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Enneagram Type 2

Enneagram Type 2

Overview

Type 2 is characterized by warmth, generosity, empathy, and a preoccupation with their personal relationships. This type has the capacity to truly love others for who they are, to be incomparably supportive, and to create deep, authentic connections between people. Type 2 is the home of the helping hand and open heart. 

However, in the fixation with love and relationships, Type 2 can become unhealthily dependent, manipulative, and self-inflated in their relationships. Secretly prideful, they can seek to make themselves indispensable to others and engender others to need them in unhealthy ways. Type 2 employs a variety of tactics, such as flattery and unhealthy self-sacrifice, in pursuit of genuinely loving relationships. At healthy levels, Type 2s are thoughtful, sincere, encouraging, deeply compassionate, and genuinely helpful. Going beyond even this, Type 2 has the capacity to become an embodiment of the encompassing, merging love they long for.

 

Character Traits & Descriptions 

Adapted from the work of Russ Hudson and Claudio Naranjo

The Helper - "The Caring, Interpersonal Type: Demonstrative, Generous, People-Pleasing, and Possessive" -Russ Hudson

Egocentric Generosity – giving in the service of seduction and self-elevation, intense love need, compulsive pursuit of pleasure, interested in being attractive, independence that involves the denial of dependency needs- Claudio Naranjo

Pathways to Essence 

Adapted from Keys to the Enneagram and Facets of Unity by A.H. Almaas

Essential Endowment: Merging Love

Merging love is the intimate, personal, melting love that is beyond emotion–it is the fundamental ground of love that sustains the essence of relationships and relationality itself. Experienced directly, merging love is a pooling, glowing experience of presence, pleasure, enjoyment, and connection. From the perspective of merging love, we know we are not separate and the recognition is luminously blissful. Though merging love is the essence of connection, it also contains the relaxed independence, flexibility, and freedom required to dive deeply into the egoic structure’s unhelpful patterns.

To learn more about Merging Love, you can explore the" Keys to the Enneagram" course or the chapter on Point 2 in A.H. Almaas’ book Keys to the Enneagram.

Ego Ideal & Avoidance: Type 2 idealizes personal relationships, generosity, and their own virtuousness in avoidance of feeling an absence of love and connection.

Passion: Pride – Self-inflation. Valuing and investing excess energy into how we would like to see ourselves.

Virtue: Humility – Seeing oneself and one's abilities clearly within a bigger, more grounded context.

Holy Idea: Holy Will / Freedom – "The Idea of Holy Will is seeing not only the existence of the universe, but that it is in a constant state of unfoldment which we experience as change, movement, and action. From this perspective, we see that freedom is the complete surrender to, and total harmony with, the unfoldment of the universe. This is the Idea of Holy Freedom: Your will and the will of the universe are completely merged and unified, so there is no inner discord. One part is not trying to change another part. There is complete inner unification." - Facets of Unity, ch. 13

Specific Delusion: Separate Entities – The belief that you have a separate will and that you can have things your way.

Specific Difficulty: Castration – The experience that not getting what you want is a blow to one's pride

Specific Reaction: Willful Action – Strong willfulness, pride, and stubbornness

Dynamic Core Elements

Adapted from the work of Sandra Maitri

Ego Trap: Freedom – Attempting to become free of others rather than free of dependency.

Anti-Self Action: Self-frustrating – Running away from oneself and depending on others for connection.

Ego Lie: False-valuation – Making others special, elite, more valuable.

Defense Mechanism: Repression – Painful and unpleasant content is actively prevented from entering conscious awareness.

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