Rage Against the Personality Tool: On the Limits of Self-Growth Tools Like Enneagram
Rachel Virginia Hester
Rage against the personality tool.
When I originally wrote that line, they were the title of a poem. A long, messy and cheesy, but frustrated poem.
I want an easy way to explain why
I want to spill my guts
and gather them all at the same time
Maybe, leave each of my friends with
little pieces of my intestines
like a nice souvenir,
so they know the feeling’s real
I’ve used tools such Myer-Briggs, astrology and the Enneagram over the past couple of years to try to understand myself and why I am the way I am: the shyness, the bursts of unforeseen energy, the constant need to self-protect, my impatience with small-talk, and my love of love (both love with a lowercase and uppercase). The first time I was introduced to the Enneagram, I was 20 years old working on a farm. All of my teammates at the farm were raving about it, eagerly learning and discussing their types. The online test that I took described me as a Type Four, but not only was I assigned a Four, the particular test I took described me as an unhealthy Four. I responded by bursting into tears. The label of “unhealthy” slapped me in the face. I didn’t want to be reminded that I wasn’t well, especially after being sent home from a service year program because they couldn’t provide the mental health support that I needed, despite their best attempts.
Fast forward a few years, I visit a friend in Albany and I’m invited to spectate an Enneagram workshop. I’m curious about my type, but during the process of reassessing my type, I spiral into another fit of tears, bawling in my friends car over how tired I feel of being reminded of how I’m not at my best.
For the record, I live with anxiety and depression. And, I have a history of panic attacks and suicidal ideations. I have probably had depression for a lot longer than I remember, since much of my teenage life, but I was in denial over my depression. I told myself that I couldn’t possibility be depressed because I was loved by God and that love was a genuine source of hope for me. I saw myself as a music-loving ball of sunshine, the embodiment of blue skies– I was so in love with Jesus– guidance counselors and high school librarians suggesting I was depressed would have me laugh in their face! But, I know now that depression has been my reality, and anxiety plagues my body. I don’t know how severe, only that it controls my life in a way that I wish it did not. I didn’t know that I had generalized anxiety until being diagnosed with it in recent years.
Since learning about these diagnosis, I’ve been curious about the story behind my mental illnesses. As I’ve stated before, I’ve been told for most of my life that these could just be innate chemical imbalances in my brain — a notion that I have resisted because of the ways I have felt it as a dismissal of my personal history.
Admittedly, I am also a struggling perfectionist… I think my perfectionism might be a trauma thing. Like my anxiety, my perfectionism gets in the way of me living my life. That is the part that makes it difficult for me to trust self-growth tools like the Enneagram and how it is currently being taught. As a Four, it is suggested that we look at the positive characteristics of Type Ones for self-growth and integration, to help us with the unhealthy qualities of Type Four. But so much of the current trend and culture of the Enneagram describes Ones as “perfectionists” — something that I am trying to heal from. And so much of this culture also describes Fours as being moody and depressive without necessarily looking into WHY that may be.
There’s so many ways that I don’t resonate with the reductionistic interpretations of the Four Type. For instance: “Fours want to be special, different, to be like no one else. They insist upon telling themselves they are the only one who experiences what they experience.”
But what if you have grown up with a sense that there isn’t anyone around you that you can see yourself in? No one who mirrors you back at yourself? What if it is only in recent years that you’ve started to see yourself reflected a little more in media, at national gatherings, in books, etc? I know so many self-identified Fours who live in between social groups, who don’t fit well into gender binaries or racial assumptions or occupy spaces of social marginalization… they don’t see themselves represented well. I don’t know if it is fair to paint with a wide brush that these Fours necessarily revel and delight in being misunderstood. Rather, speaking for myself, I would say it is my normal or my comfortable place. The land of “Misunderstood” feels more like a shitty ditch I’m used to being in, as opposed to a place I want to make into my home.
I suppose that my logic for having been so invested in growth and personality tools is the hope that if I can understand myself and what I need to grow, perhaps I can find some direction towards healing from the things that may exacerbate my mental illness. With personal tools like the Enneagram, I wonder how much of my suffering is my own doing? How responsible am I for my constant sense of fear — or the mental health struggles that make it difficult for me to feel like I can pursue the life and love that I want to have?
Maybe the way I come to approach these tools are misguided. But, isn’t that why so many of us approach these tools anyway? That they might help us understand ourselves a little more? That we might make sense of the role that we play in the social problems that keep us up at night?
But, I don’t think that incorporating a little bit more structure into my life is gonna be enough. I don’t know.
Our world today is cruel and tiring because of the large and constant presence of violent forces like capitalism and white supremacy. The values of white supremacy and capitalism are constantly imposed on me: homophobia and queer erasure in my daily interactions and on TV screens; rampant anti-blackness in my government, the Church, schools I’ve attended; rape culture in the dating world. A lot of us are lacking resources and access to that which could heal us because of these forces. Even then, our attempts to heal ourselves may get thwarted by the relentless evils that surround those of us marginalized by race, gender, class, ability, you name it. I may heal myself, but then, if the rest of the world isn’t healing with me, I’m at risk of being re-traumatized. My own attempts at self-growth and self-responsibility isn’t enough. My environment is toxic so often. We are trying to make small oases of peace, rest and pleasure despite.
I rage against these personality tools and tests, but maybe I rage more because of the ways they they are taught and presented as life-changing. So many of these tools don’t account for the world we live in, a world filled with normalized systematic and cultural injustices. A personality tool may tell me that I am self-absorbed with no context. But after years of having to deny my own personhood and individuality in my formative years- in the name of representing la raza, in the name of making white supremacy and white people comfortable, in the name of protecting myself from my the violence of my parents– why would I not be a little bit self-concerned or self-absorbed, as the Enneagram suggests Fours are? A personality tool may suggest that what I need to heal from my personal delusions may be a little more structure and distraction in my life, but what if some of the inner demons that I am suffering from — what if they are not personal delusions? What if they come from all of the violence in my environments that I’ve been taught to internalize?
I rage against personality tools, because I am trying to resist internalizing that I am the only thing standing in the way of my growth and healing. It gets hard to resist all the time. Self-growth tools become seductive to me. And, I can’t deny that I need and crave structure in my life. But, I rage against how we hold these tools without a critical analysis because I am tired of feeling like my sensitivities to an unjust world are something that I must manage in order to make others comfortable. What if my sensitivity and darkness is a gift? What if my “self-absorption” is my body and brain begging me to pay attention to what’s going on in my life, in a world where I am taught as a queer black woman and a survivor, to focus on serving and fighting for everyone else?
Enneagram Institute
Please don’t explain away my pain
Like so many other institutions have
A note:
(I anticipate receiving unsolicited advice about how I ought to get a coach. I also anticipate a response to this along the lines of “you don’t understand the enneagram!” Maybe I don’t. But, I have tried to for several years now, and it still stresses me out. However, I’m seeing black women like Mickey Scottbey Jones and Leanette Pokuwaah bring forward POC-centered approaches to the enneagram. And Hannah Paasch, a white queer person, is exploring context and personal history in her enneagram work. This makes me hopeful, but it’s very important for me to share my story of struggle. I am tired of skipping straight to the resolution, to the tidy neat bow).
Posted with permission. Original found here.