Part 4 of 7 in a Soul’s Code series about codependence

BY PAUL KAIHLA and DAVID RICKEY — Codependency is such a tricky area for self-examination, one idea is to do your own ‘chart’, so to speak. Check out if you and/or your partner fall into “that” set of behaviors.

Personality scales are what psychologists use to profile your traits and type.

The Myers-Briggs chart is the best-known lay-person’s schema for personality types but it is widely discredited among industrial organization (IO) and other psychologists.

As an IO specialist who does personality testing for one of the world’s largest headhunting firms told Soul’s Code:

“Myers-Briggs is a joke. It was created by a mother and daughter at their kitchen table, neither of whom was a psychologist, because they were trying to figure out why the man of the house was so different from them.”

A personality mapping tool that is much older than Myers-Briggs but is only now moving into the mainstream is the Enneagram. It derives from a mystical middle-eastern tradition, and was brought into the 2oth century by the globe-trotting holy man, G.I. Gurdjieff.

Today, IO psychologists are using the Enneagram for leadership training within Fortune 500 companies like Agilent and HP.

The Enneagram is a useful instrument for illuminating unconscious roles we’ve taken on so we can bring awareness to moving past those roles — not just type-casting ourselves for life. “Enneagram is like a hologram of the personality’s inner reality,” says UK-based spiritual teacher Sandra Maitri.

The Enneagram has nine basic types, and one of them is an exact match with what we call the host in a codependent relationship. Enneagram Type Two is called, “The Helper” (see the cartoon character in the Enneagram symbol above juggling a vacuum cleaner and a First Aid kit in an apron

The “illusion” No. 2’s have about themselves, says Maitri, is that they’re inherently unlovable. A No. 2 is prone to ‘buy’ love through self-sacrifice and people-pleasing; And the Enneagram No. 4 (the guy screaming in anguish in the above cartoon) is the most common, codependent recipient of that largesse.

No. 4’s have a sense of being disconnected from their true nature, cut off and abandoned. This is what spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle means by the pain body. Depression, drama and addiction are No. 4 markers.

If you recognize yourself, or someone around you, in either of these descriptions do not despair. Here is a way to deal, shared by Maitri at a 2007 workshop she gave at California’s Spirit Rock conference center:

The Enneagram is just mapping our ego structure, and that is not who we are. There are particular skill-sets we plug into as we develop personalty structures. Our egos are basically made up of self-images, self-representations, and images and representations of the world around us. That’s what we call our psychological functioning.

What is the distinction between psychology and spirituality? When we move beyond our historical sense of self, we move into spirituality. When we move beyond our psychological representations, we move into spirituality.

Is there a self that is unique? The more that we become free of our personality structure, the more dimensions and aspects of our being come into consciousness.

NEXT: Confessions of codependent

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