The Instincts

There is another aspect of the Enneagram that I have not yet talked about - that of the Instinctual Variants. There are three different instincts - Self Preservation, Sexual and Social. We operate with all three instincts but, as with the Personality Types, we have one that is dominant. Again, no instinct is better than another. We need all three of them.

The Instincts are important in that they are about our orientation in life. Where is the focus of our attention or concern? They reveal our priorities, our yearnings on a deep level, and when we are not getting an instinctual need met, or it is not being fulfilled in some way, it can feel urgent - as though we cannot live without whatever it is. What that 'it' is depends on which instinct is our dominant one. Likewise there is one instinct out of the three that usually drops behind the others - one that we are less concerned about, one that is not our focus in life and can therefore cause us problems because we pay less attention to the areas of our life that it takes care of.

Although one might think it should be quite easy to know which is our dominant instinct, in fact without any work on ourselves it can be difficult to know. When we do see it though, it provides huge clarity as to how we function and what is important to us. As a result it can help us to understand what areas of our life we may need some help or support with whilst recognising that certain aspects of our lives we take care of quite naturally without effort. We can see how we get pulled off-balance and where, if left to our own devices, we might sometimes need reigning in.

In the next posts I will look at the three Instinctual Variants and how they play out in our lives.