definition of Extraversion, and in contrast to the Jung-born popular idea of a scale of "turned outwards and shallow" vs. "turned inwards and deep", it's a trait that goes from "a lot of outward-engagement" to "little outward-engagement" and doesn't really have a negative pole or an opposite. Enthusiastic engagement vs. lack of interest rather than extraverted and introverted, per se. The classic, ruminative depth some people possess is due to different personality traits, different systems.

From the get go we see that the motivation and "superficial" behavior are linked - there's no way they couldn't be, since the behavior needs a cause to happen to begin with, an inner experience that motivates the action. They're inextricably linked. The big thing is that you need to be wary of what things you look at - you can end up in certain places by many different roads. If you try to focus on words like industrious, headstrong and opinionated when trying to discern whether someone is a One or an Eight, you'll never make heads or tails of it, which is what the warning is for. But not all superficial things are like that - some are very, very good information sources since they reflect different levels of the underlying traits.

To illustrate further, take the example of someone chewing another person out. They must be really angry, right? Well, they might be. Someone with a high degree of dispositional empathy might need to get very, very angry until they get pushed over the edge to lash out at someone. Someone else with a really low degree of dispositional empathy would simply need to be a bit displeased and they might say hideous things.

To make things even more complicated, just as people differ in their reward sensitivity (and thus positive emotionality, eg. extraverts provenly like pictures of puppies more and stay happy for longer after seeing one), people differ in their degree of negative emotionality - put the same signal into two different people and one can get really distressed while the other reacts with a shrug. So the same signal could get a similar level of inconsiderateness out of a disagreeable, unempathetic person who's emotionally stable and from a person who's agreeable and empathetic but sensitive to things that provoke negative emotions. One gets irritated and protests in a very blunt, callous manner, while the other's overcome with emotion and lashes out. Same words, same antagonism, very different root causes.

It's easy to see how these kinds of dispositions could commonly lead to different kinds of outlooks on life - a person who really viscerally feels others' pain and someone more tough-minded are likely going to adopt different life philosophies, and so on, and they're also likely to act differently overall. But these philosophies are merely a consequence of the fundamental building block of temperament, and a lot of the individual variety in that is due to how our biological systems are wired, without any kind of clear cause. Just the opposite: The way our biological systems are wired colors our experience from the day we're born. We interact with the world according to our nature, and as the world responds to our actions, we absorb the feedback through the lens of our nature. We're certainly not slaves to it, but it colors, well, everything.

This is where the Enneagram writers make their biggest mistakes - they fabricate coping strategy -style reasons for behaviors since people's differences need a cause, and that results in some pretty bad misinterpretations. In a sample of 241 pre-typed people who were given a non-Enneagram personality test, for example, Eights scored the lowest on negative emotionality. Anger-driven? Nope, not by a long shot. Uncaring, callous? Sure, they tied with Fives for the style with the lowest degree of dispositional empathy. But the authors merely write of anger, when the feeling of anger, proper, means intense emotional investment and reaction to something, and Eights are the exact opposite. They just don't care about the other's feelings as much as most people so feel more free to express their displeasure. An Eight chewing you out feels bad - being displeased is still typically provoked by a negative signal - but the Eight's inner state's going to be just miffed. They're low-care, naturally assertive people so they'll talk things out kinda roughly before shit gets out of hand. Now, if it's a 9w1 chewing you out? A person high in dispositional empathy, not naturally assertive, and to boot also a bit less sensitive to negative emotional signals than average? Just imagine how bad a person like that has to feel to really lash out at someone bigtime.

So, some profiles are wrong. Some of the profiles are not mistaken, and actually often pretty good. Take the Nines mentioned above, for example. Bottle up their anger? Sure. High degree of dispositional empathy, very low extraversion (and so low Assertiveness), lower than average negative emotionality (so their problems don't seem so serious), and bam. Others' issues feel more important to the Nine than their own, and they end up swallowing their misgivings, which eventually leads to the outbursts written in the books.

Low reward drive and high empathy also easily explain why they find it easy to move for others but not so much themselves - their muted reward drive just doesn't see too many profitable things out there, and they are in any case unused to asserting themselves the way extraverts are, and the list goes on and on.
 

Zhaylin

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Excellent thread! I wish I had read the entire thing sooner.

I have no doubt I'm an INFP (though high in sensing) 9w1 sp/so. What confuses the daylights out of me are the tritypes.

I need peace first and foremost, so I tend to isolate myself to an extreme. I loathe chaos and negative emotions or strong emotional displays. I read people and my environment, so I'm fairly vigilant. I don't notice a lot of stationary stuff (everything in a room, for instance) and my memory is absolutely crap (so don't ask me if the third person I saw was happy or sad lol). I do notice people though, and when I notice conflict (fights, tears or an inability to get something off a shelf), I'm compelled to help. I would rather not, though, because then they want to talk or thank me or .... too many variables.

Helping, is what, a 2? But helping (being nice) isn't what motivates me. Disruption of peace does... so, I guess, conflict (in it's many forms) causes some degree of anxiety for me.
Likewise, I choose sp before so because, while I can be fairly social and extremely pleasant; again, it's not because I get something out of socializing, be pleasant just minimizes conflict.

I settled on tritype 945 because, out of everything I've read, it just fit the best... but even then, not quite. I'm not brainy enough or aloof enough.

On PsyTypes, I scored 51 on 9 lol. My next highest numbers were 2 (27), 4 (25), 5 (25). For a complete picture, 1=11; 3=4; 6=17; 7=11; 8=0.
:shrug:

Of all the fears and motivations, the only ones that really fit are 5 (not secretive), 6 (not suspicious), and 9 (not the fear though) (Type Descriptions — The Enneagram Institute )

So, like I said: all kinds of confusing rofl
 

Amberiat

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I'm a bit curious about something. I've been told that enneagram is about motivation more than traits. So what if your traits go against your type, but not your motivations? On here I got typed as 7, although some people said 9. But I don't really relate to being spotaneous, very extroverted, optimistic, and bubbly. It could easily be a stereotype, but still. I definitely can be goofy and playful, but I'm also quiet, introspective, compromising and mellow like a 9. I just like variety, learning lots, experience and exploring the unique like a 7. I care a lot about peace too though.

Any insights I guess?

It's entirely about motivations.

No matter what you do there's always an underlying motive behind it, sometimes obvious and other times not so obvious. And that is what really matters, deciding your enneagram based on traits/behaviors is a mistake, you have to look at the why instead of the what.

Sometimes behaviors and motives can contradict one another, for example two people can do the same thing but for entirely different reasons, which is why you look at the motivation behind actions instead of actions themselves.

Imagine, two people donate to charity, one does it because they want to help the cause, the other does it because they want to project the image of caring about the cause in order to be viewed favorably by other people. Two identical actions, extremely different motivations behind them.
 

Brains

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It's entirely about motivations. No matter what you do there's always an underlying motive behind it, sometimes obvious and other times not so obvious. And that is what really matters, deciding your enneagram based on traits/behaviors is a mistake, you have to look at the why instead of the what. Sometimes behaviors and motives can contradict one another, for example two people can do the same thing but for entirely different reasons, which is why you look at the motivation behind actions instead of actions themselves. Imagine, two people donate to charity, one does it because they want to help the cause, the other does it because they want to project the image of caring about the cause in order to be viewed favorably by other people. Two identical actions, extremely different motivations behind them.
I disagree. It's true that some behaviors are poor indicators of type and that we should look into the why and not just the what, but that doesn't mean that motivations are the right place to look into - if anything, the facts say otherwise. The motivations don't create the personality, the personality tends to result in the kinds of outlooks that get assigned to Enneagram types. And even tgen, any particular pile of exemplars is more alike in character rather than motivation, and two people can have the same motivation for something yet be very different in character. (see page 3 for a longer, more detailed explanation)
 

Coriolis

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I disagree. It's true that some behaviors are poor indicators of type and that we should look into the why and not just the what, but that doesn't mean that motivations are the right place to look into - if anything, the facts say otherwise. The motivations don't create the personality, the personality tends to result in the kinds of outlooks that get assigned to Enneagram types. And even tgen, any particular pile of exemplars is more alike in character rather than motivation, and two people can have the same motivation for something yet be very different in character. (see page 3 for a longer, more detailed explanation)
Motivations indeed do not create personality, but they make better indicators of it than behaviors, and not just motivations. One's internal thought processes, priorities, values, and even world view are more telling than, say, whether one shows respect to authorities, is constantly late for meetings, or enjoys playing sports with friends.
 

Brains

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Motivations indeed do not create personality, but they make better indicators of it than behaviors, and not just motivations. One's internal thought processes, priorities, values, and even world view are more telling than, say, whether one shows respect to authorities, is constantly late for meetings, or enjoys playing sports with friends.
Whether behavior is a good indicator or not really depends on what behavior you're looking at: Traits (persistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving) are great, situational adaptations typically are not. Donating to charity isn't a terribly good indicator, but general politeness and being late for meetings are excellent ones. They aren't enough alone but are very, very good typing material since they're persistent reflections of the person's character at the trait level. How trait-level personality easily explains Enneagram styles.
 

Obfuscate

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motivations are important, but fears are more telling... the traits are (sometimes useful) stereotypes, and shouldn't be taken any more seriously than other stereotypes...
 

Coriolis

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Whether behavior is a good indicator or not really depends on what behavior you're looking at: Traits (persistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving) are great, situational adaptations typically are not. Donating to charity isn't a terribly good indicator, but general politeness and being late for meetings are excellent ones. They aren't enough alone but are very, very good typing material since they're persistent reflections of the person's character at the trait level. How trait-level personality easily explains Enneagram styles.
I can easily think of reasons why either behavior can relate to almost any type. Same with the reverse of being rude, and being punctual. Now tell me why the person is polite/rude, or punctual/tardy, and I can come much closer to the mark.
 
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