The Three Enneagram Instincts
Understand the animal part in you and how it still runs your life
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The primal Enneagram instincts that drive our lives
At the start of an Enneagram journey, we look at the mental, emotional and behavioural psychological pattern. Most Enneagram practitioners stop there, although there is much more at play. Below the psychological pattern are layers of primal instincts that also drive how we think, feel and act. They reflect the part of us that is still animalistic and driven by basic primal survival instincts. I call them “Enneagram Instincts” but technically they exist separately from the Enneagram personality types. They can be tricky to manage as they are not driven by logic. They fire from the gut, much faster than our brains can think.
In the Enneagram model, we recognise three main Enneagram instincts:
Self-Preservation (SP): This instinct is focused on our own safety and wellbeing.
Social (SO): This instinct focuses on the needs and rules of a tribe that keeps us safe.
Sexual (SX): This instinct drives us to explore, attract and compete as a means of survival.
We need those instincts for our survival and wellbeing, but we do not use them as effectively as animals because our emotions and thoughts interfere. For example, we may feel lonely but instead of using our social and sexual instincts to seek out company, we can get depressed, withdraw and then try to numb our emotions with food, alcohol and TV.
What is YOUR dominant Enneagram instinct?
We all have all three Enneagram instincts, but based on our personality, one is used the most (dominant) and one the least (repressed). We have easy access to our dominant instinct. In fact, we overuse the dominant instinct rather than switching between all three instincts in the most efficient manner. The mixture of our psychological patterns and dominant instinct created our Enneagram subtype. For example, if you are an Enneagram Type 4 that is Self-Preservation dominant, you may be more withdrawn than other Type 4s, and you are more likely to suffer in silence than expressing your emotions. For a Social dominant Type 4, it would be quite important to ensure that that people in their environment know exactly how they feel, so they will share their emotions for freely.; and a Sexual dominant Type 4 often looks to externalise its pain by trying to make others responsible for it.
Your instinctual sequence
Once you know your dominant Enneagram instinct, it will also be useful to establish your repressed instinct. Out of the three instincts, you have the least access to this one. This means that we also have less access to the resources associated with it. For example, if you are Social repressed, you may find it more difficult to establish yourself in social groups, while if your Self-Preservation instinct is repressed, you may find it more difficult to look after your own well-being.
The instinct, which is neither dominant nor repressed, is the one that comes second in your instinctual sequence. So, if you are SP dominant and SX repressed, your instinctual sequence will be SP/SO/SX. This means that SP is your natural go-to instinct, and you probably overuse it. You have good access to your second instinct SO, but probably not so much to your repressed instinct SX. Our instinctual sequence shapes our personality significantly and is another reason why not all representatives of the same Enneagram type look the same.
Let’s look at an example: A Type 7 with the instinctual sequence SP/SX/SO will be primarily focussed on their own wants, needs and security (SP dominant) and less on those of the people around them (SO repressed). In comparison, a Type 7 with the instinctual sequence S0/SX/SP will probably experience problems looking after their own wellbeing (SP repressed) as they sacrifice their needs for those of other people (SO dominant). This type of 7 may be quite reckless in their neglect of their own wellbeing.
If you take an Enneagram assessment with me, I will assist you in establishing your instinctual sequence and understanding what this means for your life.
Ready to get started?
Starting an Enneagram Growth Journey is a wake up call. You will gain insights about yourself and others that you can no longer “unsee”. You will learn how most people are driven by subsconsiocus patterns that run on autopilot, with little control over how they feel, think or act. So the choice is yours: Do you want to wake up, take charge and break those patterns or continue to sleepwalk through life?
