Hey Enneagram Friend! This is Abbi Rodriguez, your certified and IEA accredited Enneagram Teacher and Coach. In this space, I'll give you a sneak peek into real live coaching sessions and teach you how to apply the wisdom of the Enneagram into your life for personal growth. The invitation each episode is to take on a posture of curiosity - curiosity about yourself and others - so that you can shift from merely surviving to fully thriving in your everyday life. Visit my website at abbirodriguez.com and listen into this episode to learn more.
In the previous coaching conversation with our Enneagram Seven, he shared these challenging moments of feeling completely disenchanted, whether that was with the education system or even these other aspects of adulthood. We explored some of those experiences, those transitions, in his coaching conversation, but today in this teaching episode, I want to unpack some of that idealism that shows up for the Type Sevens because it permeates a lot of aspects in how they see the world and feel in response to the world or even how others might experience them in relationships.
There are many different triadic groups in the Enneagram. You see groupings of three all over the system, like the centers of intelligence, harmonic group, stances, and harmony triads. Today, I want to look at one of those groupings, but specifically at Type Seven, rather than all the numbers and all the groupings. As we unpack the idealism of Type Seven, I want to specifically look at harmony triads, which is one of the groups that Type Sevens fall into. This grouping is often referred to as the idealist or sometimes the frustrated idealist, and Sevens are in this harmony triad with Ones and Fours that are also part of it. It shows up in three different ways of experiencing this deep longing for the ideal and this deep frustration when that ideal is not met. It’s a frustration when their environment doesn't come into alignment with that ideal or the relationship doesn’t meet the ideal or even they don't meet this ideal, when they can't come into alignment with it. These three numbers show up in this harmony triad differently, so I'm gonna focus more specifically on Type Seven, as we're kind of expounding on our previous coaching conversation.
For Enneagram Sevens, idealism has a lot to do with freedom and satisfaction, but sometimes those concepts are kind of too big and they can feel like they're too up in the clouds, so I want to pull that down into everyday life a little bit. For sevens, idealism can show up a lot as a desire for things to be “okay” for them, for things to be good, or for them to have freedom without limitations or restrictions. It could also show up as a desire to be free from emotional discomfort when these tender emotions that feel really hard to process or feel really negative come to the surface. Because of Type Seven’s idealism, that Type-structure naturally heightens their awareness of possibilities, and it naturally is sensitive to opportunities, enjoyment, pleasure, and general positive information. Their attention goes to what could be and to the opportunities around them. And there is a natural skew in where we focus our attention that is true for all the Types - it’s just different things that we have a strong focus of attention on. That’s not inherently bad to be sensitive to positive information, but there are some challenges that can result for the Type Seven when there's an overemphasis on freedom and an over emphasis on satisfaction.
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A challenge that Sevens often experience as a result of this idealism is that their Type-structure naturally filters out any of the negative information that would threaten their ideal and a lot of this happens through reframing and rationalizing these challenging situations or challenging experiences into something more manageable. And it's not for Sevens that they fully see a problem or are aware of their feelings around it (feeling sad or scared or disappointment), but it's almost as if their Type-structure naturally puts the dimmer switch on that information so that it is not so intrusive or so invasive. It's almost like the there's a sensitivity to positive information and a dimmer on negative information. Sevens think so quickly that they can literally out think problems or rationalize negative information or uncomfortable feelings before they have to fully experience them. It's like sevens momentum and that process is so quick that they can outrun reality. The problem though, is that you can't outrun reality forever and eventually it catches up. Whether you experience some kind of life altering diagnosis, and there's this instant halt in your everyday rhythms, or maybe a significant relationship falls apart, or maybe something goes wrong and you can't think your way out of it, it just sucks and there's no way around it. Or maybe it’s just a hard season or a tumultuous relationship and there's no way to really make it more positive or for there to be a silver lining that makes any difference. These are often the moments when the optimism get shattered for the Type Seven and the rosy colored glasses get cracked.
When reality hits you like a ton of bricks, you can't always will yourself to find the silver lining. It just sucks and it's just lonely, or it's just sad, or it's just disappointing, or you just feel scared or insecure as these more tender emotions tend to surface. Because Sevens are often so unpracticed at experiencing uncomfortable emotions, Sevens have a really hard time when these big experiences come because it's almost like they're a fish out of water and they have no idea how to breathe in this environment when the ideal has been shattered or when it feels like the world is falling apart or even like the walls and limitations are closing in. Their Type-structure is naturally reframing all these smaller moments of uncomfortable emotions. So when the significant moments occur, they don't have practice, they have no idea what to do. And if this is happening on a really subconscious level, and if they're not even aware of how trapped they feel by their emotions, they tend to just escape. So if there's something going on with a relationship, and they don't realize all these emotions that are coming up around it, they might just leave the relationship or quit on the relationship, they might just leave the job or leave the faith community, whatever it might be. If they're not aware that they're starting to feel these tender emotions kind of snowballing for them, their natural response often is just to escape out of it. But sometimes those circumstances or situations can't be escaped. And some Sevens might instead mentally escape the challenging situation in parenting or in your marriage or at work.
Sevens might escape mentally through enjoyment or anticipating the next fun thing that you're going to do or the next interesting idea you're going to explore. Sometimes those pleasure and enjoyment activities are simple things like spending time with friends or go getting going and getting a cup of coffee can be almost a smokescreen of activity that's really masking your awareness of all these tender emotions that are slowly compiling for you. The strategy of escaping pain through different means of pleasure can work for a while, but you're still not facing reality. And the natural consequences tend to accumulate, the impact that that's having on your relationships tends to accumulate and all the unprocessed emotions, those tend to accumulate too. Eventually, there's usually a reckoning for Sevens when it becomes too much and they feel like they're bursting at the seams and they have to address what's going on. If not, they will just escape and ignore it, and that still affects you too as those things have lasting effects and then also all that unprocessed emotion tends to come out sideways.
If the Sevens aren't cognizant that this is happening and choose to take on some practices to process their emotions or to slow down and to see what's going on around them, it will eventually collide with them and derail them. The invitation for Sevens is not to stop pursuing freedom in satisfaction or to stop pursuing interest or to live in solidarity or boring lives, but instead the invitation is to invite practices into your everyday rhythms to slow down so that you can fully take a look around and also look inside to have more introspective space that doesn't feel overwhelming or anxiety producing. Start by building up a slow gradual ability to do that and to be okay in solitude and okay with your thoughts and okay with your feelings. These practices that can be simple things like journaling, there's lots of guided journals out there. It can be having a set of questions that you answer for yourself at the end of every day, or even at the start of every day. It could be contemplative practices. There are tons of contemplative practices, whether that is out of your faith tradition, or even mindfulness practices, guided meditations and sitting in silence, that that can be helpful in this. Even just having a group of friends that are really intentional about checking in with you and slowing you down, and you accept that invitation when they actually ask how are you doing that you lean into that question, and you're thoughtful about what's going on in your world and how that is showing up for you and what you're experiencing as a result of it.
Sevens have such a quick for momentum, that if you can intentionally incorporate rhythms that slow you down, you can create some more pause some more pause in your daily life that really help you build up this capacity to experience and process emotions - the full range of emotions, not just okay to happy, but the full scale of sadness and grief lament, loneliness, disappointment, fear, insecurity, embarrassment, and shame. These things that that come up for us not because they will become these new identifiers that forever adhere themselves to our identity, but because emotions come come, we honor them, we experience what's going on, we're curious about them, and then they dissipate. If that piece of it feels really challenging to even comprehend what that will look like to just allow yourself to experience emotions, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to the previous episode called “How to Process your Emotions.” That's a really good resource to experience your emotions so that they don't snowball and eventually turn into an avalanche that feels hard to walk out away from.
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Okay Enneagram Friends, there’s a lot more that we could unpack with our Type Sevens and how that shows up with idealism, but I think that we'll leave our teaching episode there for now. Until next time, friends!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai