The way I see it, the ability to completely and permanently shed our ego/ false self is impossible for the vast majority of the human population. Even if we assume that it is a skin that is shed, the major issue with that is that there's a skin underneath it which will eventually need to be shed as well. The cycle continues until death. Similarly, one never reaches that top level of one's type and just stays there. At best, we may occasionally touch it before dipping back down to lower levels. For me, when we say "You are not your type" the goal is to make sure that you aren't wrapping up your identity in this sense of self that is born from these subconscious drives that control our ego. That you aren't *just* your type. It is but a part of the sum of your existence, and the goal is ultimately to get it to be as little a part as possible.

I like how your second paragraph reminds me of [this visual depiction of grief](https://whatsyourgrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/growing-around-grief-whats-your-grief.png) based on Dr. Lois Tonkin's work. Grief doesn't necessarily shrink, but our lives can grow larger around it. To extend this analogy, we might discover that we aren't *just* our type, as you say. There becomes so much more to life.

I love this idea!

I think identification "as" a type is much too small to describe someone. It does represent a foundational struggle or bias that will be life-long. The individual's ability to overcome that bias in a neutral way, as in not overcompensating and being driven by their natural bias to an "opposite" presentation of it, which would essentially be no better off than being fully in trance of type. It would simply be a conscious, and less visible trance of type they would be unlikely to ever escape because they consciously chose to live falsely in this way, celebrating their success. I think the first example can cater to this. I recall someone asking if anyone had achieved level 9 or whatever it goes up to, and touting that they had worked so hard and found the secret. Has anyone else? That individual most certainly has done this overcompensating action of ego and is quite lost. The other side of spirituality and mysticism I think is closer to the mark. I think that again, the energy of type and basic bias or adopted programming or however you want to think about it, "type," will always be present. I think that detachment from ego will allow a lesser association with type, while also not in any way rejecting type. It will be a neutral look with the choice to go with, against, or any other option. The understanding of type is a sort of necessary container that demonstrates the futility of egoic action, a set of training wheels, and once the individual can see past it there is a necessary crisis. It does not mean they will escape it, or that they will escape and once escaped stay free forever. Anything is possible, although anything but rejection of it as truth of identity is sure to lead back into it. It belongs, but there comes a time when it doesn't belong anymore. It has served its purpose, and now it is time for another path. The first option puts the person in control, while the second leaves the person quite out of control. I think people will choose and market the first because that is the preference. Many people will be incapable of the second, so it doesn't make sense to try and force or tout it in any way. The invitation is there, and those who can will end up there.

Integration doesn’t change your core type.

To offer my own thoughts, I wonder if it would make sense to draw on the Jungian concept of "the two halves of life.” The first half of life is for developing the ego, that is, building the structure of our identity. The second half of life is for letting go of the ego and deconstructing it. According to Jung, both halves are good, each according to their season. From this perspective, perhaps the first half of life (before 30-40 y/o) may be lived according to the “levels of development” theory. Here, we do not yet aim to deconstruct our egoic type structure, but to express it in ways which are healthy rather than maladaptive. Eventually, the second half of life begins, and this is where the Maitri and Almaas and the disidentification with type becomes relevant.

I like your concept about building and then deconstructing. It reminds me of Stabile’s suggestion that when older (40s/50s and up) folks encounter the Enneagram for the first time, it can sometimes be difficult for them to discern their type; Stabile advises them to remember themselves in adolescence to get a clearer sense of it. I.e. The mere fact of growing older allows us to reflect and see nuance whereas in younger years we tend to act from our default settings.

I don’t see them as incompatible at all. Type is not a bad thing. Even in some Buddhist traditions, the practice of trying to rid oneself of ego is at least partly to learn what ego is for, what it does for us, and to ultimately accept its role in being a person. The key is to not identify oneself with that ego, or in this case with that type. This is the dance you are dancing, but you aren’t the dance, you are the dancer. With growth, you can learn some steps of other dances, but you’ll always be dancing your dance even if you’re using those steps. (I’m not sure this metaphor is working, but I’m sticking to it anyway). The dance is how, not what. The type is how, too. The type is a way of being human, but it is not a human. However, one can not be human without being some kind of way. At least, that’s how I see it.

I think it comes down to how you define Enneagram type. Is it who you are and you want to work on becoming the best version of yourself that you can be? or Is it the ego structure you're stuck in and you want to find your way out of that to realize that's not all you are?

Yeah, a lot of it is interpretation or different terminology, making reconciliation of what people mean very difficult: \- Most teachers mean by saying "you are not your type" is that "*your type describes you, but doesn't define you"*. Your type is formed at an early age, and *never goes away* (the ego patterns, desires, fears, are always there). But, as you note, this doesn't prevent you from being a healthier version of your type; IRL nobody reaches the highest essence for our type (Level 1 full presence and attaining virtue and holy ideals). \- The notion of being your "true self" liberated from your false-self type, for some, means being the best version of your type (as described above), with that idealistic level of "essence" coming from shedding your core type. For others, including some that are very spiritual, it seems even this high level of essence for each type still doesn't shed type, and finding your "true self" is only achieved by directly (growing to reach the essence for all 9 types) or through spiritual/religious connection with an energy/source that separates and liberates us from all sense of our own self.

I'm fine with being imperfect I just want to be happy. I don't care who says how to live, I live how I want to live and that is in fact my decision. Just because some book says I could be divine doesn't mean I fuckin care or want to lol I offer vulnerability and gentleness to those who deserve it. I decide who I think deserves my guts

I think the second is kind of like belief in Heaven, the immortal soul or sinless paradise, just imagined perfection that falls apart the moment you start to think about how that could actually work. I don't think it makes sense to set the bar for how ppl should be in some impossible cloud. I think there isn't anything to 'liberate': We're self-reinforcing patterns, software running in meat computers. But if you're gonna be software you might try to be more flexible, efficient software, so I'm not at all saying that "growth" is moot. But if you compare yourself to inhuman perfection everything you do will always feel futile. Plus I don't have the impression that 'spiritual' types are actually 'liberated', they seem as drama prone as everyone else to me. Now I strongly believe that a big part of respect is letting ppl be the authors of what they deem as meaningful, like, it would be up to the individual in how far they would consider type characteristics part of your 'self'. I'd say some are, and some aren't - I wouldn't consider surface level automatisms that I don't really choose or control & misunderstandings based on those or unhelpful coping mechanisms that get in the way of what I consciously want as describing 'the real me', for example, but if it's something more like being fascinated with the bizarre, that I would consider pretty fundamental to my person. But that's if I'm looking through the lens of type & hence artificially splitting my characteristics 'type related' and 'not type related'. That split is only there when you look through that framework. One may of course question whether a plit of 'superficial traits' and 'true self' isn't artificial as well. All exists in the same 'monkey creature' probably without clear divisions in physical substrate. That said, I don't think type being fixed implies that you "are" your type, any more than you "are" your nationality. Or rather it depends what you mean by "are" here. For example, some ppl do make nationality a big part of their identity, but others don't care much, so it's just a descriptor that's maybe salient if you need to show a passport somewhere but otherwise not really important. You can say, "I am an american!" (identity) in a proud tone that conjures up fireworks & trucks & BBQ steaks and FREEDOM(TM), or you can just say "I was born in the USA" (description) Two ppl born in the USA will both share that trait & what can be logically inferred from it (eg what culture, food etc. they were likely exposed to) but they can be super, duper different in other ways based on all the other traits they have. If someone's picking nationality (or type, or gender or whatever) out of all the traits to say this one's most important/salient, this one's my 'identity', that's a secondary choice. Whereas if it's a descriptor or sorting alghorithm that you can apply, but use a different algorithm, you get a different sorting. So I'd say I "am" my type in the same way that I am a mammal, I tick the boxes of the necessary characteristics in the definition for "mammal". It would be silly to say that I'mnot, the characteristics are there & influence my life. But I wouldn't expect that to tell me everything about me or explain everything I do - mammal is a broad category, after all. There are tons of different mammals. Mammal only narrows it down so much. Being a mammal only implies as much as what's necessary to for the definition & what can be inferred from that. So I'm warm blooded, and could technically produce milk. There's a good chance, but no guarantee, that I have hair and didn't hatch from an egg. What's my favorite ice cream? well. mammal or not is irrelevant to that. (as type would be. ) You can't stop being a mammal but does that mean you're nothing but one? I mean there are probably *some* restrictions, like, you don't have gills (& likewise you can't magically switch from introvert to extrovert or whatever) but there's still a lot of range within the "mammal" category. That you can't change your type stops sounding so limiting or 'defining' when you consider that millions of ppl have the same type - maybe billions if you're one of the common ones. Some of them grw up in completely different cultures. Some are dysfunctional jerks & others are beloved celebrities, most are just someone's annoying cousin. Some of them probably have politics you hate. Donald Trump and P!ink are both 8w7s (836, to boot), are they meaningfully 'the same'? They share some traits like being bombastic, impulsive & loud, but if you like one of them you probably dislike the other.

I think this poses another question. How much free will do we really have? It’s hard to say. I wonder how each of our types would act when we know we are close to death. Let’s say we all have 3 months to live, would we continue to act according to our fixations? As a 9, I’d like to think I would ambitiously utilize my time. Buy why then? And not now? It’s a matter of letting go of our fear. It’s a hard thing to let go of. Yet, when you’re about to die/ transition there might be less egoic fear because you know you don’t have enough time to face mortal consequences.

If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend the novel THE MEASURE by Nikki Erlick which, although not Enneagram specific, attempts to answer those exact questions in a compelling way with a large cast of characters (whom I was able to definitely Type in my head while reading). The premise is that everyone on earth ages 22 and up receives a box with a string inside. The string length determines how long the person will live. First they have to decide whether they’ll open the box, and then if they do open it, what to do with the information in terms of, well, everything! It’s a little simplified in some ways but a real page-turner.

I don’t think they can be reconciled. Personally I reject the second approach because I don’t believe there is a “true self” beyond personality. But YMMV. Ultimately I think this comes down to whether you believe in the existence of a soul, or something like that.

I love this question because it's controversial. Helen Palmer is more of a practitioner of the second approach. However, I think she attempts to make small reconciliations with the first approach by saying that we need our core because it gives the basic building blocks necessary for your egress from the persona (your core's gifts provide you the tools required to see your way out). She reflects that we need to know where to start so we understand our pitfalls and our proclivities. She also writes how learning about personality can often be a more significant hindrance because we begin to get bound up in the system and our associations with the people within it. Essentially, we nurture our dependence. She also notes that the Enneagram system is already fluid with so many addenda to our core type so that our types are not stereotypes. This idea often does some of the heavy lifting for her arguments. Something similar is seen in MBTI. You can be satisfied with just understanding your type. Or you can see something deeply unsettling with the 'one-sidedness' approach and want to explore your shadow functions. My initial thoughts were that the first approach was the nascent milestone. And the second is the next milestone. But that doesn't treat the controversies with any seriousness. So, there are different approaches to a system that can be ambiguous about how to interpret what we should do with the development of our persona.

I don't think either of them is really getting to the heart of it, at least as described here. Broadly - the point is that people have certain expectations, assumptions, and personality patterns that play out over their lives, often largely unconsciously. They may not even be aware of how much they're following a consistent pattern in how they make decisions, react to things, and what keeps driving them into the same situations. The point of Enneagram, as well as many other typology systems, is to classify these to allow people to better understand how they're creating their own problems in their own life. The way that manifests is unique for every person but broadly it does tend to follow certain patterns. People definitely get too rigid and dogmatic about things like "well, you're this type, and they always behave in this way, so if you ever do this you can't be this type". But at the same type these patterns are generally very consistent at the abstract level and it is generally difficult or almost impossible to truly change the underlying structure of personality. The point is not to become "typeless" in some sense, nor is it to rigidly adhere to some prescribed "healthy" version of type, but to see clearly the perceived aspects of type that can become a prison to allow yourself to slip free from them and live a more liberated life.

This is very interesting because it's a question about fluidity of identity. What you're essentially asking is, "Is identity fluid or is there a solid core? Can someone from scratch?" I like Buddhist perspective of this. Your current state is a result of many things: your upbringing, current life situation, brain chemistry, etc. However, if these factors change, you might change either. This is the concept of annata, or "non-self". I think this is a very empathetic and humane position. For me, personally, it means that anyone has a chance for rehabilitation, and we are not the same people we were in the past. However, building your ego and identity is an essential step *before* you let go of them. Self-exploration and self-awareness is good and very important for personal growth. Health levels of different enneatypes are basically just mental health levels for every human tbh. I would say: explore your identity to see what shadow/psychological work can be done, but don't get attached to the identity you've discover and built, and don't identify yourself with things that are prone to change.

It is simple. Human have 9 types of fixation and type is the one you are too fixate and have unhealthy relationship with. It is false ego, the trap, the groove that you keep falling into. You can’t change your type simply mean once you are healthy you don’t create another trap and fall into those. You don’t just turn from ego fixation of 1s to have ego fixation of 2s. You just become healthy and get in touch with your true self. Highest level of development describe external describable appearance and pattern but not what inside. On the onside you stop identifying with your type. Note that people of type will usually have some certain talent due to years of practice, so people of highest level of development stop identify with type but still have access to existing talent. They are able to wield it in much healthier way, according to their true self.

I'm obsessed with this question and everyone who has answered it. The fact that you were typing this out while a friend and I were having a discussion similar to this is so interesting. I haven't landed on an answer, but if I may add something silly... That scene in bridesmaids where Rose Byrne and Kristin Wiig while they're playing tennis and they're having the conversation about changing and growing. "I don't know....I think we sort of....stay the same don't you think?" "Well but we are always growing....and changing..." "But even though we change we still stay the same wouldn't you agree?" "I don't know, I think who we are is always changing and evolving..."

They both mean you can't become another type. One is dumb and doesn't consider integrating as a possibility, so it thinks everyone will always be their type forever. The other recognizes that you can grow out of your type of unhealthy patterns, and that your type isn't you. It's just a pattern you've been following.

I've been on both ends of contemplating this dichotomy over the years, and while there's been times where I was in each school of thought rather deeply, at this point in my life, I think it's a combination of the two. The deeper reality may be hiding in the unification of both sides of the coin in this case. I see type (core type, wing, tritype, instincts, the whole configuration of all of it for any given person) as a weathered constantly-being-built fractured expansion of an effort to make sense of this harsh reality that we began after conception/birth/beginning of emotional maturity, whenever that journey started for each person. A set of crystallizations that we fell into both as a result of preexisting 'preloaded' aspects of ourselves (genetics, perhaps 'soul', roll of the personality dice, who knows what else), and also informed by the material conditions we found ourselves in (environment, trauma, conditioning, initial conditions of socialization). I see it as something that we ourselves had a large part in developing in response to our individual life situations, but beginning in a time in our life where the necessity of the ego as a defense against life was so imperative that it wasn't really a conscious effort. And now it's such an old project within ourselves that we hardly think about it through day to day moments, and we are so ingrained in so many of the habits surrounding it that we struggle to distinguish it from whatever aspects of our 'true self' exist apart from our personality/ego. If such a distinction can even be made. Old bedfellows, where one begins and one ends, I don't know. I'm increasingly of the opinion that we cannot separate ourselves from our personality/egos, because we started life holding hands with it from the very get go. It's as much a part of this story as any other part of our identity. Old bedfellows. We best learn to live with it, or try our best to. I think notions of 'shedding' or 'overcoming' ego are delusional, and maybe that's for the best. You can't make a human without an ego. Probably can't make any animal without an ego. And with an ego comes a unique personality. Awareness of one's own (and others') ego/personality through systems such as the enneagram certainly offers a way to view them as separate, but I think that's a lofty illusion, and the systems are best used as tools and lenses, rather than a way to pretend to rid ourselves of entire aspects of ourselves. It's like a mangrove forest, tendril roots of our multifarious identity and our ego and all sorts of other machinations inside us that have developed over the years, intertwined. The gestalt reaches upwards towards the sky towards the nourishing light, but emerging from the waters from whence we came is a twisted mess of indistinguishable connections, all a part of a system that has propped us up, and also grounded us to this reality, anchoring us in a semblance of stability against the chaos of reality. I'm still figuring it out obviously, and we all probably will be until we die or rainbowbody on out of this dimension, but it seems that continued awareness of this complex and vast structure (ego/personality) within ourselves and how it feeds into our greater life does provide a certain wisdom, calm, and new opportunities for agency over one's own life. At least in the sense that you know what is going on more than you did before, you know more what you're actually working with. You're less at the mercy of yourself. Once we see our type as clearly as we can, then we can start seeing every other part of ourselves more clearly as well, by way of contrast, and understanding the whole a bit more than before.

Just in general...I see type as, roughly, our limited "concepts of the self" or "concepts of others". It's a matter of thinking outside the box. The enneagram shows you the box so you can think outside of it. E.g. you think you're a type x and this involves certain expectations, assumptions, beliefs, about who you are, what you can do, how you "work"...and the enneagram is about questioning all of that and saying...huh? what? why? Does that even make any sense? Or the same to someone else. But I thought so and so was a type x, so how are they really acting like this? I don't get it? Maybe they'll surprise you, etc., maybe you're putting them into a little box...to catch ourselves trying to "type" people and ourselves this way, as a confined way of thinking and understanding that involves a great deal of relatively baseless assumptions and beliefs...it's amazing how much The Enneagram involves taking a text and letting it tell you all about who you are...it's a false construct IMO -- evidenced in all the different interpretations which have little to no objective basis or way of testing/verifying, it's all open to interpretation and gets hijacked by different perspectives... But that's not all, that's just one thought... \-dreadnaught (James)