[DAWN GABRIEL]
Faith Fringes is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith in Practice, Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic or Impact Driven Leader, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network.

Hi, I’m Dawn Gabriel, host of Faith Fringes Podcast, recording live from Castle Rock Colorado, not only where I love to live, but I also work as the owner of a counseling center in the historic downtown. This podcast is a place to explore more than the traditional norms of the Christian culture. For those desiring deeper connection with God and engaging their spirituality in new ways, this will be a safe place to allow doubt, questions and curiosity, without judgment. We will be creating intentional space to listen in on other’s faith journeys, whether that is deconstruction or reconstruction, with the hope of traveling alongside you on your own spiritual path. If you’re interested in getting even more out of this podcast, grab my free email course Spiritual Reflections on my websitefaithfringes.com. Welcome to the podcast.

Hello. So I just wanted to jump in here real quick and let you know that this recording had a little bit of sound tech issues, and that was based on, it was one of my first interviews and I did not know what I was doing with the tech. So we recorded a great interview and what happened was I realized halfway through something was wrong with one of our mics and our headphones and so we switched it up. So the first part of what you’re going to hear with James Owens and the intro to the Enneagram is you’re going to hear a little bit of tech issues. So if you can bear with it, I still think there are some awesome, valuable lessons and things to learn about the Enneagram.

He goes all the way up from type one and two and also the intro and so then we cut it off around type two, and then we pick it back up again from types three through nine on the second one, and that tech will be a lot better. So if you can bear with us and listen to the first episode, I still think you’re going to get a lot of part one and I still think there’s some nuggets that you really want to hear. I’m just giving you a heads up and a warning that there might be some disturbing stuff that you hear tech-wise. My sound engineer was amazing, he reduced a lot of it actually, but there’s still some points where you might cringe a little bit. So just give you a heads up. After this, I figured it out and I am able to do better tech, but this was one of my first interviews. Even though it’s airing later, just to let you guys know in the spirit of authenticity. Listen in as we hear more about the Enneagram and how it’s a great tool for us growing spiritually. Thanks so much.
[DAWN]
Welcome to Faith Fringes podcast. Thanks so much for being here today. Today I’m so excited. We are going to be diving in to something that will help you develop your spiritual journey and maybe discover more about your faith. If you’ve ever taken a personality test or really tried to figure out more and becoming self-aware, you probably have heard of personality tests like the Myers-Brigg or the DiSC and stuff like that. But in reality, the one that has really helped me the most is called the Enneagram. I’m not sure if you guys have heard of that, it’s kind of newer to us in the last 20 years, I would say, but it’s actually been around for a long time. And I’m so excited to have a guest who is an expert in the Enneagram.

I have with me today, James Owens and James is an Enneagram teacher, a United Methodist minister, and a self-described Bible and theology nerd. He earned a master’s degree from Denver Seminary and Duke Divinity School, where he studied the Bible, theology and church history extensively. He currently serves on the staff of Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church in Savannah, Georgia for the last several years, James has devoted himself to the study and practice of the Enneagram, a life-changing personality assessment tool, which he uses in his personal spiritual formation and helping teams work together. James lives in Savannah, Georgia with his wife, Whitney, who is a mental health counselor, counseling practice owner and consultant, and their two daughters, Anna and Abby. Thanks so much for joining us, James. Welcome.
[JAMES P. OWENS]
Thank you. I’m so glad to be here and excited to talk about the Enneagram with you.
[DAWN]
Yes. So yes, James, maybe some people have never heard of the Enneagram, but I’d like to, before we jump into that, I’d like to hear, like, why is the Enneagram so important to you and why do you like it so much?
[JAMES]
That’s an awesome first question. So the Enneagram has been, before I ever started thinking about wanting to work with other people with Enneagram, it was really important to me personally. So I went to a school called Denver Seminary for my M.​Div, it’s a master of divinity, just kind of a standard degree that you get when you’re wanting to go into ministry in a church type of setting. So I went there for my M.​Div and while I was in school, I worked at the library. And so I would see all of the different books that people were checking out especially the books that professors would put on reserve to keep behind the counter there at the library and one that kept popping up again and again, was Richard Rohr book on the Enneagram. I believe it’s called The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective or something like that by Richard Rohr, but I’m sure a lot of your audience are pretty familiar with.

So that was the first time I’d ever heard of the Enneagram. I would see this book, I guess a professor must’ve assigned a reading for a particular class for it. I never had it assigned for any classes I was in. So I just kind of thought, “Okay, that’s interesting, the Enneagram. I wonder what that is all about. And then a little bit later on, as I was finishing up my degree there at Denver Seminary, I actually went through a really challenging time with a particular local church that I was involved with. I was pursuing ministry, pursuing ordained ministry at the time with this church and just kind of talking with people there about the process about what it would look like for me to become a minister in their tradition and at the end of it, these folks at this church just kind of told me, “You know, we don’t really think you are, we don’t really think you work it out for this. We don’t think you have the personality for ministry.”

They said, “You’re too quiet. You’re too reserved. You’re too intellectual. We want something different in our ministers.” And I remember my wife Whitney was meeting with a mentor of hers and told her all this, told the mentor, all this and the mentor said, “Oh,” especially hearing this stuff about my personality, she said, “Oh, is he a five on the Enneagram?” And we were like, “We have no idea.”
[DAWN]
What is that?
[JAMES]
Yes, “What is a five? What does that even mean?” And so in response to that, I actually started looking into the it. So maybe I am a five on the Enneagram, who knows? As it turns out, I am a five on the Enneagram, which is a type known for being kind of observant, intellectual, wanting to investigate things ,sometimes called the observer or investigator. The type is more inclined to thinking, wants to think before they act, and looks like a little bit reserved. So I looked into that a little bit and kind of made that discovery and I thought, “Okay, that’s interesting. That helps me understand myself a little better.” And fortunately I wasn’t too deterred by these folks and ended up getting on staff at a different church and moved down here to Savannah to join the staff with Wesley Monumental.

And as I was beginning my ministry here, I thought, “You know what, maybe this Enneagram thing can help me grow even more, can help me get even better.” So I began to read and study up on the Enneagram and just found it to be so helpful for me in my personal development, both just as an individual, but also as someone working on the staff of the church. And the Enneagram has been so helpful for me and understanding myself, what I’m good at, what I’m not good at, but how I can grow to not only to maximize my strengths and minimize my weaknesses, but to uncover new strengths, to really let down the defenses that I’ve built up over the years and allow God’s spirit to flow through me in new and different ways.
[DAWN]
Wow. So yes, with the Enneagram, I’m wondering, like, I’m sure you’ve taken other personality tests, especially with your wife being a counselor. I’m sure she probably practiced some of her test on you as she’s going through grad school, but why do you think the Enneagram was so life-changing for you and for others that you’ve seen? What about it makes it different?
[JAMES]
Yes, I think one of the things that makes the Enneagram so special is that it really gets at what’s going on inside of you. It really gets that kind of your internal workings, more so than just external behavior. So you take something like the Myers-Briggs or the DiSC, I was given the DiSC in a job interview once a long time ago, we did stuff with the Myers-Briggs and a ministry I was involved with years ago, and those can certainly be helpful in different ways. By and large, those kind of deal with behavior. They deal with how we act in different situations and they’re also static. “Here’s your Myers-Briggs four letters, you know, IMTJ. Here’s some things you might be good at, here’s some things you might not be good at. Good luck.”

Whereas the Enneagram, not only does it get at what’s going on inside of you, it’s more about your internal motivations. What are your fears? What are your desires? What motivates you? What’s going on inside of you that makes you act the way you do? But also the Enneagram gives us a dynamic path to grow it. Doesn’t just say, “Here’s what you are. You’re a five, you’re a two, you’re a three. Here’s some things you might be good at. Good luck.” No, the Enneagram actually gives us a path to growth and says, “Well, this is the personality you’ve built up over the years, but here’s how you can access the best of all the personality types. Here’s how you can grow to not only minimize your weaknesses and maximize your strengths, but really uncover new strengths that you didn’t know you had to really let down those defenses and access the things that you were born to have, as we would say, in Christian lanes, you were created by God to have.”
[DAWN]
Wow. I love that. I love that you differentiated between like external behaviors and internal motivation, because as I’ve worked with the Enneagram myself, I’ve studied it probably for two years on a personal level and I could not figure out at first, what number was. It took me a long time and I was kind of like, “Whoa, I thought I was self-aware. Why can’t I figure this out?” But it sounds like what you just said, that it’s a little bit more organic than some of the other personality tests, like the colors. Are you a red, are you a blue or are you, the animal test, are you a lion or a golden retriever? And so those kind of put you in a box per se, but it sounds like the Enneagram is more, it moves around, like you can really hone in and work on a trait or maybe we need to jump into it more, but it does sound like it’s a lot more moveable and organic and helps you understand some internal workings.
[JAMES]
Yes, absolutely. And so one of the things that’s really cool about the Enneagram is that it’s dynamic. We do identify with one type and I believe that if folks will really do the work, they can identify with one dominant personality type, but there is so much more than just that one type. Of course there’s levels of functioning, there’s ways you do better or worse based on how you’re doing. There’s also wings, which kind of gives some dynamism to it. Those are the adjacent numbers that are next to you, sort of your next door neighbors on the Enneagram if you’re looking at the circle. And then of course, there’s all those lines going through the middle of the Enneagram, which are directions of stress and security, which show us how we might behave when we’re in insecure situations or when we’re in particularly stressful situations.

So for each type, yes, there’s a lot of different things going on. There’s a lot that it can teach us about human behavior and all of the varied ways that we behave and think and feel, all of the contradictions that we have as human beings and all of the things that change about us given the situations that we’re in.
[DAWN]
Wow. Yes, I remember when I first saw it, actually I think Whitney was the first one to say, “Hey, have you ever taken the Enneagram?” You guys were visiting Colorado from Georgia and she said, “My husband’s really getting into this and I’ve taken the test and we love it. We use it with our teams.” I went home that day actually after eating lunch with her and took it and I just remember looking up and I was overwhelmed with all the lines and the wings. So yes, maybe you could help us understand, like, give us an overview if you can of like, what do you mean by numbers? What do you mean by wings? Like just wherever you think would be helpful to give a start jumping into the overview of how to look at the Enneagram and figure this out.
[JAMES]
Yes. Awesome. I think that’s perfect. So the Enneagram is something that talks about our personality types. The basic idea behind the Enneagram is that there are nine basic personality types. And I’m sure anyone that’s listening to this can go and Google. I’ll assemble of it real quick. It’s a figure with nine, it’s a nine-pointed figure and it’s usually placed inside a circle and around the outside of that circle are nine numbers, one through nine. One is not better than nine and nine is not better than one. It’s not a grade. They’re just numbers given to each personality type, nine basic personality types, nine basic ways of being, moving and thinking, feeling in the world.

Personality types I like to say are kind of like a statue that you build of yourself. You start building it when you’re very young. Throughout your childhood, you’re sort of building this personality. It’s kind of like a statue of yourself and so by the time you reach say about your mid twenties or so maybe a little bit later for some people, maybe a little bit earlier for others, it’s more or less built. You’ve built this statue of yourself and when people want to know who you are, you point to the statue and you say, “Well, this is who I am. This is what I look like.” That’s kind of what our personality is. It’s what we show people that we are. We show the world that we are these personalities that we’ve built up over the years. And of course, that’s not bad. You have to have a personality. Everyone does this.

But the thing is, to go back to the statue analogy, it’s not really you. Your personality is not your true self or at least it’s not all of it. I think it shows aspects of your true self, but it’s not everything you were meant to be. It’s not everything we’ve been saying, Christian language, you were created to be. So I think when we build our personalities, we tend to emphasize one aspect over another. You know, we all have the capacity, I believe to be say morally good, or to be loving, to be effective, creative, wise, faithful, joyful, powerful, peaceful. You know, these are the things that we were all created with in the image of God. You’ll notice I listed nine characteristics. We all have the capacity to be all of them, but we tend to latch onto one more than all of the others.

And in the Enneagram teaching, it says that we really try to be like one of those things more than all of the rest as we build our personalities. One person might say, “I want to be good. I want to be morally good, righteous, perfect.” So they build up their personality, their statue around that one idea. And that’s what they show the world. They might be afraid of being seen as wrong or corrupt or imperfect. They want to be seen as good. You know, maybe another person might say, “I want to be seen as loving. I want to be seen as helpful, compassionate.” And so they build up their personality based on that. Another might say, “I want to be successful.” Another might say, “I want to be unique and creative.” And so on and so forth. And there’s one of those for each of the nine Enneagram types.

So it’s kind of like throughout our early lives, we build up this personality and it’s good. It helps us get through the world, but as we get older, it might start to hinder us. It might be too much into one thing and not all the rest. And so I like to explain the Enneagram this way, because it shows us from the outset that your personality type is good, but it’s not the whole of who you are. So the goal of the Enneagram is not to just figure out your type and “Oh yes. Okay, there’s my type. I figured it out. I’m good now.” The goal is to access the best things of all the types, those nine characteristics goodness, love, effectiveness, creativity, wisdom, faithfulness, joy, power, peace, all of those really good things about each type. We can access those.
[DAWN]
So when you’re saying you can access those, but would you say, then you’re still, like when things are just maybe even keel in your life or maybe even stressful, you’re going to kind of lean one way still, but the goal is to grow in order to access? I guess what I’m trying to say is, do you change types ever? Do you switch numbers or what have you seen with that?
[JAMES]
Yes, that’s a good question. I think different teachers might say different things about this, but conventional wisdom on the Enneagram seems to be that you do have one dominant type and that it does not change. And I think the reason for this is because, like I said, is your dominant personality type is something you spend many years developing. I can see even for myself that I spent many years as a child developing this type five personality and maybe I tried on different personality types at other times, but that was where I kind of kept coming back to. And so now that I’m an adult I might behave at times very much like a five. I might integrate to age or disintegrate to seven. We can explain what that means in a minute. You know, I might look to my four wing or my six wing, but I’m still a type five because I’m not going to go through that process of growing up again and develop a whole another personality type. So I think as we grow we stay, our dominant personality type remains the same, but yes, the goal is not to just be the best five or three or nine or whatever you can be. The goal is to access the best of all of these types.
[DAWN]
Yes, that’s such a good point, because I think, it reminds me of when I’m sitting with a client and working on they usually come in because they want to have something better, something go better in their life. And when they come in and we kind of dig in and after a while, we discover some things, the way things that as you grow up, you said, you’re developing your personality. And the way we grow up, sometimes especially if there’s trauma or not even just trauma, like we all have life happen or dysfunction in life at times. The way we react to that is super important, how we react to our experiences and what once might have been helpful and survival can turn into a cage later. And so it’s learning to like dig in deep within yourself to understand like what it is that needs to change, but also what is still there that is true. And so it kind of, that’s what it reminded me of when you were talking about, you’re still always going to be your type, but it’s learning to integrate some of these other values that the other numbers are bringing in. That’s just what was going through my head when you were talking.
[JAMES]
Yes. I think that’s really insightful that all of these personality types, all of the nine types of the Enneagram have things that are awesome and wonderful about them. They’ll have things that are less awesome and not as wonderful about them. And so just like you said a second ago the things that helped us in our younger years might become like cages as we get older. So if we continue just trying to do the same thing over and over again that we grew up doing well, it might work in some ways, but probably it’s going to hinder us and others. So when we start to let down some of those defenses, then I think we can really, really grow. We can kind of see why we built up things the way we did, and also, okay, well, maybe I need to let down some of those defenses a little bit and really engage with things in a different way.
[DAWN]
Yes. Actually, I had a really good friend who actually also works with me. He had studied the Enneagram a lot and he said something that was super powerful and it actually helped me figure out my number. He said, when he dives into the Enneagram and reads more of how the, I forget how you called it, I don’t know if you said the negative side, but the darker motivations that it hits so close to home for him that he like would kind of go into a depression on how accurate, like it’s almost, “Are they seeing inside my soul? Like no one else sees this dark motivation here.” And I was like, “Really? It’s that intense?” So as I started reading more, and by the way, I’m a three, as I started reading more about it, you kind of almost reject your number based on the negative at first is what I’ve heard. And that’s what happened with me. I’m like, “No way.” And then I read it more. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s totally true and I don’t like it at all.” It’s like a vulnerable unmasking.
[JAMES]
I think so. And I think that’s why Enneagram teaching can be so powerful, is that it does show us the things about ourselves sometimes that we try to hide. And I can certainly feel the same way about some of the things related to type five. I have a, fives are often seen as being kind of aloof and cold and not personable. And so, I worked very hard to be seen as warm and personable. So it’s really hard for me when I feel like I’m not being perceived in that way.
[DAWN]
Sure. Yes. So let’s, maybe if you could give an overview like of the nine types, however, it feels comfortable for you. So listeners can say, “Oh, maybe that’s me. I can do more research on that number.” So I don’t know how you start, if you start at one or start at nine, however you want to do it, maybe would that be helpful giving an overview?
[JAMES]
Yes, absolutely. And we can just start at type one. Of course, there’s a lot. You can start anywhere on the circle that. Like I said, the numbers are not necessarily important. It’s just an easy way for people to catalog the types, but starting on a type one and if you’re kind of imagining the figure of the Enneagram or you’ve seen it before, probably it’s a figure with nine points inside of the circle. And so at the very top of the circle is type nine.

So we go just a little bit clockwise over to type one, which is called the reformer or the perfectionist. This is the type that says, “I am good. I am morally good. I am righteous. I am sometimes perfect.” That’s what they want to show the world of themselves. Type ones are characterized by the presence of something that’s called the inner critic by a lot of Enneagram teachers. I think this is all real kind of give away. If you’re a type one and you have this really strong, inner, critical voice, maybe it sounds like your mother. You know, always telling you like, this could’ve been better. The Christians aren’t straight on the south or you know whatever it is. Ones desire to be morally good, to be right and so however they were raised, whatever they just define as good, that’s what they’re going to go towards because their basic fear is being corrupt or wrong.

There are obviously lots of great things about type ones. My wife is a type one, Whitney is. Ones are ethical, hardworking, and have great principles, that you can count on them to do the right thing. They can inspire us by their example. I’m a huge comic book fan, huge fan of Marvel movies. So captain America, Steve Rogers is a great, to me, example of a type one. Even if it’s Me Against the World by Dolly, I’m going to do the right thing. And so that kind of, in that kind of a way ones can —

So the sort of the shadow side like you mentioned the things that we might not want to hear for type ones, well, perfectionism, because nothing is ever fully perfect. Sometimes when they’re less healthy, ones can have unrealistic expectations of themselves and others. They can take that desire to be morally perfect and put it on to others in an unhealthy way.

Each type also in addition to these basic desires and basic fears also has like a deadly sin, some people call it or a pitfall that they’re particularly inclined towards. And so for type ones, their deadly sin, or some people call it a passion is anger. And that’s an interesting one because all of these deadly sins are passions. They’re probably things that the person would originally say, “Oh you know I don’t really have a problem with that.” And most ones would probably say, “Yes I don’t really have a problem with anger. I’m not an angry person.” And that’s because they’ve been taught that anger is bad, it’s negative, and so they don’t want to have it. So for each one of these, you have to kind of turn it on its head a little bit to see how it works.

So for type ones, their anger is often internalized. They often turn that in on themselves and just continue to have these kinds of incredibly high expectations of themselves when they don’t feel it, they can be angry with themselves. Well, the other way that it comes out for type one is that it doesn’t come out as like boiling over anger. It’s this kind of smoldering, resentment. You know, “Oh my gosh, everyone else in the world is having fun and here I’m having to scrub the floors because they’re dirty or I’m having to make everything right or be the responsible one when everyone else is out having fun. I really wish I could do that.”
[DAWN]
Wow. Okay, so I’m learning to recognize that this, like you said, turn it upside down and look at it a different way. I like hearing that to kind of understand, “Oh yes, I do struggle with this. It just looks different.”
[JAMES]
That’s right. And so each of the deadly sins or passions for the Enneagram types can be really helpful for us as we try to grow. So for type ones, it’s kind of getting in touch with that anger and saying, “Okay, well I’ve tried to kind of deny this or I’ve tried to just say I’m a good person. I don’t have anger.” So getting in touch with that and realizing where it’s coming from can be important step on the path to growth.
[DAWN]
Cool. So what about two?
[JAMES]
Yes. So type two continuing clockwise around the circle is called the helper or the giver, sometimes. These are basically people whose desire is to be loved. They want to be loved in life. And so generally speaking, somewhere along the way in their childhood type twos got this message that the way to be loved is to be loving towards others. The way to be loved is to help others, to be kind, to do for others constantly. And so type twos are kind of working out of this desire to be loved in this fear of being unloved or alone. So to accomplish these goals and avoid this fear, they put others’ needs before their own, they build community, are kind compassionate, servant hearted, really, one of the terms that Richard Rohr uses for type two is the need to be needed.

So I’m going to be loved by loving. I’m going to be needed, going to be the indispensable person. And that’s very good. That works for a lot of type twos in in great ways. You know, they are empathetic towards others, they sense what others need, what other’s needs are. Type twos are great at meeting the needs of other people. They tend to know what folks want or need before they even do themselves. A type two is the sort of person that will drop whatever they’re doing and help you. The deadly sin for twos as the passion is pride. So again, you might kind of at first think, “Oh, well, that’s not right.” Type twos spend so much of their time to giving and doing for others. How could they be prideful? Well, when you give and do for others in order to have those people say, “Oh my gosh, you’re so needed. You’re so loving. You’re so compassionate. You’re so great.” When you give in order to get, that’s kind of pride coming in there, right? Twos want to be indispensable. So that’s kind of the shadow side there for type twos.
[DAWN]
You know, it’s funny because when I said earlier, I was trying to decide what number I was, I kept thinking I was a two at first, but the more I dove into it and realized and learned better boundaries in my life, I realized like sometimes growing up in the conservative Christian culture you’re like raised to be a two. Especially as a woman or a female, like you’re supposed to be giving and you’re supposed to be selfless. And so I had to realize as I, like I said, as I looked back at my life and as I discovered boundaries, I realized actually I’m not a two, but some of that was like trained into me. And I do think my wing is a two, I’m a three wing too, but it was hard to figure out like, is this really, what’s my motivation and what’s my shadow side?

Thank you for listening today at Faith Fringes Podcast. If you want to explore more of your own faith journey, I offer my free eight-week email course called Spiritual Reflections, where you take a deeper dive into your own story included as a journaling workbook that has guided exercises. So if you want to explore more of what you were brought up to believe, or even look at where you may have been disillusioned or hurt, but yet still deep down you desire to authentically connect with God, then this course is for you. Just go to faithfringes.com to sign up.

Also, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email and tell me what’s on your mind. You can reach me at dawn@faithfringes.com.

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