When type comes alive
Why the Levels change how we understand everything else in the Enneagram
While we’re talking about ‘nine different personality types’, we’re also aware that this number is a bit of a optical illusion. Because there are all kinds of features that change how our Enneagram type comes across, such as instinctual preferences and when certain features — passions, arrow points, object relations affects and patterns, fixations, centre scrambling and compartmentalisation — show up. And the single important teaching to understand these interweaving features is one that we often simply call the Levels. (Going forward I’ll write ‘the Levels’ to refer to the teaching as a whole and ‘(the) level/s’ when referring to, well, the actual levels.)
The Levels of Balance (a k a the Levels of Development) are, in my view, a real game-changer in the Enneagram world. They provide a vertical map of type, and in doing so give us somewhere to place all those other features. Instead of treating the characteristics and groupings mentioned above as a collection of more or less independent type attributes, the Levels can begin to show us how they relate to the underlying movement of type itself. And that’s where things start to clarify conceptually.
It’s a bit like taking the flat, two-dimensional image of the collection of types and suddenly discovering that it has depth. The Enneagram becomes a richer, layered, three-dimensional version of itself. All of a sudden, the types start looking like people rather than caricatures. If life were a picture film, this would be the point at which the Enneagram poster with its type names and keyword descriptions jumped off the wall and turned into a moving, talking entity. Until this happens (at least figuratively 😉), the Enneagram of personality can remain a fun and surprisingly insightful party trick: a cool, slightly ‘under your skin’ personality typology that nevertheless starts to fall apart rather quickly if the person encountering it doesn’t happen to sit somewhere near the particular level-span represented by the description.
And this is an important point: any description of a type that doesn’t explicitly include the Levels is nevertheless describing the type at particular levels, whether the person administering them is aware of this fact or not. It just doesn’t tell you that it’s doing so. At best, the descriptions hover around a similar range for all nine types. If most of them are describing something around the average levels, that’s at least reasonably consistent. At worst, though, the level-span varies considerably between types. We can end up with, say, a Seven description including traits and behaviours well into the lower levels, while a One is described almost exclusively around the upper-average range. The resulting picture isn’t simply incomplete but actively distorts our understanding of the types.
Of course, many books and sets of type descriptions include ‘at their best’ and ‘at their worst’ sections. That’s certainly a step up. But these sections are usually there to illustrate the scope of the type: here’s what this person might look like when they’re doing very well, and here’s what they might look like when they’re doing very badly. What they generally don’t share in the process, though, is where on the vertical map these changes occur, or — more importantly — which of the other features included in the descriptions are likely to become activated alongside them.
One might argue that this is simply more detail than the general population is interested in, which is a fair point — but when descriptions already include features that do vary with the levels, omitting this part of the teaching muddies the waters in an unhelpful way. In my experience and opinion, almost any type feature becomes considerably more interesting — and considerably more relevant and precise — when viewed against this vertical landscape.
How we juggle the centres
Take centre scrambling, for instance, which I’ve touched upon in previous essays, with The Centre Shuffle going into the greatest detail. (I’m realising as I’m referring to it that this essay will have gone into the archive now, which means that unless you’re a paying subscriber, you can’t access it. But since it’s a thorough chew-through of the dynamics of centre scrambling, I got an idea — stay tuned, or scroll to the end of this post.)
This teaching is actually particularly interesting, as it connects to so many of the other changing-along-with-the-level type features. But even just in itself, it reveals things about each type which explain and clear up a lot of potential confusion. To show how the understanding of both the Levels and centre scrambling is relevant to our understanding of type, let’s take an example.
Suppose we’re trying to understand someone in whom point Four provides the dominant energy — but we don’t yet know that Four is their type. We might read the description of Four and see the emphasis on heart, image and emotional reactivity. And while we recognise some of this in the person in front of us, we also notice a puzzling lot of mind: defending, arguing, questioning, analysing. This combo might have us conclude we’re dealing with a Six. However, if their core type is really Four, the mental activity we’re witnessing isn’t coming from the core. Rather, the head centre has been enrolled to support the Four’s self-image and worldview. This is characteristic of the average levels at point Four, but it’s something that tends to be much harder to understand when the Levels aren’t part of the picture. Because the average Levels are where most people spend much of their time, most Fours we encounter will show some degree of this ‘head-centre feel’. Exactly how it manifests will depend on other features — instinctual preferences, for instance, as well as circumstances, capacities and the role the person is currently occupying.
We don’t have to look far to find another example, either — we can just reverse the issue. Particularly in Sixes that lead with the sx instinct, we can encounter a striking emotional ‘realness’, impulsiveness and a propensity to act on their feelings. These things might all have us think, Hrm — Four, perhaps?
In the Six, as a primary type, the scrambling of the centres presents slightly differently. The other two centres scramble, which, in the Six, creates a kind of separate state of ‘feeling~doing’, kept slightly apart from the state where the Six is into the home-base centre of thinking. In the Riso-Hudson teaching, where the scrambling of the centres was first introduced, the state produced when doing and feeling scramble while thinking gets cut off from the mix is called duty mode. Presented as such, it doesn’t sound very Fourish of course, but the result can still produce a Fourish-looking vibe to the casual observer (and, frequently, to the Sixes in question, depending on the depth of their understanding of both the Enneagram and themselves).
And this is precisely where the Levels begin to earn their keep. They don’t merely tell us what a Four is or what a Six is; they help us understand why a Four can sometimes look like a Six, why a Six can sometimes look like a Four, and what is actually happening underneath the apparent similarity. That’s a very different kind of understanding — and this is only one example.
Once we start from the map provided by the Levels, we can also see how features such as the so-called ‘suppressed centre’ tie into the area of object relations, how different features weave themselves into type at different level-spans, and why some expressions that seem contradictory at first actually make perfect sense once we know where on the vertical axis we’re exploring. Almost any feature we decide to zoom in on becomes richer when we place it in relation to this three-dimensional landscape.
Over the months ahead, I’m planning a series of masterclasses that will zoom in on some of these features and look at them, sometimes in relation to one another but always through the lens of the Levels, rather than as isolated pieces of Enneagram information. Once you have the vertical map, the nine-pointed diagram starts to look rather different — and, frankly, considerably more alive.
If this is an idea that appeals to you — standalone, interactive workshops with lots of space for exploration and questions, spanning ~2 hours or just a bit longer — you might get in touch with me and have a say in which topic/s feel the most compelling, worthwhile, or of particular interest to you.
If you don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription …
… but still want to read complementary reflections on the centres and centre scrambling, I wanted to make this possible. I put together an essay bundle featuring of 5 essays previously published here, focusing specifically on the centres and these dynamics. The bundle is a 43 page PDF (A4 format), and you can download it for €5.
The button below will take you to the bundle on The Enneagram Way’s web store, where can also view the complete table of contents.
And, of course, if you want a little dive into the teaching of the Levels as such, you might also be interested in the PDF Climbing the Levels booklet! 😉❤️
As always, feel free to contact me through theenneagramway.com or a DM here on Substack, or schedule a free chemistry Zoom session if you have questions or want to explore different formats of exploring together.